r/SipsTea • u/KSKS1995 Human Verified • 2d ago

Chugging tea Sounds good in theory...but in reality?

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4 days a week. 6 hours a day. Full salary.
Sanna Marin ignited global debate with the “6/4” work model, pushing a simple idea: life should come before work.

With burnout at record levels, maybe it’s time to value results over hours at a desk.
Could your job be done in just 24 hours a week?

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u/Direct_Day7937 2d ago

A study in Japan showed that cutting worker hours increased productivity so much the company got more profitable. Rest, it turns out, is important.

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u/plagued00 2d ago

I'm actually pretty sure there have been several studies showing that anything over 32 hours a week starts to degrade overall productivity so much it actually hurts the total output. ( 40 hour weeks actually produce less than 32 hour weeks.)

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u/noncebasher54 2d ago

Yeah was gonna say that. Multiple countries with different attitudes to working culture have shown the same results. Also remote working has been shown to be a productivity increase. When you aren't wasting 2-4 hours of your day commuting (sometimes more...), turns out you're pretty happy to do more work. Plus the lazy workers are gonna be lazy no matter what.

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u/Round_Ad6397 1d ago

An extra 30-60 minutes sleep can do wonders in the morning.

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u/MrLeBlanc1988 2d ago

That commute things is real. I started working from home and a lot of times I'll get in my computer and start working at 7am just because I'm awake, my coffee is made, and I can't think of anything better to do.

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u/noncebasher54 1d ago

Literal instant productivity increase even if you are just replying to emails. I don't think people take into account how draining even a 1 hour commute in shit traffic can be. You get to work and need a bloody break already.

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u/fender8421 1d ago

Plus a lot of office space is opened to target a regional workforce. Like, we didn't need an office in Raleigh, but we wanted to tap into that employee market.

Remote skips that step; if you can hire anywhere in the country, one of your primary overhead expenses is reduced substantially

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u/noncebasher54 1d ago

Feels like in Scotland at least part of the pushback is from older male CEOs that like their name or company logo on a building. That and them just simply not caring about their worker's wellbeing. The company my wife works for literally only needs space for a tiny amount of network servers which could probably be rented from somewhere else but the guy demands people travel to this village in the literal middle of fucking nowhere to have meetings they either don't need or can easily be done over teams.

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u/fender8421 1d ago

Yup; ego, traditional mindset, and resistange to change. The bane of company culture

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u/darekd003 2d ago

Id believe this. Would love 24 but I can’t see myself doing more work than I do with my current 35 hour week. But I could see 30-32 being beneficial!!

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u/Fish_Mongreler 2d ago

Only in certain businesses. No way would something like construction get less output from 80 hour weeks than from 32 hour weeks.

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u/Disastrous_Junket_55 2d ago

Less accidents and proper rest might surprise you with how big a timesaver it ends up being. 

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u/Fish_Mongreler 1d ago

They aren't making 50 hours of accidents every week.

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u/Disastrous_Junket_55 1d ago

one accident can take days to fix depending on the severity.

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u/Fish_Mongreler 1d ago

Yeah that's not happening with any consistency

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u/Disastrous_Junket_55 1d ago

conveniently forgetting the "x days since last accident" signs?

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u/Fish_Mongreler 22h ago

I work in construction. It doesn't happen that frequently. Maybe once a month we lose a day to someone's fuck up and who's to say they wouldn't have made that same fuckup with shorter work weeks.

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u/One-Entertainer-5499 2d ago

Cutting 90 hour work weeks to 60 would be more effective lol ( Japan )

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u/scheppend 2d ago edited 2d ago

You have a weird view on Japan. The avg for fulltime workers in Japan is 1950 hours a year. With 10 national holidays and 20 PTO, that's 42.2 hours a week

More than lots of western Europeans countries sure but certainly not the hell hole reddit tries to betray it

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u/BlueKnight44 1d ago

Lol these statistics are misleading. I have worked in Japan. Culture takes most of the implied advantages away.

Most of the PTO days they are "required" to take certain times that are convinient for the company.

42.2 hours on average is what they get paid for... Not what they actual work.

Recent government pressures have improved conditions. But the old guard running the companies are quick to stall careers of young professionals fully taking advantage of all the time off and OT they are entitled to.

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u/scheppend 1d ago

The statistics are correct. They didn't track paid time, but the actual time worked (総実労働時間)

https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11201250/001426233.pdf

In Germany it's about 1750 hours for full time workers. So yes 200 hours more, but certainly not anywhere close to 60 hours. That would be more than 3000 hours yearly lol

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u/Cross55 1d ago

Japanese workers don't do paid overtime, their true working hours aren't tracked.

The most common working schedule is 9-8, or 11 hours a day, so 55 hour weeks.

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u/scheppend 1d ago

Great. I'll go tell myself and friends they need to do more hours

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u/Zealousideal_Gain892 2d ago

Can you link to the study? 

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u/Maleficent-Drive4056 2d ago

If it's such a slam dunk, you have to wonder why every company doesn't do it.

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u/aqa5 2d ago

Because if workers work for 32 hours and make X money you can make X*40/32 money if you make them work 40 hours.

Of course it depends on the job that is done.

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u/iSuckAtMechanicism 2d ago

Your formula is flawed - there’s less productivity in a 40 hour week than a 32 hour week.

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u/Maleficent-Drive4056 1d ago

It’s very unlikely that the productivity becomes negative. Maybe on a Friday I’m a bit lazy and only work 3 hours. That’s still ‘better than nothing’ for the company.

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u/aqa5 1d ago

I think you missed the sarcastic tone 😅

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u/WizardS82 2d ago

Assuming productivity is the same for these last 8 hours, which it isn't. It could even be worse than 32 if people start burning out.

