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Business Review - A New Week

  Can companies profit more from a four-day work week?  Editor of Inc. magazine Jeff Haden shares research that benefits both employees and organizations.
 

 
The pandemic forced many companies to explore new ways of managing their employees. Editor of Inc Magazine, Jeff Haden, shares what some organizations learned about productivity by experimenting with how employees work.
 
“A lot of leaders through no choice of their own were forced to shift more to managing by objectives instead of managing by presence.”
 
Depending on the nature of the work, research suggests that fewer workdays can actually be more profitable for some companies. Perpetual Guardian decided to test a four-day work week to evaluate if it would meet the company's needs in terms of productivity and employee work, life balance.
 
“Perpetual Guardian is a New Zealand based company. They decided to actually run an experiment. So, they trialed it and found that even though people were working one day less, their productivity went up by about 20% and the employees reported about a 50% improvement in what they perceived as their own work, life balance. Every organization is only as good as the results that it produces, not the amount of time that people work. How many hours I spend on something doesn't really matter? What you really care about is what are the results of the time that I did spend. And so, if it took me two hours to do something that delights you, do you care that it didn't take 10? The idea that you can be rewarded through maybe a little bit more personal time for the fact that your efficient and productive and all the other things that we want our employees to be, that's a win for both sides as well.
 
“Business Review” is a production of Livingston and McKay and the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University.