there The 4-day working week in Portugal begins a pilot project in June 2023 In private companies that have volunteered to participate, for a period of six months and without public financial assistance, later extending to the public sector, if it achieves “satisfactory progress”. We'll find out everything you need to know about the 4-day work week in Portugal.
4 day work week in Portugal in 2023
According to the design of the 4-day week pilot project to be presented by the government, only in the “second phase” and “in the event of satisfactory progress of the pilot project”, Experience 4 days a week ” It can be extended to the public sector ». In fact, according to the Executive, “the pilot targeting this sector will require the adaptation of impact assessment tools and will be subject to various legal and budgetary constraints.”
Gradually, in a third stage, the intention is that Create conditions for testing a more ambitious model “Which involves a quasi-experimental design, in which one group of companies adopts the change and another group acts as a monitor,” a government document says.
How the 4-day trial program will work in Portugal
Initially it was limited to private sector companiesThe trial trial will last 4 days a week for 6 months and will be ” Voluntary and reversible The participating companies will not receive any financial compensation from the state, which will only provide “technical services and administrative support to support the transitional phase.”
According to the executive authority,expertise ” It cannot involve a reduction in salary and must involve a reduction in weekly working hours “.
The state does not provide any financial compensation No specific number of weekly hours will be specified – “It can be 32 hours, 34 hours, 36 hours, and it is determined by agreement between management and employees” – but the experiment must “include the vast majority of the company’s employees,” with the exception of large companies, where it can only be tested in a few Of institutions or services.
The pilot project timeline expects that in the coming months, Until January 2023, there will be periods for companies to express their interest Explanation sessions will be held to “explain how the study will be conducted,” with a date set to select participants in February next year.
Between March and May, preparations will be made for the four-day trial run It will then begin in June and continue until November. During December 2023, there will be a “reflection period,” during which “management will reflect on the experience and decide whether to maintain the new organization, return to the five-day workweek, or adopt a hybrid model.”
The government also stipulates that if the membership of the pilot project is less than 40 companies, it will be implemented with all of them. If there is a larger membership, companies could be divided into two groups – one for treatment and one for control – which would allow “A A more robust evaluation of the effects of the four-day week “.
Although acknowledging that the fact that this experiment is based on companies' self-selection “may bias the results,” the executive believes that… The results of the pilot project will be significant.
How will the impact of the four-day week on workers and businesses be assessed?
According to the government, The evaluation of the pilot project will focus on the effects of the 4-day workweek on employees and businesses On the employee side, “employee time use during rest days will also be measured, to understand where and how non-work time is used”:
- effects on well-being,
- quality of life,
- Mental health,
- physical health,
- Level of commitment to the company,
- Job Satisfaction.
side a company“The overall focus will be on productivity, competitiveness, average costs and profits,” with the following impacts assessed:
- Short- and long-term absenteeism rate, employability,
- Organizing internal operations,
- Financial and non-financial performance indicators (such as customer/user complaints),
- Repeated work accidents,
- Consumption of intermediate goods, both raw materials and energy costs.
to'Evaluation will be done through surveys (before, during and after the trial), which “will be designed to be comparable to other international trials, but adapted to Portuguese reality”, with the aim of “encouraging the verification of the data generated in these surveys with databases of official data”.
The trial will be for a 4-day week Curated by Pedro Gomez, author of the book ” Friday is the new Saturday He also relied on the advice of Rita Fontina, Associate Professor of Strategic Human Resource Management at Henley Business School, University of Reading, on the external team assisting the CEO.