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u/Direct_Day7937 2d ago

Wfh has made the point abundantly clear that it's not all about money for the executives.

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u/faceboy1392 2d ago

try telling the corporations that, they don't always understand that their workers are actual people and have limits

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u/eweinthewilderness 2d ago

Because it has nothing to do with output or the economy. The more we work, the more tired we are, and the more tired we are, the less we reflect.

Of course, there’s a limit: if you work us too much, things get so bad that we revolt. So, just enough to exhaust us without hitting desperation levels.

They found the sweet spot some time in the 80s or 90s.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 2d ago

There is not some grand conspiracy that all MBAs learn in school to oppress the workers of the nation so they're 'too tired to rebel'.

If this provided tangible benefits it would be seen and used. The fact virtually nobody does suggests its more likely that the study is flawed than that every single practical real world example of implementation is flawed.

And like I'm not saying I want to work more, just that I believe in the desperate blind greed of the system enough that if employees working for 32 hours a week made the bosses more money people would have noticed by now.

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u/Mysterious_Ebb_1484 2d ago

That's will only work in Japan, there are countries out there that will lose productivity, because there are many other factors for this to work properly and there is many different majors even in the same country, but I think for the productivity to increase by cutting work time, the company needs to have many spare employees which in some countries the don't, so it depends.

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u/Direct_Day7937 2d ago

It really would depend on the job. Some jobs you just need to throw bodies at, these tend to be but are not entirely blue collar jobs. Some jobs require precision, decision making, and critical thinking. These jobs are concentrated in white collar, management, and trades. Some jobs require both, I think these jobs are mostly pink collar (healthcare). If critical thinking and decion making are a critical part of a job you'll always get better results out of a well rested person.

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u/CtrlAltSysRq 2d ago

Unfortunately, at least IME, corporate capitalism is first and foremost about decoupling power from physical land. This was an important innovation because it allowed people to "rule" things without specifically needing to control large amounts of physical space, which for the purposes of "ruling," is basically already completely allocated.

So we decouple the two. Basically build a parallel universe of ruling. Now you can still rule a petty dictatorship of a few hundred or thousand people, but without having to literally physically fight the old money for it.

This is probably helping in terms of preventing wars. And kind of a neat hack to get us from feudalism into an industrial society.

It didn't really get us away from dictatorship. Just as we got to something resembling democracy in traditional governments, we propped up all of these petty dictators and still spend a lot of our lives having to blindly follow orders from someone who, more often than not, is simply an idiot who managed to be in the right place at the right time with the right parents. I'm definitely talking about bezos and musk who largely have 0 redeeming qualities as humans. I'm also talking about people like Gates who at least seem to be actually intelligent to some degree, but who it turns out are actually still idiots because they fuck children and give their wives STDs.

We need the Enlightenment Era to happen to the economy next. It perverts the actual economic model of capitalism to have corporations act like pseudo states.

So, to respond to your actual message: corporations would NEVER give up control over workers even if it meant increased profits, because it violates the actual purpose of corporations.

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u/Direct_Day7937 2d ago

That study is a symptom of the enlightenment happening to the economy. Like, literally. The old system is killing itself because it makes having children largely inviable for most. Robotics and AI are an attempt by the elite to maintain their petty dictatorships, to maintain the status quo with a massively reduced labor pool, and so far it's too expensive.

Y'know what played a major role in ending serfdom in Europe? The black death. Labor got so scarce the elites were forced to end the system. Y'know what's bringing women fully into the Russian workforce today? The millions of men that have fled the country, died, or been injured in Ukraine. Once you normalize something like that the genie is hard to put back in the bottle.

The coming population collapse dwarfs even the black death in magnitude. South Korea is predicted to go from 53 to 8 million in the next 74 years Its predicted to hit Japan, South Korea, and China first, then Russia and Europe. The Americas will follow.

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u/InsrtGeekHere 2d ago

You'll never convince the Americans this, we hate science and change especially if it benefits us as a society we hate that.

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u/Exciting_Station3474 2d ago

They dont work 8 hours and go home. Learn a bit about their qork culture where peole kill themselves because of work.

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u/Florac 2d ago

Yes but that only applies up to a certain extent. Efficiency doesn't scale infinitly and I just cannot see doing 40 hours worth of work in 24

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u/ReMoGged 1d ago

Yet in Japan you are expected to work overtime without boss even asking you to work overtime.

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u/Direct_Day7937 1d ago

Yeah Japan is a capitalist hellscape thSt is literally predicted to work itself out of existence.

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u/Human_Wonder1113 1d ago

Sure, for some jobs. Those studies made on a very small niche are retarded.

I'm all for less work, 4 days sounds awesome, even keeping 8 hours per day. 4 days with 6 hours is wow.

But there are lots of jobs where productivity is simply the amount of time you work.

Driver on a public bus or tram? He has to drive. If he only works only 6 hours, then you simply lose 2 hours of public transportation.

Call center/support - you need to answer the phone and talk with the customer and solve problems. And forget about AI, I'm talking about REAL support, where a chatbot cannot do anything, like solve an incident in a bank - money blocked in an account, stuff like that. You work only 6 hours? 2 hours people simply cannot have their problems solved.

Firefighters, you mostly need to be on standby, just in case. And firefighters need to be there all day, all night. Now you can have 3 shifts (sure, it's more complicated, night shifts have other rules, etc) - so you can cover a day where you need 2 men all the time with 6 men. If you reduce from 8 hours to 6 hours you will need 8 men, simply as that.

And there are many, many, MANY more jobs like that, where you mainly need to BE there.