A total of 100 companies in the UK have switched to a permanent four-day working week for all employees without any loss of pay, according to The Guardian report. It added that though these companies employ just 2,600 employees in total, the 4-Day Week Campaign group is hoping they will be the vanguard of a major shift.
Among the companies that have decided to roll out the 4-day work week are Atom Bank and global marketing company Awin. These two firms have 450 employees each. Other companies include eFileCabinet, Welocalize, Hivemind Technologies, GoLinks, Halftone Digital, Reboot, Hutch Games, and Talewind, among others.
According to The Guardian, Adam Ross, chief executive officer of Awin, said that adopting the four-day week was “one of the most transformative initiatives we’ve seen in the history of the company… Over the course of the last year and a half, we have not only seen a tremendous increase in employee wellness and well-being but concurrently, our customer service and relations, as well as talent relations and retention also have benefited.”
The UK campaign is also coordinating the world’s biggest pilot scheme for about 70 companies, which employ about 3,300 workers, to adopt the four-day week in a trial with researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, Boston college and thinktank Autonomy, according to the report.
In September, 88 per cent of those companies in a survey at the middle of the trial said the four-day week was working “well” for their business at that stage of the trial. About 95 per cent of the companies surveyed said productivity had either stayed the same or improved since the introduction, The Guardian said.
The report quoted Joe Ryle, director of the UK campaign, as saying that there was increasing momentum in the adoption of the four-day week, even as companies brace for a long recession. “We want to see a four-day week with no loss of pay become the normal way of working in this country by the end of the decade so we are aiming to sign up many more companies over the next few years… With many businesses struggling to afford 10 per cent inflation pay rises, we’re starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution.”
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