At the time of the release of the year-end awards in the same year, many people are worried about their performance appraisal results, because many companies' year-end awards are linked to performance. The quality of performance is often linked to your "diligence", and diligence is a direct embodiment of how much overtime (gratuitous) is.
Of course, this is not absolute. But if you are in a company with a strong overtime culture, you often leave work early and do not work overtime on weekends, which often leaves a bad impression on the leader, which may affect your promotion and salary increase and performance appraisal.
Overtime culture has always been a sensitive topic at home and abroad, and it is a frequent visitor to the hot search list. In the past two years, the situation is developing in a good direction, domestic factories have begun to cancel overtime, while many foreign companies are more advanced, implementing a "four-day work week" system.
Recently, the Four-Day Work Coalition added Blackbird Interactive, the developer of Home: The Karak Desert, which will officially and permanently implement the model in April, while offering flexible location options. They adopt this model purely to retain employees and enhance the company's competitiveness.
Homeland: Karak Desert
Mulch! These game companies have employees who go on four days a week and take three days off
As a social animal, if one day the company announces four days a week, three days off, the salary and benefits will not change, it is estimated that the groundhog barking is not enough to describe one-ten-thousandth of my excitement.
However, in foreign countries, more and more gamers are enjoying this benefit.
Last year, the news that AAA game developer Eidos-Montréal and its subsidiary Eidos-Sherbrooke announced the implementation of a four-day work model sparked a heated discussion in the domestic game industry.
It is understood that before they adopted the four-day work system, in order to take care of the mental health problems that may cause employees due to the epidemic, they had adopted a model of up to 4 hours of rest on Fridays, and finally upgraded to a four-day work system last fall.
Of course, their adoption of this model has also been interpreted as a measure to increase the attractiveness of the company under the inclusion of Canadian talent. We know that in AAA game companies, employee overtime is a common occurrence, which has caused a high job-hopping rate in these companies, and employees' cognition of these companies is often associated with tiredness, exhaustion, and mental health decline.
So, a AAA game company took this step, and it made a lot of sense.
In addition, there are a number of independent game studios that work four days a week, which is also a big hit, including Crown Crows Crows, Die Gute Fabrik, Young Horses, Kitfox Games, Armor Games, Ko_Op Mode.
Among them, behind Crows Crows' implementation of this model is a story full of "human touch".
That happened in January 2020, when the sequel to their research project, The Stanley Parable, had been postponed. In the game industry, project delay is a common thing, in the face of delay, the usual practice is overtime, while the game company in Berlin, Germany, has chosen a different approach, from the regular 955 work system to a four-day work week.
Stanley's Fables
There was much to the benefit of this shift to studio head William Pugh, a young man in his 20s. He has worked in theaters and said it was a challenge to adapt to this nine-to-five job, "it's hard to achieve work-life balance," and he watched Microsoft Japan's efforts to experiment with the four-day workday — employees are not only happier, but more efficient. In fact, in 2019, one of the producers in their studio had already come up with the idea of a four-day studio, which was mentioned again by other colleagues a few months later, and they finally made this big decision.
While studios like Crows Crows, which have only single-digit employees, don't have as many people as AAA games, they are still an important force in the industry to improve the working environment for employees.
The Crows Crows Crows team
On a four-day workday, the reduction in efficiency that management fears may not exist
From the company's point of view, if the four-day working system is adopted, whether it can improve efficiency, or at least whether it can achieve efficiency equivalent to the five-day work system, is an important measure.
Pugh says he has no data on whether to improve efficiency, but he feels that the work is more consistent and that "people are happier." ”
And Pugh's feelings are scientifically "grounded." The Reykjavik City Council, Iceland, conducted a trial of more than 2,500 employees (1% of Iceland's working population). The trial showed that employees were less stressed after shorter work weeks and also reduced the risk of overdraft. Importantly, employee feedback says they "have more time to spend with family, develop hobbies, and do chores." According to the researchers, although the working hours have been reduced from 40 hours to 35 or 36 hours, efficiency has remained the same or improved.
There are also companies that use a four-day workday and are working hard to improve employee efficiency.
For example, Hannah Nicklin, head of the Copenhagen studio Die Gute Fabrik, devised tough measures to allow the 15-member team to use their time more effectively, including working with other studios with solutions. As an example, she prefers to pay the outside world for two hours of consulting rather than having employees spend a week researching on exactly the same issues.
Illustration of Die Gute Fabrik's work environment
Meanwhile, the company's creative producer, Ben Wilson, designed meeting templates for different matters, ensuring that everyone was well prepared for the meeting. Nicklin explains, "A lot of it's about project management. "Meetings should be efficient.
For AAA games, after changing to a four-day workday, it is not easy to improve efficiency.
Eidos Studios is also implementing smarter work structures, including stipulating that meetings can't be held at certain times of the week and designing "focused time" designed to be more productive. Ultimately, these all want employees to be more focused and less unnecessary distractions.
Overtime, do you dare to refuse?
We often use the term "social animal" to describe workers, ridiculing the pressure from work.
There are many reasons for overtime, or because of the company's overtime culture, individuals are forced to work overtime, may also be because of their own low efficiency, or because of the company's welfare, such as free shuttles and so on.
However, we must realize that excessive overtime affects a person's physical health, and if it is serious, it even poses a threat to life, and now the cases of sudden death due to overtime are frequently on the hot search, which also reflects this severe phenomenon. At the same time, overtime is also easy to cause a person to have psychological problems, which is often ignored by the public.
Pugh mentions a "mental health crisis", and the four-day workday is "life-saving" for him, because he can use Fridays to better schedule treatment, and if it is a five-day work system, he needs to rush to get treatment before or after work, which will only make him more tired.
Now I often hang on my lips: life is not only about gouge, but also poetry and far away. But for many, work has taken up most of his time, unable to juggle poetry and distance. Although in a short period of time we dare not have the luxury of a four-day work system like abroad, there are more and more people, more young people, who dare to refuse to work overtime. So are you one of them?