Working four days a week reduces stress and maintains productivity levels, says a report published today by researchers at the University of Cambridge, based on a pilot project with 61 UK companies.
The report maintains that during the six months in which these organizations reduced the working hours of their employees by 20%, without a salary reduction, sick leave will decrease by 65% and employee departures to other companies by 57%.
The research also indicates that 79% of employees indicated that their ‘burnout’ (exhaustion) was reduced and 39% said that their stress levels decreased.
The companies that participated in the program, promoted by the pressure group “Campaña 4 Días de la Semana” (“Campaign of the four days of the week”, in Portuguese), registered an average increase of 1.4% in their income in the same period of the previous year, the report also points out, led by Cambridge sociologist Brendan Burchell.
“Before this test, many doubted that we would see an increase in productivity to compensate for the reduction in work time, but that is exactly what we saw,” stressed the sociologist.
“Many employees were more than willing to implement improvements on their own. Long meetings with many people were reduced or eliminated entirely. Workers were much less willing to waste time,” added Brendan Burchell.
In Portugal, of the 90 companies that expressed interest in joining the four-day work week, some 30 formalized the decision to join the pilot project, the Secretary of State for Labor, Miguel Fontes, revealed on February 15.
“Our goal was to have a number of no less than 30 and we already have that number, most likely we will even exceed that threshold,” added Miguel Fontes, stressing that “many companies are still considering” the decision.
At the beginning of the month, the Minister of Labor, Solidarity and Social Security, Ana Mendes Godinho, told Negócios and Antena1 that the companies interested in joining the four-day work week project come from various sectors, especially industry, the trade, information and communication. , with geographical variety and different dimensions.
The pilot program consists of evaluating the implementation of the four-day week, with the corresponding reduction in working hours, without reduction in pay, and is aimed at employers and their workers who voluntarily wish to join.
The entities that enroll in the pilot program are evaluated before, during and after the program, using indicators related to the company, namely, productivity and intermediate costs, and workers, including health and well-being, using a methodology to be defined by the coordinating team.
The coordinator of the pilot project of the four-day week, Pedro Gomes, professor at Birkbeck, University of London, defended at the end of October that the four-day week still has “a long way” to go until it is implemented in Portugal, but that “it is the first step on a path that will take many years to complete”.
Source: TSF
