Shortened working week: unexpected quality and involvement

Thanks to the positive outcome, Icelandic trade unions have been able to renegotiate national working patterns: to date,86% of the workforce on the islandhas switched to shorter hours while maintaining the same pay. But that is not all. Now also in many other countries – from Spain to New Zealand – the shortened week is being tried out.

The most obvious results

• Despite the reduction in workers’ hours, there has been no drop in productivity. On the contrary, in most cases this increased.
• The workers stated that they perceived positive effects on their health and work-life balance.
• They also confirmed feeling less stressed and at risk of Burnout due to the perceived greater involvement in their team and the perceived satisfaction with their job. The typical dimensions of Burnout – i.e., the adjustment problem between person and job as well as the risk of deterioration of commitment and emotions associated with work – are drastically reduced.

Why is employee involvement important?

To answer this question, it is interesting to refer to the research collected in State of the Global Workplace 2021. In addition to productivity and performance, the Gallup agency considered employee engagement because it is strongly related to employee well-being. How to calculate it, though? The agency took into account not only factors such as happiness or individual satisfaction but also performance-related elements such as being aware of what others expect of you, knowing how your work contributes to the company purpose and experiencing encouragement and development.

• Analysis has shown that improving employee engagement amplifies organisational results in terms of reliability, safety, sales, productivity and profitability.
• Studies in times of pandemic and global crisis have also shown that in difficult times, engagement is an even stronger indicator of performance.
• The greater the involvement and satisfaction in work, the better people feel in their lives in general.

Engaged employees act differently by exceeding expectations, giving the companies where they work a clear competitive advantage.

The 4-day working week is the future of work

“The work result does not lie in the quantity but in the quality of the time we dedicate to accomplishing our tasks. It is not about working faster, but rather about working smarter.”

This is the thinking of Andrew Barnes, administrator and owner of Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand-based financial management services company with over 240 employees. Barnes experimented with this flexibility model for a couple of months in 2018 and discovered that employee productivity, engagement, satisfaction, work-life balance and well-being had never been better. He has since introduced the 4-day week as a fixed model. Want to learn more? Watch this video

In order to stimulate the debate on the future of work and provide concrete ideas for changing the paradigm, Barnes also founded the 4 Day Week Global movement. This is a campaign that, to date, has involved 37 countries worldwide. Among the realities that have applied the 4-day week work system are:

• Microsoft. It recently made headlines when it published the results of an experiment in a Japanese subsidiary where, with offices closed every Friday during the month of August, productivity increased by 40%.
• Basecamp. During the summer months, the software company’s staff worked four days a week.
• Unilever. It is allowing staff to cut working hours by 20% without adjusting pay.

To read more click here Time is invaluable in our lives. Even at work it must be used intelligently. Maybe even in Italy we will evolve towards reducing the working day to 4 days… but in the meantime let’s commit to seize every moment to involve employees and colleagues and feel involved and satisfied in our activities!