Short week: the UK tries it too – iO Donna

Lto short week in the office takes hold more and more. The workers like the idea, the companies less but some are more persuaded than others, and they try. Like this, after Iceland, Scotland and Belgiumjust to give a few examples, we also start in United Kingdom.

Short week: the United Kingdom also leaves

Here the experiment will be the largest and most structured ever. The target? Work less to work better. In all, at the moment, there are approx about seventy companies who have decided to implement this new way for their employees to check employee productivity. Naturally, without changing the salary.

The Autonomy think tank and the NGO are in charge of the project 4 Day Week Global, and involves shops, restaurants, law firms, software companies and marketing firms.

It will last 6 months and in this period i employees will work 80% of the time less. They will be monitored by researchers from Oxford, Cambridge and Boston College who will examine how this new way of working it will affect both their work resultsis on their quality of life. With the ultimate goal of understanding if the benefits are real.

The list of countries and companies that have decided to introduce the short working week is getting longer and longer

Work less to work better

Hopefully it will show that work less it does not at all risk the commitment and productivity assigned to office hoursbut that on the contrary increases the enthusiasm and energy a lot.

Go to the company fewer times it also means doing something for the environment: by shortening the working week, in fact, travel is reduced. Glthe effects on pollution would be considerable.

Short week: people like it more and more

The list of countries and companies that have decided to introduce the short work week it gets longer and longer. The first state to try the four-day work week was Iceland and the experiment conducted in 2015 and 2016 in Reykjavik it turned out to be an overwhelming success.

In fact, from a study conducted on that test, it emerged that the worker welfare had improved dramatically without there having been any loss of productivity or quality of the services provided. Since that time, 86% of Icelanders have chosen the short week.

The speech is then returned warm during the pandemic, when we saw that the work was going on very well and could be perfectly managed even from home. And so, one after another, the European states have begun.

The UAE also wants to work less

There Scotlandthanks to a pilot project by the governmentlast year introduced the four-day workweek for the first time, experiencing a 20% reduction in their employees’ working hours. The Belgium approved the short work week from this year.

Among the European countries that wanted to test the four-day working week there is also the Spain which, with a pilot project, brought the workers involved through 39 to 32 hours, keeping wages unchanged.

From this year also the United Arab Emirates they decided for the change. They will be the first country in the world to introduce the 4 and a half day work weekthus letting the weekend start on Friday afternoon.

Further east, Japan is encouraging shorter working days. In 2019, Microsoft decided to give its employees one more day off per week and the experiment led to a 40% increase in productivity.

It’s Italy? As always, bringing up the rearin our country we don’t talk about working four days instead of five. Or rather we talk about it, but it ends there. The realities in which the short working week has been introduced are very few and more than anything else they are experiments of private companies.

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