New Zealand Firm's Four-Day Week an 'Unmitigated Success' (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The New Zealand company behind a landmark trial of a four-day working week has concluded it an unmitigated success, with 78% of employees feeling they were able to successfully manage their work-life balance, an increase of 24 percentage points. Two-hundred-and-forty staff at Perpetual Guardian, a company which manages trusts, wills and estate planning, trialled a four-day working week over March and April, working four, eight-hour days but getting paid for five. Jarrod Haar, professor of human resource management at Auckland University of Technology, found job and life satisfaction increased on all levels across the home and work front, with employees performing better in their jobs and enjoying them more than before the experiment. Work-life balance, which reflected how well respondents felt they could successfully manage their work and non-work roles, increased by 24%. In November last year just over half (54%) of staff felt they could effectively balance their work and home commitments, while after the trial this number jumped to 78%. Staff stress levels decreased by 7 percentage points across the board as a result of the trial, while stimulation, commitment and a sense of empowerment at work all improved significantly, with overall life satisfaction increasing by 5 percentage points.

Comments

Re:Already known

[Mr D from 63]

I've worked 4 x 10 hour schedules in the past. It is quite nice to have one weekday to do all your shopping and errands when everyone else is at work, leaving weekends wide open. Three day weekends give you a lot more options. Unfortunately, if your business requires you to support customers on that other day, it can cause challenges. Split shifts can bring inefficiencies.

Focus

[Bongo]

Wonder if modern workplace, with so much interfacing with others by email and meetings, requires so much focus and switching, that your brain seriously needs the break.

Re:Missed Most Important Metrics

[jythie]

Keep in mind that the workload, the expectations, the things that needed to get done, those did not change. This is a pretty major point since being overworked or not getting tasks completed is a major contributor to stress.

Performance improved

[Immerman]

You missed the part where they said employee performance also improved - which is what the company paying them undoubtedly cares about. If you can pay your employees the same amount, they do more/better work, morale improves, AND they get an extra day off every week to focus on their own life, then everybody wins.

Maybe you could maintain/improve performance further with a three-day week, but I suspect the combination of the larger increase in per-hour productivity required, in combination with the smaller incremental reduction in stress, would make that difficult. Though it might well be worth investigating, in smaller increments to try to find the optimal "sweet spot". Perhaps 3 10-hour days, or 4 7-hour days or something would yield even greater productivity.