Companies are made up of people, and people get things wrong. A great example is working from home - prior to the pandemic many companies refused to consider it. They didn't believe it works. They refused to trust their staff. They thought the IT issues would make it unworkable. It was only being forced to try it that made them understand that it's actually really good for many people. So much so that lots of companies continued to do it, and recruited people remotely because they don't plan on stopping it.
It takes a leap of faith to make big changes like this. Sometimes the decision makers don't have the courage to try.
Good question and one way to approach it, for sure. But it appears paradigms shift in waves. Running a business means focusing on the most important things for that business. It’s likely that things like these are microoptimizations.
For instance, there are many companies that have taken the pandemic as an opportunity to enable permanent remote work even post-pandemic. It would have been a massive recruiting improvement to have had that pre-pandemic. (And it was, I worked at a place that was like this). But in the end, it was better to just focus on the business itself. There’s only so many things it’s worth not standardizing on.
As someone who prefers both in-office and more than 40 hrs of work, I find this whole thing interesting
If workers were more productive working less hours you wouldn't need the government to do anything - businesses acting in their own interests would do this automatically.
The government doesn't know how to run businesses better than the businesses themselves.
Well many private businesses are already, take MSs pilot recently. Do you know how the 40 hour 5 day week was initially established in the US?
The postwar era status quo of people travelling hours each way to their job, then to spend most of it in meetings or in an open plan office (chosen for managerial oversight, not productivity, which is a clue we will come back to) with too much noise to be productive are being challenged (cv19)
The research is clear, most white collar workers report much less productive work time compared to their work hours.
Reporting and data collection in this ever increasing era of cognitively demanding work is becoming far more accurate. In previous times, people's fear of redundancy has caused false overreach of business hours, and competitive presenteeism. Between this, and micromanagerial institutions like the open plan office, there is plenty of activity that doesn't accurately report productivity up to the business. Assuming the business has perfect information here is the fault. There are forces shaping these standards that are beyond the reach of produtivity, cultural normalisation of unhealthiness is rife. Look at China.
Assuming that a person will always be productive for X hours a day, regardless of how long they are in the office, is naive.
The reality is that people spend some percentage of their time being productive. During the day they take coffee breaks, chat with coworkers, check Twitter, etc.
Assume people are productive for 20 hours now. If you reduced the work week to be 20 hours, productivity would go down. There would still be meetings, coffee breaks, etc that eat into those 20 hours. Now people are only productive for, say, 15 hours a week.
You know that workers will just piss away the extra two hours a day and then take Friday’s off.
I mean, I and most of my colleagues did that when my employer had 4 day work weeks during the summer. Instead of “summer hours” we called it “some of the hours”.
European countries do not have at-will employment, you cannot just fire people around without a clear justification and first trying to resolve the issue with the employee.
If this is free productivity, why don't companies already do this?