An Explanation for Employees to Work 80% of Their Normal Workweek in Exchange for Half of their Regular Hours: A Case Study in the UK
It was easy for the head of a London public relations firm to convince her employees to work less hours.
Losey’s team has hit its stride after a rocky start, but after a difficult journey to convince her board. She said she is 80% sure everyone will keep the routine after November, when the trial ends.
The trial is being conducted by 70 companies in the United Kingdom. For six months starting in June, more than 3,300 employees have worked 80% of their usual hours — for the same rate of pay — in exchange for promising to deliver 100% of their usual work.
The program is being run by the nonprofit organization 4 Day Week Global; Autonomy, a think tank; and the 4 Day Week UK Campaign, in partnership with researchers from Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College.
There are new ways of working. Many companies have hybrid arrangements, even as C.E.O.s are finding success getting staff back to the office more regularly. But another experiment is gaining traction: Not one of 33 companies that piloted a four-day workweek for six months as part of a large-scale study this year said they would return to a standard schedule. The firms, which together have more than 900 employees, also reported higher revenue and employee productivity. The nonprofit advocacy group that coordinated the pilot programs, called 4 Day Week Global, has signed up dozens of companies to participate in studies next year.
For Gary Conroy, founder and CEO of 5 Squirrels, a skincare product manufacturer on England’s south coast with 13 full-time employees, the new work routine gets “better and better all the time,” he told CNN Business.
Four Months in Losey’s Work-Life at a New Health Organization: The Case of a Family Run-Down and the Effects on Their Work
“We’ve all lost a lot of weight…we were overweight before,” he said. The team has more time to prepare healthy food. Lots of people are going to the gym a lot more.”
Four months into the trial, Losey said her clients are happy with their performance, while her team is much more inspired and creative. An internal study at the company found that productivity was up 35% and staff said they were feeling healthier and happier, compared to before the trial.
She said that the clients are desperate to see the experiment pays off because they want to convince their bosses of the benefits.
Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, told CNN Business’ Christine Romans that the four-day work week provides “a major competitive advantage for firms in the labor market.”
It also makes for happier and healthier employees, Schor said. That’s especially important given the demands of the pandemic pushed many to simply burn out.
Americans don’t find two days enough for the weekend. They can’t get all of their errands and family care [done] and taking their kids to activities, and even just a little bit of time for themselves, and preparing for the work week,” she said. All of that is crammed into two days and isn’t enough.
She described the first week as apocalyptic, with too few coworkers available to respond to client emergencies. She cried when she sat on the kitchen floor.
Slowly, the team has adapted, and introduced new habits that have made all the difference. Now, internal meetings are capped to 15 minutes, and client meetings to 30 minutes. Emails to colleagues cannot exceed 25 percent of the total day’s emails.
A traffic light system is one way Losey’s staff tries to keep their focus on the job. If you are happy to talk, the light on the desk is green, amber, and red, while if you are busy but are available to speak, it is red.
Conroy said he has introduced “deep work time” where, for two hours every morning and two hours every afternoon, his staff ignore emails, calls or instant messages and concentrate on their projects.
The office phones were too67531, so they have been disconnected. He said that clients were initially bothered but have since responded with more emails.
The Good, the Bad, the Ugly: Why tech is so good for children in America, and how it affects a child’s poverty
Wall Street and venture investors are both bullish on green tech. In his year-end letter, Bill Gates notes that climate-related R. & D. has grown nearly a third since the 2015 Paris accords. Over the past two years the private capital investment in the sector has grown, spending $70 billion. From that, new technologies to address climate issues are continuing to emerge. Larry Fink, C.E.O. of BlackRock, said at the DealBook Summit that venture funding would flow to start-ups using hard science to address the world’s biggest problems. The money will be seen as a way of changing where it goes. “It’s not going to go to all this stuff that provided us good utility to get food quicker or find a taxi sooner.”
Bots probably won’t take your job — and could make it easier. Fears that technology will replace human workers are as old as technology, and they were raised once again in November when a company called OpenAI released ChatGPT, an automated writing program. But AI experts have long insisted that such technologies have limitations that prevent them from fully replacing humans. What the bots can do well is make grunt work easier. The doctor in Palm Beach posting a video of himself asking a letter to an insurance company was one of the earliest examples of virality.
Real progress is being made in tackling child poverty. The number of children in America living below the poverty line has plummeted by 59 percent since 1993. As The Times’s Jason DeParle reported in September, “child poverty has fallen in every state, and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white, Black, Hispanic and Asian, living with one parent or two, and in native or immigrant households.” The improvements coincide with more generous state and federal subsidies for working families, and changes to welfare laws that make it easier for struggling households to apply for assistance programs.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/24/business/dealbook/optimisim-in-2023.html
Cancer Vaccines: New Frontiers in the Antiaging Diagnosis and Treatment of Its Epidemics (The Moderna Report)
We are getting close to cancer vaccines. Researchers have long thought that it was possible to immunize individuals at high risk of cancer, or even cure cancer in those who were already showing signs of it. Until recently, they had made little progress, but now promising results from preliminary studies are giving some doctors new hope. Moderna said that the vaccine against skin cancer did well in trials. Moderna and others are working on dozens of other vaccines to treat various other cancers.