[Mordisquitos]

What a hollow dismissal of based on acrobatic leaps of semantics.

The word 'study' is no sacred possession exclusive to the natural sciences, and there is nothing wrong with properly conducted surveys as a method in sociology, economics or psychology.

If surveys targeting the very people responsible for optimising their businesses' productivity, with no incentive to falsify their conclusions, is good evidence. Without any other way to systematically measure the change in productivity across a plethora of different businesses implementing a four-day workweek, it is as good as it gets — much better than purely theoretical assumptions that productivity must have dropped.

You can find the study here if you wish to critique its methods: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x

[EasyMark]

I lot of management types really do not want to hear this. They don't like the idea of employees having 3 idle days to recover and reload on a long weekend. They don't understand that being happy(er) can actually improve productivity

[aeternum]

I did read it, thus my comment. Did you actually read the methods? This is what you're defending:

"Methods This study took a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews with n=15 industry leaders" .. "Participants were identified via media reports " .. "A total of n=15 key informants participated in this study" .. "Recent research into appropriate sample sizes for qualitative research found saturation typically occurs between 9 and 17 interviews and the researchers agreed that no fresh insights or themes arose after the twelfth interview in this study (Hennink & Kaiser, 2022)"

The interviews contain invaluable insights such as: “adopting the 4DWW takes work” “Productivity up, waste removed” “Management -led/employee -driven,” “Train for leisure,”

I stand by my statement.

[surgical_fire]

Standing by a plainly wrong statement does not make it right.

A qualitative study is still a study, especially considering that the subjects of the study are the sort of people that can evaluate the thing being studied.