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According to the results of the pilot program in six countries, reducing weekly work within four days can improve people’s health and reduce the risk of genealogy depletion.
The growing number of countries, including Poland, Iceland, Germany and Portugal, experimenting with a reduction in weekly work as a possible answer to an increase in depression, anxiety and professional exhaustion among workers. Meanwhile, in Belgium, workers have the right to request a four -day working week.
A new study published in the journal Nature Human Human is added to the growing volume of research showing that shorter working weeks can benefit both employees and employers.
About 2900 employees of 141 organizations participated in the test, who reduced their weeks, without reducing their income in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Great Britain and the United States.
Prior to the start of the study, the company passed two months of training and changes in their works to increase their effectiveness and cooperation. Then they applied a four -day working week – or by 20%, a reduction in working hours – for another six months.
Six months later, workers with a reduction in working weeks reported less exhaustion and improvement of mental and physical health, as well as more satisfaction with their work.
At the same time, there were no changes for employees in 12 American companies that did not reduce their working weeks, which served as a comparative team.
“It seems that the impact on prosperity is quite homogeneous in all companies, in all countries, for all employees,” said Euronews Health, one of the authors of the study and associate professor of sociology in Boston College.
The more people reduced their working time, the better they felt to their work and professional exhaustion, and, to some extent, their mental health showed the study.
But even workers who reduced their working time by just a few hours reported the best health and satisfaction with their work than the comparison team.
Most of the companies still worked with shorter weeks of work a year after the launch of the program, and the results, according to the visible, did not disappear over time, since people adapted to their new watches.
“There are no signs of the change of employees or results,” said Barcel, a sociologist from the University of Cambridge, analyzed four -day work programs in the United Kingdom, but did not participate in the latest study.
‘Play a change’
The advantages of a shorter working week are largely generalized in three factors: perceived labor capacity of workers, fewer problems with sleep and less fatigue, emphasizing how important the dream of people is.
“The connection between good sleep and all kinds of health and good indicators is really quite strong,” said Euronews Health, Barcel, which is also a partner in the college of Magdalene.
It is worth noting that employees in the latest study worked an average of 40 hours a week before the test, which means that a decrease by 20% will bring them 32 hours. This is already an average weekly work for people in the Netherlands, while the average indicator throughout the European Union is 36 hours.
Nevertheless, the results can be instructive for countries and organizations that want to free their employees. For example, Spain is currently engaged in plans to reduce its weekly work to 37.5 hours from 40 hours.
The pilot program had some restrictions, for example, the fact that employees reported their prosperity in the investigation – and perhaps mentioned too much how well they coped ”in the hope of maintaining the dough,” the researchers admitted.
The companies had to choose participation in the studies themselves, which means that the study of organizations that already maintain flexibility and well can be based on employees, which can distort the results and make their shortest working weeks.
“If you think about the dominant organizational culture, which encourages most of the hours of work and office work … Reducing working hours, as a rule, is not compatible with this ideology”Van said.
The pilot application was also concentrated on countries with a high level of English, so it is unclear how a four -day working week can be transferred to other countries or working culture.
Despite this, Barcelle said that the study is a blockbuster, which still offers the most reliable data on how four days of the working week work in different types of organizations and countries.
“These four -day studies began to take off from the pandemic era, where people had a much greater imagination of how everything could differ “He said. And added: “This is an absolutely important study that … will change the data.”