[imagesource: Samsung Tomorrow]

See that? That’s the four-day workweek peeping over the horizon.

Guiding us towards this better future is one of the world’s largest trials of a shorter working week based in Iceland, which showed that everyone was much happier, healthier, and more productive with this sort of business model.

The UK-based campaign called 4 Day Week Global – a collaboration between three non-profit organisations, a labour think-tank, and researchers at three universities in the UK and US – has also been encouraging businesses to change their tune, giving workers a lot more flexibility and overall joie de vivre.

The pilot programme aims to last six months up till December this year and involves 70 British companies with around 3 300 workers across myriad industries, including food production, marketing, and tech.

Months after instituting a four-day workweek test on its own, a construction-recruitment firm in Devon, England called Girling Jones joined in the campaign’s mix.

Leaders at Girling Jones had been brainstorming ways to retain and attract new employees, like raising pay for one, and decided eventually that they’d take the four-day workweek plunge, reported Business Insider.

That Icelandic study inspired them, pushing Girling Jones to pay its employees the same amount of money for fewer days of work.

The impressive results speak for themselves:

Although it started out as an endeavour to make hiring and retaining employees easier, [Fiona Blackwell, associate director of the firm] said that it “became something much bigger,” creating a more productive environment during working hours and improving the mood among staff, in addition to seeing a boost in profits.

“The reason we’re doing it now is that people are happier,” Blackwell said. “If your home life is great and you’re balancing home life and hobbies, you’re going to come into work happier and that’s a direct link there… that’s why we’re doing it now, more than the original reason.”

Since the “Great Resignation” across both the US and the UK with workers quitting their jobs in droves over the past year, jobs that offer better pay, safer working conditions, a better work-life balance, and more office-time flexibility have been increasingly popular.

Blackwell recognised this need to adapt or go down, and thankfully, it has worked in her company’s favour:

Girling Jones staff take off rotating days of the week, but on Mondays and Fridays, they’re all in the office. “In four days we’re being more thorough with our work,” she said.

She added that despite fewer clocked hours, employees at Girling Jones have actually been more productive overall in the past few months — and her theory is that it’s because there’s less time to waste.

“If you don’t complete something you need to complete, say on a Tuesday, what’s the point of stressing on Wednesday that you have to do it on Thursday?” she said. “So you finish it on Tuesday so you can enjoy your day off… This isn’t to say that any of us were lazy before, but you definitely get more out of people from the eight-hour day than you would have previously.”

The increase in productivity has also yielded decent profits – the company saw a 29% increase, after taxes, from last June.

But most importantly, I reckon, employees are able to actually enjoy their lives, getting more out of their free time.

It is time for an update on the old workweek, and with campaigns like 4 Day Week Global showing that it works, that time really ought to be now.

[source:businessinsider]