Greece becomes first EU country to introduce a six-day working week. This bucks a global trend of companies exploring whether to embrace a shorter working week. Greece’s GDP is expected to grow by 2.2% in 2024. In 2025, economic growth is projected at 2.3%. Country’s economy growth was by far the weakest in EU between 2010 and 2019. As a result, investment is expected to gain further momentum, and become a key contributor to output growth, while household spending is likely to be further supported by a rise in real income. Eurozone average GDP growth is 0.8%. Interesting to see if this becomes the new norm over the next decade or will the more affluent economies continue pursuing shorter weeks despite the lackluster growth. What do you think?
I think a 6 work day per week is a terrible decision for the wellbeing of the owners of the country, which are the greek citizens. Furthermore, I expect it won’t help the economy, because the real lever here is ‘productivity per hour’, which will not change and actually often there’s correlation btw long hours worked and low productivity. As an objective observer, it will be an interesting case to help understand if more hours worked impact positively in the economy, opposite to productivity/hour. The data of GDP growth is very misleading, because measuring growth from very different bases provides no insight. Let me illustrate this with an example: Miska goes to the gym 7d/week and is the closest we have in games industry to Captain America. I go 2d/week. However, I expect to start going 4d/week after this month. This means my ‘gym time’ is expected to grow +200%. While lazy Miska ‘gym time’ will remain stagnant, at 0% growth. Therefore I am clearly overworking Miska, am I not?
Wasn’t 4 day work week supposed to be the future (not so long ago?)
It's an interesting concept - in the gaming market I'm not sure how easy it would to hire people into a 6 day week from other countries, I imagine its going to be the same for other industries too. Part of fuelling growth is attracting talent from elsewhere where there's a skills shortage domestically, I'm not sure how many people who move to Greece if a 6 day week is mandated (vs. their current 4/5 day setup)
Being Greek living in Greece, and without supporting the law, the news spreading around doesn't say the whole details of the law. There are conditions that employees would work 6 days (e.g. increased work), it doesn't apply to all companies (e.g. not tech companies), and they would be paid 40% more that extra day. The rulers stated that the law was "mainly" implemented to enable industrial companies to address the issue of unreported income, which was already occurring due to employees working six days a week because companies were unable to find suitable resources for rotating shifts. Again, not a supporter of the law.
I don't know the details, but this seems to me like a way of making sure that people who are already working an extra day (like in construction) have the state's support. Meaning, the state wants more taxes collected, as usual 😄 As a civilization and with all the technical advancements (including AI), we should be moving slowly and surely to a 4 day work week. Or shorter 5 days (like 6 hours/day) while maintaining more or less the same output. This will improve the quality of life and give us time to be free. 🔥
Chris Kempt
1w
What’s going on in Croatia?
I don't think either 4 or 6 days-week changes much to be honest. Absolute majority of game dev companies are international-stuff packed ones (I may be wrong for Greece's companies specifically here, so fell free to correct me), so it all will be oriented on average practices over at least EU/NA which are still having 5-days working week overall. I have 2 simple cases to support this: - Case 1: In 2018 we've run an experiment of 4.5 working day at Gameloft Kharkiv (Friday was a 4hr day). But ofc, team's management kept the right to prolong the working hours on Friday in case deadlines are off or similar. Real-life practice showed that the productivity rise was not higher than 5% (measured in lost of factors, from deadlines miss rate to employee turnover). But most important, overall overtime rate among the teams remained the same. Like if you have a Tier 1 game which feeds everyone in the company and your deadline is off, you will go for that work on Saturday morning whatever the working hours policy is. ⬇
Maybe you should also add a little context of why this was introduced in Greece? This was not done to boost growth afaik. Also not to lure in foreign investment. Yet you only put this in context of GDP growth. Also this applies only to a few sectors in Greece economy where companies grapple with lack of workforce. A quick research shows this is a more complex topic than your post implies.
So much for German productivity. 🥲
Deconstructor of Fun I Founder I Executive I Angel Investor
1wI think it’s a step backward if more countries adopt 6 day work week like we used to have a century ago. I hope we can improve productivity with more sophisticated measures.