Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output
<i>&quot;... a New Zealand financial services company, switched its 240 staff from a five-day week to a four-day week last November and maintained their pay. Productivity increased in the four days they worked so there was no drop in the total amount of work done.&quot;</i><p>The result&#x2F;claim makes intuitive sense to me but.....  The problem trying to study this is that &quot;productivity&quot; of many&#x2F;most white collar workers is basically impossible to measure.<p>Some do. Customer support can be benchmarked (and prodctivity-pushed) But... customers support jobs don&#x27;t lend to this 4d workweek thing. The jobs that do lend to it, don&#x27;t lend to measurement.<p>This difficulty can lead to all sorts of wierdness. Tyler Cowen claimed that office worker productivity has not been (measurably) increased by office computerization. IE, going from secretaries, fax and typwriters to Google docs hasn&#x27;t produced any economic gains.<p>Strange claim. Difficult to measure. David Graeber (anarchist that reckons most office work is pointless busy-work) quotes the same stat this white paper quotes, people spend about 2&#x2F;8 hrs working and the rest procrastinating on social media.<p>Measurement is also not incidental here. Measurablity changes everything. Once an employees job productivity is measurable, it can be optimized and already has been.<p>It&#x27;s a Shrodinger&#x27;s product evangalist problem...<p>That said, I like the jist.Lets shorten the workweek. Science-wise... well...