Unilever will introduce new project management software to cut down on unnecessary tasks and support faster decision-making.
This is not based on hope, but on analysis of how 81 white-collar workers in Auckland carry out their day-to-day tasks using the practical lessons from a local advisory firm Perpetual Guardian, itself a four-day week business run by Andrew Barnes, a former boss of £5.7bn turnover investment broker Bestinvest. Like Awin, Unilever will trust staff to work more effectively during a 12-month pilot project. It urged the government to investigate ways of rolling out a four-day week, starting with the public sector.Ī few weeks after the Unilever announcement Awin, an online marketing firm, said its 1,000 employees – including more than 300 based in the UK – would move to a four-day week after trialling several forms of flexible working. It said a majority of 50,000 firms studied would be able to cope with the change through higher productivity or by raising prices.
With productivity increases close to zero since the 2008 financial crash and the pandemic forcing companies like Target to rethink how they deploy their resources, there is a growing expectation that a broader shift to shorter working hours will happen in 2021.Ī recent report by the thinktank Autonomy argued that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, could prevent a steep rise in unemployment if he supported companies moving to a four-day week. He said that during much of the 20th-century companies were forced, either by trade union action, government policy or labour shortages to give workers a large slice of the gains in productivity – the output of each worker per hour – but this ran out of steam in the 1980s. Harper is the co-author of a new book, The Case for a Four-Day Week, that sets out the practical arguments for a reduction in the hours spent at work with no loss of pay. “Its time has come,” says the economist Aidan Harper, who has championed the four-day week with colleagues at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) thinktank and a growing number of political organisations across Europe. When Unilever said in November it would move staff in its New Zealand office to a four-day week on the same pay, the maker of Dove soap and Magnum ice-cream which employs more than 150,000 people worldwide, gave the kind of high-profile endorsement for flexible working that campaigners have been waiting for. “And from a mental health point of view, we see huge benefits and because everyone wants it to work, you get an upside in higher profits.” “Of course there were teething problems, but we found meetings were much shorter and we looked at the way staff worked and what they did much more closely to achieve significant efficiencies.
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