Do you and your coworkers feel like the weekend is always too short?
Thousands of workers in the United Kingdom are now testing out a four-day workweek as part of a new pilot program.
The trial includes more than 3,300 workers in 70 companies and organizations in sectors ranging from financial services to health care, retail and even a fish and chip shop.
It is being coordinated by the nonprofit groups 4 Day Week Global and 4 Day Week UK Campaign and the progressive think tank Autonomy, and the results of the trial will be analyzed by researchers from Cambridge University and Oxford University in the U.K. and Boston College in the United States, according tomultiple reports.
The workers “are receiving (100%) of the pay for (80%) of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain at least (100%) productivity,” according to the pilot program’s site. It will include workshops and other training for participants, in addition to “wellbeing and productivity assessment.”
“We’ll be analyzing how employees respond to having an extra day off, in terms of stress and burnout, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy use, travel and many other aspects of life,” Juliet Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College and the lead researcher on the project, said, The New York Times reported.
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Joe Ryle, the campaign director for the 4 Day Week Campaign, told the Times data on the program will be collected through interviews and surveys, in addition to measures the individual companies use to document productivity among staff.
The U.K. is not the first country where workers have tested out a four-day workweek. A study on workers in Iceland published by Autonomy last year found that "Worker wellbeing increased across a range of indicators, from perceived stress and burnout, to health and work-life balance." Productivity also either remained the same or improved for a majority of employers.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: UK: Four-day workweek trial begins after pushes in California, Iceland
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