Companies around the world are embracing what might seem like a radical idea: a four-day workweek. The concept is gaining ground in places as varied as New Zealand and Russia, and it’s making inroads among some American companies. Employers are seeing surprising benefits, including higher sales and profits.
"Core to this is that people are not productive for every hour, every minute of the day that they’re in the office," Barnes says, which means there was lots of distraction and wasted time that could be cut.
Simply slashing the number and duration of meetings saved huge amounts of time. Also, he did away with open-floor office plans and saw workers spending far less time on social media. All this, he says, made it easier to focus more deeply on the work.
The company didn’t police how workers spent their time. But if performance slipped, the firm could revert back to the full-week schedule. Barnes says that alone motivated workers.
Yep it may not work for all forms of jobs such as restaurants, call centres, etc as employing extra staff for extra shifts could raise costs? Fact is the "modern" office accounts for hours present but that tends to become the metric (no matter what the balanced scorecard says). When we think 4IR I realise that it is not just education that needs a complete overhaul…
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