The four-day week will solve some of work's biggest problems - but only if companies can adapt

Young man leaving the office pushing a bicycle accompanied by his male colleague talking together and looking happy — Picture: Hinterhaus Productions/Getty

Information employees have made up their minds about how they need work to look to any extent further. For many, which means not having to pull themselves off the bed and into an workplace 5 days per week – or in any respect, in some instances.

However location is just one a part of the puzzle with regards to redesigning work. Professionals aren’t solely wrangling for management over the place they do their work, however when. And it appears the reply to that’s more and more “not on Fridays, please.”

The four-day week presents one thing of a utopian imaginative and prescient of a world the place a work-life steadiness is strictly that – a harmonious and (close to) equal steadiness of working and never working. One much less day of labor and someday extra of relaxation and rest. Twenty-four entire hours of further free leisure time every week. Think about that!

The four-day week in itself is not new. Some corporations have been engaged on these fashions for years, usually by compressing a daily work week into fewer days. On this case, an extended working day could be the trade-off for having to solely are available in (or go online) 4 days per week. Would you slightly work 5 eight-hour days, or 4 10-hour days? Personally, I do not assume both bears vital enchantment over the opposite, even when I do like the concept of a three-day weekend.

However that is not all the time the case, and more and more, employers are starting to discover how chopping hours is usually a car for happier, extra motivated employees who’re extra engaged, and thus, much less prone to stop. It is also an understandably highly effective software for attracting expertise at a time when hiring exercise is off the charts – notably in tech, IT and different specialised professions. If you happen to’re a smaller firm that does not have the finances to supply the identical salaries as a bigger rival group, giving the reward of time and a greater work-life steadiness might show an efficient incentive.

SEE: The four-day work week is coming: This is what it might imply for you

Trials of shorter working weeks have largely confirmed profitable. Microsoft Japan, as an illustration, reported a 40% enhance in productiveness after transferring to a four-day week. In the meantime, Iceland’s well-known four-year trial was deemed so successful that lots of the nation’s employees are actually capable of request to work a shorter week. Corporations that I’ve spoken to say that transferring their employees to a four-day week has boosted morale and wellbeing, and tutorial analysis additionally signifies that chopping hours really results in higher output, slightly than worse.

And let’s not neglect the potential a shorter working week might have for selling gender equality within the office, not simply by making it simpler for companions to share caregiving duties extra evenly, but in addition by making it simpler for ladies to stay in full-time employment after having youngsters – decreasing the gender pay hole because of this.

A four-day week will not work for everybody, and it isn’t all the time a case of telling everybody they’ll have Fridays off. What occurs if a consumer has an pressing grievance at 5:30pm on a Thursday, as an illustration?

Attempting to suit all the pieces that must be completed over the course of a typical week into fewer days may additionally trigger scheduling complications, notably in case your week consists of quite a few conferences, catch-ups and brainstorming periods. That is not going to assist with stress, which is without doubt one of the essential issues the four-day week is meant to handle. Then once more, perhaps this simply implies that employers shall be compelled to chop out pointless conferences to be able to let workers get on with – – precise work.

All these questions is perhaps answered when worldwide pilots wrap up later this yr. In the event that they show profitable, enterprise leaders shall be confronted with a strong argument for transferring their employees to a shorter working week. Those that resist with none sensible, logistical or operational motive for doing so are prone to discover themselves within the perilous place of getting to elucidate why.