Meet the companies that decided to maintain a 4-day week – 02/21/2023 – Market

Faye Johnson-Smith thought it was too good to be true when her boss told her she could take every Wednesday off without a reduction in her pay.

His company participated in a six-month trial of the costs and benefits of reducing the work week to just four days while still paying in full.

Like most workers, Faye felt healthier and happier working fewer hours.

At the end of the testing period, it wasn’t just the employees who approved the novelty. Almost all 61 employers were also interested in maintaining the new standard of work.

The scheme, which ran from June to December 2022, involved businesses across the UK and of all types – such as breweries, restaurants, software companies and recruitment agencies.

A report on the test results states that the four-day-a-week regime has “great benefits”, especially for the well-being of employees.

The report’s authors argue that the test could trigger changes in attitudes — and that soon everyone in the country could have a midweek day off or a three-day weekend.

Faye works as a supervisor for Citizen Advice in the city of Gateshead, where around 200 employees took part in the scheme.

She says the extra day off gives her time to “recover”.

As a result, she goes back to work “ready to go”. According to Faye, she does as much, if not more, in her four days than she used to in five.

Her colleague, Bethany Lawson, says she finds it easier to manage her staff now that most work four days a week. She also says she is able to work harder thanks to the extra day off.

But for the full-pay four-day week to work across the country, employers will need to see productivity gains.

Workers will need to create in four days the services and products they were creating in five, in order for it to bring in enough money to pay a full week’s wages.

This kind of productivity growth has been a challenge for the UK economy. In recent years, the country has been surpassed by many other wealthy nations in the amount of value created per worker. There are several explanations as to why this is so and how this problem could be fixed.

The report’s authors argue that while the test took place among companies — and who were therefore more likely to make the scheme work — the results make a strong case for a shorter workweek.

“We don’t have a firm grip on exactly what happened to productivity, but we do know that across a variety of other metrics —revenue, turnover [da força de trabalho]self-reports of productivity, employee well-being, and costs—we had very good results,” says Juliet Schor of Boston College, one of the academic institutions behind the test, alongside the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

While most participating companies said they were satisfied with productivity and performance results, only 23 provided financial data on revenues. But this is an indication that the recipes remained practically the same during the six months of the test.

Of the 61 companies that participated, 56 said they would continue with the four-day week, at least temporarily. But 18 of them said the change would be permanent.

Tyler Grange, an environmental consultancy with six offices in England, is one of the companies that has decided to adopt the four-day week.

The company’s director, Simon Ursell, admits that the first month of the test was “a little tense”.

He says he didn’t want to simply compress into four days the work that was being done in five, because that would put the team under too much pressure.

His plan was to do away with unnecessary meetings and travel. But in the end, it was the employees themselves who found ways to be more efficient.

“If you give people this incredible incentive of one full day a week, they’ll work really hard to make it all work,” he says.

Now, he says, his team is producing 2% more in four days than they used to in five. And the team is happier. Absences from work are down by two-thirds and Tyler Grange is being flooded with resumes from candidates wanting to work there.

These results reflect the overall findings of the report: that employees were much less likely to get sick and more likely to stay with their employer, reducing recruitment costs and making staff training more valuable.

However, the results were not so clear for all companies.

Citizens Advice, where Faye works, isn’t quite ready to embrace the four-day week.

Chief executive Alison Dunn says the charity has found many benefits from the shorter workweek, including less attrition among its employees, who are under a lot of pressure because of the current economic downturn.

“The scheme worked for most of our businesses,” she says. “But there are some areas where it’s not yet clear how effective it would be [ter uma semana de quatro dias].”

One industry where the four-day work week is difficult to implement is the contact center, which already had strict metrics and hard-to-meet targets. In this area, Citizens Advice had to bear the cost of hiring more staff to allow everyone to work only four days a week.

Dunn hopes the extra investment will eventually be offset by a reduction in recruiting, retention and illness costs, but this is all still “a work in progress”, she says, with a review expected in April.

This text was originally published here.