Amazon employees at Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing event – Photo: Amazon
Amazon to test 30-hour week
To support recruiting efforts, Amazon plans to test a 30-hour workweek.
The program will allow participants to work from Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and log additional hours on a flexible basis. Employees get full benefits but receive 75 percent of what full-time employees earn. Workers will have the option to scale up to 40 hours a week. The test will initially involve a few dozen people in human resources.
The Washington Post, owned by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, first reported on the program.
“We want to create a work environment that is tailored to a reduced schedule and still fosters success and career growth,” Amazon said in an event posting on Eventbrite.com. “This initiative was created with Amazon’s diverse workforce in mind and the realization that the traditional full-time schedule may not be a ‘one size fits all’ model.”
Amazon does offer some part-time employees full-time benefits but this program places entire internal teams, including managers, on reduced hours.
Deloitte and KPMG are among the few companies offering opportunities for 30-hour weeks. Labor experts still see a stigma against working part-time or reduced hours. Many working four-day weeks surpass 40 hours.
The increasing flexibility could help improve Amazon’s diversity, particularly supporting the needs of women managing careers and family. About three-quarters of Amazon’s managers globally are male.
A New York Times investigation last year was highly critical of Amazon’s working conditions although Amazon denied many of the harshest allegations.
More flexible work options could enhance Amazon’s recruiting efforts in general. With the low unemployment rate, competition for talent has increased.
Writing for Fortune, David Morris noted that many labor experts believe automation is lowering overall labor demand and that reduced-hours arrangements could present solutions. He wrote, “A 30-hour work week is seen by some as a way to more evenly distribute the shrinking pool of labor among workers, and reduce the potential of automation to increase income inequality.”
- Amazon is piloting teams with a 30-hour workweek – Washington Post
- Amazon test pilots 30-hour work week – San Francisco Business Times
- What’s behind Amazon’s 30-hour workweek pilot program? – CBS News
- Amazon Tests 30-Hour Work Week – Fortune
- Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace – New York Times
- What The New York Times Didn’t Tell You – Medium.com
- Was Portrayal of Amazon’s Brutal Workplace on Target? – The New York Times
Discussion Questions
Discussion questions: Do you see more of an upside or downside to 30-hour weeks and reduced weekly hours for companies? Should retailers be open to flexible scheduling to support diversity in hiring as well as recruiting in competitive areas such as technology?
Poll
BrainTrust
Ian Percy
President, The Ian Percy Corporation
Janet Dorenkott
President, Jadeco
I think that it is difficult to equate career advancement in any company with a 30-hour work week. It may encourage talented workers with home responsibilities but I doubt very much that the reduced load would be looked upon favorably in personal advancement.
I think we are missing the main message here in Amazon’s toe in the water. I think it is the brand’s tiny attempt to defray the employment practices criticism that at times seems to bog Amazon down. I doubt very much it will move far beyond the experiment with a few HR employees.
This concept has great merit for semi-retirees who want to ease their way out and for folks who want or need a reduced involvement in their careers. Testing the concept with complete “work groups” as I have read Amazon will do to keep the work flow consistent across a team seems to me to be a recipe for reduced productivity. Either that or the teams will prove that they really can accomplish as much in a highly-focused 30-hour week as they can in a 40-hour week that almost certainly includes some “me time.” That just may prove true. But I don’t see how the company can maintain equal “career tracks” between the 30 and 40(+) hour workers. It can work fine in small firms. But I doubt it can work in corporations — even one as inventive as Amazon.
Amazon is offering employees the option to work less hours while taking an equivalent pay deduction. So they’re making some of their employees part time. How is this innovative? If the “benefits” Amazon is referring to mean health insurance, most part-time employees are covered under Obamacare regardless. I’m not seeing what’s attractive here.
Scheduling across all functions is likely to be problematic because a business needs to be open and function for more hours than 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday through Thursday. However, this schedule is likely to be attractive to some workers. 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. for 40 hours is also likely to be attractive to some workers. The experiment is a great idea. Figuring out how to implement the change across all functions and/or workers may be more problematic.
I think it could work but I’ll be interested to see the results.
“Employee’s get full benefits but receive 75 percent of what full-time employees earn.” I assume that means they have a pay scale so they can easily calculate and justify that number. Although the percentage lines up with the reduced hours, if the benefits are still paid equally then Amazon loses money. I think this would be hard for retailers because their margins are much lower than they are in the technology industry. This increased cost would get passed on to consumers and prices would go up. This would cost them customers and profit.
I also agree with Tom Dougherty’s comment that it will help workers with more home responsibilities, but it will be hard to advance someone working 30 hours a week over others who put in 40 to 60 hours a week. Salaried employees generally put in more time than 40 hours. So it’s difficult to compare the two. On the other hand, this is a great option for some people. Another option might be a full 40+ work week with the flexibility to work from home (depending on your role).
I think we all know that time and actual productivity are not correlated in any combination.
I do find it amusing that Amazon is starting with managers and corporate people. These are the folks who sit in endless meetings, typically between 35 and 50 percent of their work week. Another four hours per week is spent preparing — or getting braced — for those meetings. This article suggests that 67 percent of meeting time is useless.
