There was a story I read about the Carnegie steelworks end of the 1800s. Usual working hours was six days a week. Then the plant manager introduced a 40 hour week. Productivity went up and less accidents happened. This went for a while until the manager got killed in an accident. Soon after, despite the good numbers, the plant went back to the old schedule. I think it’s hard to shake the belief that the more hours you work the more you get done.

I'm guessing here, but it's usually hard to convince the right people.. I've been through this for me personally, so obviously anecdotal, but even if you take an equivalent pay cut people are often reluctant to let you work less because "how will you get anything done", even though there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. But admittedly it's quite counterintuitive too, saying I'll work less but I'll be more productive..

Most likely because they are not yet sure whether or not it was a fluke and/or whether or not it would have unforeseen long term impacts and/or they identified other issues they need to address. E.g. the article pointed out that a lot of the increase seemed to be down to fewer meetings. Which presumably raises the question of 1) whether that's sustainable (were those meetings really meetings that could just be cut?) and 2) if it is sustainable, maybe they think they can achieve a bigger productivity increase by slashing meetings and not cutting working hours.

It also seems like one of those things that are near impossible to reverse if you make them the norm and things goes sideways, so I can understand they want to be cautious.

We've done this the last few years at my company, so that we have every other Friday during the summer off, staggered for coverage.

It's nice. Nobody ever does anything on Friday anyway, and a three-day weekend lets you actually go somewhere or get a project done. Moreover, when you have a weekday off regularly, you can actually go to the post office or the bank or all the other places that are only open when working people are working and can't go.

So the same question for your company. Why is the only during the summer? A staggered every other Friday off has always been something I’ve hoped would become mainstream year round. It isn’t that progressive of a thing to enact since its staggered/every other.

Generally, we work from home all Fridays, so you have to handle your meetings and email, but there's still flexibility. The summer fridays are nice because you are completely off, no expectation of availability.

It's a little silly to only do in the summer, but it's still a nice perk.

The most people get used to it, the more I would expect "Thursday" to become the new Friday and you should expect to quickly end up losing the benefit of that additional day off as laziness takes over.

My company implements an optional every other Friday off. Somewhat surprisingly, Thursday hasn’t really become the new Friday. In fact, the people who choose to work the full 5 days tend to get more work done on Fridays, since fewer people are around to interrupt them. The people who take those Fridays off are generally happier and still pretty productive on Thursdays.

If people didn't want to work at all this might be true (at least if Friday off was widely implemented). But generally that doesn't seem to be the case. Unemployment seems to stress people, and most people seem to prefer vacations that are 2-3 weeks at a time, even if they could take more. So if you offered people to come in whenever they want they might be there more often than you expect.

Wouldn’t people be comparing to their peers outside of work? Most people don’t get any Friday’s off. It would be pretty wild to start wanting Thursday off so much when no one else is getting Friday off.

I’m not sure lazy people care which day of the week it is.

It's unlikely someone in the know will post answers here, but this is Japan - and it has totally different work culture. The idea of an employee leaving before their boss is still unthinkable in many cases. Many people are employed in what are bureaucratic "paper pushing" jobs, even if their title suggests otherwise.

You can see a little bit of this if you visit because you'll experience endless paperwork for everything, but this is only one layer of a very complex onion. I wouldn't say this is all bad, but it has problems.

Because it's PR fluff since no metric was actually shown here?