This is the British daily The Guardian who announces it: Great Britain will launch the largest life-size experiment of transition to the four-day week ever attempted. Sixty companies with more than 3,000 employees will work one day less per week and receive the same salary between the months of June and December. The thing will be closely monitored to measure the consequences: no less than three universities – Oxford, Cambridge and Boston College, in the United States – will monitor the grain and measure productivity gains, well-being, absenteeism and all the consequences. of this change.
There is both the Royal Society of Biology in London and a fish and chip shop in Norfolk as well as a brewery, also in London. For some companies, such as the Royal Society of Biology, the decision to take part in the experimentation aims to respond to recruitment problems, which its boss calls “incredibly competitive”. “It is for us, he saidto be a good employer, innovative, in order to attract and retain our employees”. For one of the initiators of the experiment, it all started with the health crisis, which definitively called into question the pattern of the five-day working week, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. “We now favor the quality of work, and no longer the quantity of hours”he said.
Britain is not alone in embarking on such a path. Since last autumn, in the region of Valencia, Spain has been financing the experimentation of the “short week” in 200 companies, with the idea of extending it to the whole country. Iceland had also tried the experiment, in a program which involved more than 2,500 civil servants.
In France, there is interest in the subject: 61% of employees and 54% of HRDs would be ready to switch to the four-day week, according to a survey conducted by the Observatory of work rhythms. In companies that have adopted it, there has been a marked drop in absenteeism and an increase in productivity. But above all, a much greater ease of hiring. Which could well be a decisive argument to test the four days.