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berlinparisexpress OP t1_jahsn2h wrote

I felt like posting and commenting on this because I work for a company of 300 people that has made the shift to the 4-day workweek (with no loss of pay) almost 4 years ago. As some people comment in the article linked, it was hard!

Not everyone was on the same page or communicating well. Some departments were just super disorganized and stressed. In the first few months people actually reported MORE stress and our sales results tanked. Some people also thought it was super unfair because some of my colleagues fully enjoyed the day off while others felt that they still had to catch up on their work because their results were time-dependent (eg: salespeople having a fixed number of calls to make every week).

However, after 6 months of adjustments it just started to work wonderfully for everyone. For instance, at the beginning anyone could pick any day but Monday but we now restrict it to Wednesday or Friday so that the teams work more easily together.

I haven't worked a single Friday in 4 years and could not go back to a 5DWW easily now and I don't think any of my colleagues would.

I think this is really interesting as a whole lot of people currently entering the job market are starting to doubt they'll ever retire, so if we can find ways of making work more sustainable during our careers we might achieve something even more interesting than "escape the rat race as early as possible" and start enjoying life at 70.

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MattWey t1_jakfqp0 wrote

Would you say part of the stress was due to people being used to slack a lot during the week, but now when time to get the same amount of work got cut, it became a bit difficult to work intensely?

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berlinparisexpress OP t1_jama5ue wrote

Some of that, some of people just stressing about not meeting their objectives or suddenly having a lot of meetings concentrated on fewer days. One of the answers was actually to cut the amount of meetings by 20+% to make up for it.

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MattWey t1_janfntw wrote

Many startups have so may meetings it's crazy. My current workplace has a daily meeting and numerous other one's where often times only attendance is expected. But the problem is people loooove talking in circles about some shit without making a decision.

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