Ways to Offer a 4-day Work Week to Your Employees
It’s becoming a trend around the world to offer employees more time at home by reducing the hours spent at work. Several companies realized that it’s not necessarily the number of hours at work that matters, but the quality of the results. Some employees spend several hours at work, or even work over time, but they end up with poor outputs. Others become stressed out because they have to arrive at work on time, but they have a lot of things to think about. They come up with all sorts of excuses since they couldn’t keep up with the rules.
The confusing part is that even those who were unable to follow the rules related to promptness at work still manage to finish their work on time and have excellent results.
It means that as a manager, you need to rethink how you deal with the work hours for your employees. You might want to be more flexible. Offering a 4-day work week is a good idea.
The benefits
When you provide more time for employees to stay home and be with their family, they become less stressed out. They also have more time to deal with chores. When it’s time for them to get back to work, their entire attention is only for work related tasks. They don’t have any other worries since they had enough time to deal with problems over the 3-day break.
Another benefit is that the employees could take care of their mental health. It’s possible for them to go through a lot, but because of work, they ignore all their problems and keep pushing through. You don’t want to lose your precious employees because you make them devote their entire time for work.
A few tips
If you want to offer a 4-day work week, you need to inform your employees about it. Most of them would agree to it, but it comes with a responsibility. Tell them that you’re giving more time to rest, but they should still finish their tasks on time. You can start with a transition phase, and returning to your old schedule is possible if the employees failed to remain productive with the new work scheme.
Since you lost an entire day of work, you can add an extra hour at the end of each work day to make up for that time. You can also offer a working lunch break for those who don’t want to go out and eat.
For those who don’t want a 4-day work week, you can offer the choice of working late in the morning or to take off early in the afternoon if they wish to continue working for five days. Some people don’t need that extra day off, but they need more time to sleep or avoid traffic in the morning. They also want to attend to the needs of their kids at school before going to work.
With these tips, you can create a flexible and stress-free work environment for your employees without sacrificing the quality of their outputs.
Photo Attribution:
Featured and 1st image from https://unsplash.com/photos/_UeY8aTI6d0
2nd image from https://www.indiatimes.com/health/healthyliving/is-a-four-day-workweek-the-answer-to-higher-productivity-and-better-well-being-350273.html
