According to the results of a British study that took place over the course of a year and a half which involved 61 companies and 2,900 workers from a variety of industries - including catering - the four-day week would benefit everyone by decreasing stress and boosting productivity.
The study
The four-day work week is being debated across Europe and may soon become an option to save the restaurant industry from labor shortages. A hefty study carried out in Great Britain further supports this theory; its results are bound to trigger debate.
It is signed by a team of researchers from Boston and Cambridge universities, together with the independent research institute Autonomy. In June 2022, 61 British companies from different sectors (manufacturing, hôtellerie, finance, education, nonprofit, culture) pledged to significantly reduce the working hours of 2900 employees, with unchanged wages. Most of the entrepreneurs say they have seen no decline in their planned productivity targets, according to recently published results.
At the end of the one-and-a-half-year trial, interviews with workers attested to a significant drop in stress: 39 said it had improved, while 71% mentioned a decreased risk of burnout. Even sick leave and resignations plummeted, by 65% and 57% respectively. So much so that for 15 percent of respondents, no salary increase would be worth the return to a five-day workweek. On the entrepreneurs' side, there were no losses. In fact, profits increased by an average of 1.4%, 35% more than in previous years. This is because workers were able to avoid wasting time and fruitless meetings and were able to focus on their tasks.
The models implemented in the study were different, depending on the business sector and organizational peculiarities, from the classic Free Friday to conditional and variously modulated "decentralized," "annualized" formulas. Indeed, there is no universal solution that applies for all. It remains to be seen whether the restaurant industry can realistically cover costs this way. "But if we ask entrepreneurs, many of them are convinced that the four-day week will happen," adds sociologist Brendal Burchell, co-author of the study.
In fact, in many Austrian and German factories this is already a reality: employees can choose to work only four days, but often this is a variation of a part-time time position or a different way of spreading out the usual forty-hour week. Something very different from the so-called "100 80 100 model," which involves reduced hours for the same salary.
Source: Rolling Pin
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