QUICK POLL: Which day of the week do you spend doing the least work? For me, it was always Friday. It’s a running joke that in Cape Town nobody gets anything done on a Friday after 12pm, but it’s not just Cape Town; trying to get hold of anyone at work after 3pm on a Friday has always been tricky. The fact is, none of us is 100% productive every single hour of every day. So why not trim the fat?
‘These ideas of working smarter have been around for ages, but the pandemic has pushed us to the point where we’ve decided to start challenging the way we work and see if there’s a better way to do it,’ says Professor Charlene Lew, associate professor and director of internationalisation at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria.
With burnout on the rise and productivity losses costing companies money, there’s an argument to be made for allowing employees more time off. Case in point: countries around the world are experimenting with a four-day working week, with the view that it not only boosts employee wellbeing but also improves productivity and staff engagement. Spain is set to become the first country to officially trial a four-day working week, starting in September, and the Japanese government has proposed the same (this from a country that has a word for ‘worked to death’: karoshi). New Zealand, the UK and Germany are considering it too.
The four-day working week
This story is from the September/October 2021 edition of Fairlady.
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This story is from the September/October 2021 edition of Fairlady.
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