What is all the fuss about?
The Government have been piloting a scheme to trial a 4-day working week and people have been asking me what it is all about.
Prompted by the demand for flexible working, the need to keep good people, along with the pressure to provide work-life balance and reduce overhead costs, about 70 companies and 3,300 staff have been giving the 4-day week a 6 month try out.
What it is not – is compressed hours. This is the requirement to do for example: 4 x 10-hour days instead of 5 x 8-hour days. This keeps your pay and working week the same.
The proposal is that by working smarter and more productively, people can work 4 out of their 5 days at the usual number of hours but yet get paid for 5 days work. This is effectively a 20% pay rise based on hourly rate alone!
Clearly then there are benefits for employees. What about employers? The feedback from this pilot so far is showing that people are maintaining their productivity. Employers may be able to reduce overheads in terms of office space, heat and light. Combined with the increase in hybrid working and working from home, employers are maintaining their customer services, expanding their catchment area for talent recruitment and are able to offer more attractive overall packages to retain key people. Reducing presenteeism and filling up the time for the sake of the extra pay can prove its weight in gold to employers and employees alike.
From the trial- which is due to finish in December – about 86% of employers say they are likely to continue with this working pattern and 88% say it is working well.
However, the feedback indicates that smaller employers and businesses are struggling more to cover the hours needed to meet customer demand and deal with handovers. Only time will tell if this trend towards the shorter working week, already popular in some other larger developed countries, will become more of a norm for the rest of us.