For thousands of lucky people, the work week only lasts four days, and they are still paid 100% of their regular income to do their job, even though they have earned a full day of personal time.
Sounds too good to be true? It is not necessarily an impossible dream. This idyllic labor rebalancing could, hypothetically, become the new normal one day, if campaigns to achieve a four-day workweek continue to gain momentum.
Now in what is estimated to be the largest weekly four-day work experiment ever conducted, 70 companies and more than 3,300 employees in the UK are embracing the change in work-life balance and family, as part of a pilot program to test four-day work arrangements for the next six months.
The initiative, led by 4 Non-Profit Global Day Week, along with other organizations, is being run in conjunction with researchers from the University of Cambridge, Oxford University and Boston College, who will investigate how it affects the week of four days to workers (among other things).
“We will analyze how employees respond to having an extra day off, in terms of stress and exhaustion, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy consumption, travel and many other aspects of life,” says the economist and sociologist Juliet. Schor of Boston College, principal investigator of the project.
But it’s not just UK workers who will benefit from spending four days. 4 Day Week Global is also conducting pilot tests in Australia and New Zealand, and the organization recently announced an upcoming test in the United States and Canada, with next month as the deadline for registration, and expects the pilot to start in October.
The four-day work weeks or, alternatively, the 35-hour weeks have been studied by researchers for years through a series of international trials, the largest to date being an experiment in Iceland involving approximately 2,500 participants.
This essay found that the reduction in staff hours worked offered numerous benefits to employees, although it did not lead to declines in productivity.
“Many workers expressed that after working fewer hours they felt better, more energized and less stressed, which made them have more energy for other activities, such as exercise, friends and hobbies,” the researchers said. .
“This had a positive effect on his work.”
This kind of result is how it can make sense for employees to work less time while earning the same amount of money they usually do. The idea is that simply by having less time to work (and having more free time), they will have more energy, commitment and well-being, so they can be more effective and productive in the time they spend working.
This concept is not just an illusion, but a commitment in principle of the employees who participate in these programs, called model 100-80-100: that is, workers receive 100 percent of their salary, working 80 percent hundred of his pay. time, in exchange for a 100 percent productivity.
Another benefit, in theory, is the environment, with research suggesting that we can reduce carbon emissions if we reduce our working hours.
“The four-day week is generally considered a triple dividend policy: it helps employees, businesses and the climate,” Schor says. “Our research efforts will go deeper into all of this.”
4 Day Week Global was born after the first successful four-day work week experiment of the organizers at Perpetual Guardian, a trusted company in New Zealand, which enjoyed so much of the benefits they chose to make the permanent changes.
“What we’ve seen is a massive increase in staff involvement and satisfaction with the work they do, a massive increase in staff’s intention to continue working with the company, and we haven’t seen a drop in productivity,” he said. say Andrew, CEO of the company. Barnes explained at the time.
“We’re paying for productivity.”
It remains to be seen whether the new trials in the UK, Australia and New Zealand (and the future US / Canada pilot) will yield such promising results, but if they do, we can expect even more support to support the campaign just to work four days .
Some think that the transition may be just a matter of time, echoing the adoption by modern society of the five-day working week in the early decades of the twentieth century, which involved eliminating a sixth day of work. .
“Moving first gives us a lot of advantages,” Paddy Lambros, head of people and talent at the British technology company Sensat, which is taking part in the UK test, told Euronews.
“We’ve seen an increase in applications, we’ve seen an increase in sentiment, we’ve been able to hire more diverse people … When we put all these things together, we see a huge advantage in adopting what we think inevitably comes anyway, first of all “.
You can learn more about the pilot and the campaign on the 4 Day Week Global website.