A co-founder of a personal training course who implemented a four-day work week said the compressed hours actually hindered productivity.. He trialled a four-day week with some departments and found that employees switching from an eight-hour working day to 11 was on the whole “initially, but then average times to complete projects and to get back to customers dropped. Marking assignments took longer. And our sales were down.
However, the official four-day week campaign is not about condensed hours, and is calling for the same pay for fewer hours. According to ONS figures, 2.58 million people are off work due to long-term illness, a figure that has risen by 449,000 since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in January 2020,He said when the four-day week involving condensed hours inevitably came up, “it was largely a negative reaction” from SME owners.
Mr Fitzgerald urged the Government to consider the needs of SMEs. “Many owners of SMEs are working six days a week. To tell them to have their employees working shorter days across fewer days may not be practical. They’re already dealing with enough economic pressures from: “My team already had flexible hours – they can start at times that suit them and most take a compressed lunch break to finish at 4.30pm.