Around 30 UK Companies Take Part In The Six-Month Trial Of A Four-Day Working Week With The Same Salary

Around 30 UK businesses have decided to take part in the four-day working week trial for six months to increase the work and life balance with no reduction in pay for the employees; the latest to join this trial include a telecoms firm, a video games developer, and a training company. The trial is being run by academics at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, as well as Boston College in the US and thinktank Autonomy; this is being overseen by ‘4 Day Week Global’, which is a campaign group.

Yo Telecom’s 90 employees will move from a 40-hour working week to a four-day 32-hour working week, there will be no reduction in pay and the trial is six months long starting in June. The game developer Hutch with 120 employees and MBL Seminars with 70 employees will also be moving into the six-month trial from June.

Nathan Hanslip, chief executive of Southampton-based Yo Telecom, said he hoped an extra day off would result in healthier staff and better customer service. He said, “I feel the additional day’s rest our team will benefit from will push productivity, increase work satisfaction and improve general wellbeing above and beyond anything we have experienced in the past.”

Shaun Rutland, chief executive and co-founder of Hutch, said he hoped for improvements in productivity and worker health, as well as a boost to gender equality and “a more sustainable work environment”.

Morgan Rigby, the chairman of Manchester-based MBL Seminars, said, “Now that we are getting to the other side of the pandemic, the four-day week is back on our corporate agenda. It is exciting, a new dawn for a new era. Whilst it will be a challenge, it is one that we are looking forward to.”

Joe Ryle, the director of the 4 Day Week UK campaign, said the trial’s organisers were considering increasing the number of business participants from 30 to 50, given the strong response to the launch of the UK pilot study. The pilot study gained a lot of momentum in the recent weeks with more than 500 workers signing up and hundreds of other businesses signing up to information sessions, suggesting that they are considering testing this trial too. Many other businesses have implanted their own version of the four-day working week, including Atom Bank and the Landmark London, a five-star hotel.

If you are interested in seeing the results of this trial, then keep a look out for updates, especially from June onwards as that is when the trial begins; many other businesses may be joining this campaign sooner or later, so you may be affected by this as well.