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A few weeks ago, the head of a small technological company of 29 years in Wales continued LinkedIn to say that he was going to try a new way of working.
“We are abandoning the four -day work week,” saying Aced Nelmes, whose staff had just spent two years working approximately 32 hours a week from Monday to Thursday, without cutting the payment of its previous five -day week.
This had increased staff production and retention, he said. So I was going one step further with a three -month test of a completely flexible 32 -hour week. Employees could work at any time at any day from Monday to Sunday, anywhere I wanted.
The idea was to make Lumen Seo, the Cardiff’s search engine optimization company, founded in 2020, as attractive as possible for parents, new carpineers and their seven existing employees.
The answer to its publication is fair to say, it was great.
Almost 1,000 people commented on an idea that many said sounded “epic”, “brilliant” and “impressive.” Several asked if Nelmes was hiring. (He plans). And some asked the question that came to mind: how can something work? How do people know who is working when? Does the staff feel forced to be contacted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? How does the company that respond to the needs of its customers maintain?
Nelmes admits that effort requires discipline. Use a software platform to delegate tasks to staff every Monday, depending on how many hours each job is expected to take. A messaging tool allows everyone to know if people are available or not. A lot of preparation is performed for meetings, to avoid wasting time.
Everyone has to work at the same time for at least two or three hours a week, but Nelmes thinks that, in general, the corporate labor world is too industrialized for a digital era. Therefore, it is worth letting people form their working hours as much as possible.
“I would say that, because personnel members have more time out of work focused, regimented and structured, tend to enter the office with more ideas,” he says.
Until now, Lumen seems to be an atypical case.
The 4 -day United Kingdom Foundation has been encouraging a week of 32 hours and four days for years, but its campaign director, Joe Ryle, says that most companies that adopt the idea work four days of the week.
A minority of organizations has tried 32 hours for five days of the week, he said. But I didn’t know of any full 32 -hour lumen fat version for seven days.
I can see why some could try, if they are in a white necklace sector and have a business like Lumen, whose staff does a lot of work individually, in tasks such as writing material for company websites.
They would also need a boss like Nelmes, who likes to travel and winters in the Canary Islands for weeks. (“You know many interesting people and it is healthier”). And I’m sure it would help if a business were small.
Even so, the Lumen trial is adjusted to the change fed by pandemic to a more flexible work, which has persisted on a longer scale for longer than expected, Including me.
The four -day conventional week has proven more tenacious than the critics had predicted, although perhaps Not so successful As some activists expected.
The de facto work site says that the proportion of publications mentioned by a four -day week has increased significantly since 2020 in the United States, Germany, France, Canada and the United Kingdom. But it is still below 1 percent, even in the United Kingdom, which has most of the five nations.
In 2022, Belgium gave workers the right to request a four -day week, but only condensing the existing hours, without cutting them. Other regions have tried the idea, like many companies.
Of the 61 organizations that participated in a great six -month trial in the United Kingdom in 2022, 56 He decided to continue with the model, says the foundation of 4 Day Week, which has now accredited more than 230 four -day organizations. Most have 10 to 50 employees. The largest is atom, the bank -based bank, which has about 470 employees. Many are in sectors such as technology and marketing. But, without a doubt, a number are directed by bosses as Nelmes who are convinced that this is the path of the future and that they are crucial. His ideas can stay for much longer than you think.