More companies experiment with a 4-day work week

Ever since the pandemic set the stress levels off for most employees in 2020, many companies have experimented with a four-day workweek- a work schedule that has been proposed for decades but has never quite caught on. Cap Watkins, chief experience officer of Primary, an online children’s clothes retailer said that they gave the employees a day off on Friday since March 2020 and by December the new schedule was working so well that Primary decided to extend it indefinitely. Watkins says that the one big advantage is that “people feel recharged on Monday.” In addition to this, the company's voluntary attrition rate has fallen slightly to 7 percent this year, even as workers in the United States are quitting jobs at record levels.

The four-day workweek is driven by flexible work arrangements and concern for burnout and empowerment of employees in a tight labor market. Kickstarter, Shake Shack and Unilever’s New Zealand unit are other workplaces that have adopted the four-day workweek or announced plans to begin. An experiment in Iceland also showed that the schedule improves worker well-being and does not reduce overall output. Four-day workweeks have been discussed many times over the years. Richard Nixon, then vice president in 1956 predicted a four-day workweek in the “not too distant future.” So did President Jimmy Carter in 1977 when he said a four-day workweek would conserve energy amid the oil crisis, and considered urging companies to adopt it. 

Source: The New York Times