In practice, are the last 8 hours of a workweek as productive as the first 8 hours? Would employers actually be losing 20% of a worker's productivity in many cases? Or would it be more like 10%? Maybe even less, if productivity improves on the four working days?
Hard to generalize of course, but my gut feeling (based on my company’s experiment for 13 weeks) is that it’s less than 10%. Potentially increasing longer-term productivity. Emphasis on long-term because it might seem like a drop in the short term. Longer term job satisfaction and general well being can increase, focus and just being able to recharge more effectively. Yes, completely anecdotal. FWIW My company since decided to switch to 4-days all year in 2021.
For myself, I find I'm more productive in the last half of the week. But my employer (and team) tend to front-load the week with meetings, so by Wednesday my schedule is clear enough to be heads-down and get stuff done.
I guess the impact is quite small since deadlocks (meetings, approvals, other peoples' code etc) you need to wait out is much of the work hours anyway.
