The pandemic is inspiring some companies to test 4-day workweeks — but will it hurt productivity?

An office is no longer synonymous with conference rooms and cubicles. For many, it’s become synonymous with being at home with pets, family members or roommates during the pandemic, which helped make working from home the new norm for some workers.

Unilever UL, +0.51% is currently six months into a 12-month long experiment in New Zealand that was offered to all 81 employees based in the country. The experiment, which was conducted in two separate waves between 2015 to 2019, studied the effects of cutting back working hours from 40 hours a week to 35 or 36 hours a week, without pay cuts.

“ ‘Many workers expressed that after starting to work fewer hours they felt better, more energized, and less stressed, resulting in them having more energy for other activities, such as exercise, friends and hobbies’ ” “For example, the 5-4/9 arrangement lets staffers alternate between weeks of five nine-hour days and ones with four nine-hour days, so you get a day off every other week,” he added.

For his part, Unilever’s Bangs said the jury is still out on the results at his company. “If we end up in a situation where the team is working four extended days, then we miss the point of this,” Bangs told Reuters last year before the experiment began.

Imagine sky high productivity + extremely satisfied employees on a 2 day work week.

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