So let’s say on average that’s 11 hours PER WEEK of wasted, non-productive time caused by this one factor. Not only that, but that wasted time exhausts the energy and thinking needed for non-meeting work like innovation, communication, team-building, customer service and actual leadership.
There’s a reason Happy Hour starts AFTER work. Gallup tells us that 71 percent of most folks aren’t very happy in their work so merely shortening the work week ain’t going to do much other than cut your pay. Of course, those of us with an entrepreneurial bent wish everyone else would stop whining about how “hard and long” they work. You have no idea.
A big upside is it will attract low wage workers who can’t afford to lose their entitlements if they work 40 hours. Walmart is already doing this. I doubt Amazon would pay the full tab on health insurance or pays Costco hourly wages. Working only 30 hours means many workers can still get food stamps, free school lunch and Medicaid. And most of all, a job which our government often requires for people on entitlement programs. I don’t know what other benefits Amazon has but vacation, maternity leave and such would make the 30 hour week a very sweet deal. Many workers who have found that working 40 hours is more expensive than working 30 plus entitlements will have much less stress with this Euro-style work schedule.
Perhaps the greatest change in our modern economy is pitting workers against workers. Yes, this is an age-old practice of a meritocracy, but the pressure for corporate success is the basis for shifting production from one country to another or using contract workers as extended staff or subject matter experts rather than staff. Human resources policies are part of this shift with compressed work weeks, job sharing and other strategies to generate maximum return on labor investment.
The 30-hour work week has trade-offs. Companies can access a larger possible labor pool and likely enjoy better performance and safety from short-week workers. The downside is that workers incur a higher cost of their “get-ready, put away” in working and employment-related travel time and cost. And since workers may be required to get a second job to meet income needs and are at threat of loosing the 30-hour week income, workers that have to operate as a “free-agent” will know the pressure of performance that differ from a paternal worker policy.
A 30-hour work week is good for Amazon and supports a casual worker mentality, but increases the pressure on worker income.
I don’ know if 30 hours is the right number, but there are enough studies across various countries that indicate that the number of hours Americans put into their work week does not translate into more productivity. In fact, several of the studies show that fewer hours (say, 32 or 35) actually increases overall productivity.
With that in mind, it was surely worth trying. And if Amazon or anyone else finds that there is no reduction in overall productivity, please, don’t cut the salary. Despite the fact that we are so hours-oriented, hours are not the output, productivity is.
The U.S. has a huge labor shortage. Help wanted signs everywhere. Unfortunately no one wants to work because of the Catch-22 of losing government benefits like Obamacare subsidies or food assistance. Sure the unemployed can always get a job at Walmart but for a lot of people that sounds unpleasant. Working for Amazon to me would be more desirable. Good for Amazon for finding a solution to a difficult social issue.
Creating part-time positions with some benefits for a few dozen hardly warrants headline news. Considering that Amazon manages every detail on a granular basis, it opens the door to lower employee costs as they manage productivity.
Clever PR for Amazon just before the push for holiday sales. But ultimately I can’t see how this will be good for the employees. Amazon should call this what it is, an effective way to keep labor costs down and maximize profits.
I think this move is unexpected, since Amazon is famous for the 60 to 70 hour work week. For warehouse workers and certain non-line departments it may make sense; for the rest of the organization it represents too large a pivot to be believable.
I agree with Tom and Ben. Sure, most of us know that a focused 30 hour work week could be more productive than a leisurely 40 hour work schedule, but if we were really ambitious and upwardly mobile, how many of us would sign on for the pared down hours? While the idea has great merit in theory, I’m afraid that in practice it would create two “classes” of workers and that anyone seeking to improve their personal position would opt in for the extended hours.
Here’s my predication: Amazon will declare it a “success” and continue to use it in limited office suite roles. But they won’t roll it out company wide because it won’t work for their distribution centers.
That said, I am intrigued. When I had a tech startup once, the formal corporate expectation was for 16 hour workdays. What I saw was that after 8 hours, effectiveness dropped exponentially. We have found this in our film production work, too. For every hour worked beyond normal hours, we get half an hour of impact, then a quarter hour of impact.
So there is a chance that a drop to 30 hours will increase productivity during those hours.
(As a side note, I read this week that Ford change to four 6 hour daily shifts in the Depression so that they could employ more workers. That’s another intriguing idea.)
The Washington Post is owned by Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, so I’m not going to take the paper’s word on some of this. Some feminists are outraged because this 30 hour work week will pigeonhole women into “mommy jobs” while those working 70-80 hours a week will most likely get chosen for advancement. The author of one article stated women don’t need less hours at work, they need more help from their partners at home. I felt some of her thoughts where interesting:
The key here, of course, is the “(e)mployees get full benefits” part; absent that this is simply converting your labor force to part time (and the implications that usually carries). As for the benefits of flexibility, it depends on how much trouble one is having filling positions. In tech and other specialized fields where talents are unique, it’s probably a good idea to cast the net as broadly as possible; with many of the more commoditized jobs in retail, I would think it’s less of an imperative … and even though, in theory, 4 people working 10 — or 7 1/2 — hours/week each is the same as one person working those same hours, in practice I doubt it would be as efficient.