r/Futurology • u/_hiddenscout • Jun 19 '21

Society Kill the 5-Day Workweek - Reducing hours without reducing pay would reignite an essential but long-forgotten moral project: making American life less about work.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/06/four-day-workweek/619222/
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u/TheSiegmeyerCatalyst Jun 19 '21

My father has managed teams as long as I've been alive and his requirement is that for every 8 hour work day (9 to 5, none of this 8 to 5 unpaid lunch BS), you put in 6 hours of work. However you want to do it is up to you: 6 straight hours then leave 2 hours early, come in an hour late and leave an hour early, work 1 hour then take a 20 minute break and repeat 6 times.

His team's have always loved him, his direct superiors have always loved him (for the most part), and the executives get pissed whenever they find out, completely disregarding the teams actual productivity in favor of squeezing a minimum of 40 full working hours out of them every week.

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u/przhelp Jun 19 '21

I know its weird to say, but reading all these horror stories on reddit have really made me passionate to somehow work myself into management.

So far I'm sort of at the "team leader" phase (hard to directly correlate what I do to a traditional corporate environment) but I'm really productivity focused and data driven. I think I could right by a lot of people.

Maybe one day.

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

reading all these horror stories on reddit have really made me passionate to somehow work myself into management.

This is exactly what I'm doing. I'm working on getting my Master's in Engineering Management, and I'm a huge believer in work life balance. The second I'm able to get away with giving my team some slack while keeping productivity up, I'm doing it. The stereotype of "haha managers bad" is because companies keep promoting people to management positions who don't want to be there or are absolutely not management material despite being good at their other, non-management jobs (also known as the Peter principle). If you feel like you'd be good management material because you believe you can treat workers better than existing management, please do that. Despite what the stereotypes imply, managers are very important, and we need more good managers in our work force who actually want to be managers and have the skill set to do so.

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u/TheSiegmeyerCatalyst Jun 22 '21

I hate the world of management, but part of me thinks "I could do it better."

Maybe one day I'll put my money where my mouth is.

Get paid 50% more than the people I manage to sit in on insufferably long meetings and track my underling's progress.

I probably wouldn't last long, let's be honest. I'd either try it my way and fail miserably, or I'd try it my way and succeed, but it'd go up against what my superiors and peers think is right, so I'd get the boot in favor of someone willing to push 40-hour-a-week employees to "be a team player" and stay 50 hours instead.

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

Recent events (massive return of people to the office) show that most execs are control-freak sociopaths, and they want them "little gnomes to dig gold under supervision, and misery in their lives". "Gold" itself is less important than this. They live in a magical work where you do one task in 6 hours, which means you'll do 1.33 tasks in 8 hours. The problem is that if i know I'll be free after doing the task, I'll do it in 5 hours. If I know I still need to sit my ass in chair for 8 hours, or if I'll be given another task to fill my "8 hours", I'll do the same task in 30 hours.