A week after the government presented the pilot project for the four-day workweek, which should start privately in June 2023, a Coverflex survey shows that “more than eight in ten Portuguese employees (86%) liked to change the length of their work. the working week” to four days.
The vast majority of workers are available to shorten the workweek from five to four days, but with differences in workload. The survey published yesterday found that “62.1% of respondents would like to try to work 40 hours a week, spread over just four days a week”. It would mean that the current maximum working day is increased from eight to ten hours, if we look at a homogeneous distribution of the workload over the week. Only 23.9% of employees who participated in the questionnaire would prefer to reduce the weekly working time from 40 to 32 hours, which would make it possible to maintain eight hours a day, even if it involved a salary cut. And only “14% of respondents still prefer the usual solution of 40 hours of work per week over five days,” the same survey concludes.
It should be borne in mind that these results stem from a survey conducted among 1438 employees, mainly between the ages of 25 and 34, in the fields of information technologies and software development, who are more conducive to mixed or remote work and with more flexibility to to adapt to the four-day work week.
In terms of job location, 47.1% of respondents were found to be in a hybrid regime, i.e. some days at home and others at the company. “However, the face-to-face regime was the one that increased the most compared to last year’s results, from 20.3% in 2021 to 29.5% this year, reflecting the return of teams to a logic that is more based on the sharing of a physical space, in a post-confinement and return-to-office scenario”, according to the survey that lists Lisbon as the neighborhood with the highest percentage of participants working in a hybrid regime (57.6% ).
costs for telecommuting
In terms of energy or telecommunications costs associated with telecommuting or the mixed regime, most companies (76.2%) still do not provide any kind of assistance, according to a survey. However, this percentage shows an improvement from 2021, when 81.4% of employers paid no expenses to the employee.
Given the approximately 20% of companies that have a budget for hybrid or remote working in their compensation package, most claim to have an annual budget of up to 250 euros. Only 17 participants reported having €1,000 or more for work-related out-of-office expenses.
On the topic related to salary supplements, the study shows how workers’ priorities have changed in the context of the energy crisis and high inflation. So while the benefits with expenditures on education, health and technology are now the most used, the Portuguese would like to see in their range of benefits expenditures related to fuel (37.1%), savings and pension products (33.5%) and travel (33%).
Salomé Pinto is a journalist for Dinheiro Vivo
Source: DN
