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“Gift of the Gods” – how Iceland views the four-day work week

“Incredible success” – this is how Iceland defines its experiment with a four-day working week.

The idea of ​​such a thing is not new and has already been tried in Australia, Spain, France, Britain and even some states in the United States, but so far the conclusions are rather contradictory.

Not in Iceland, where the idea of ​​four working days and three weekends is brilliant.

Representatives of the Icelandic unions told the BBC that more and more businesses in the country are considering reducing the working hours of their employees, while their salaries remain unchanged.

They also specify that the experiment with the four-day working week was conducted before the pandemic – in the period from 2015 to 2019.

The initiator is the Reykjavik City Council, and the experiment involves 2,500 employees, which is about one percent of the small northern state’s total workforce. Participants include a variety of businesses as well as social service providers, schools and even hospitals.

They all go from a 40-hour work week to a schedule of 32 to a maximum of 36 hours of work in seven days. The rest of the time, workers are free to do whatever they want with their free time, while, as we have already said, they receive the same amount of money as for a full working week.

Currently, 86 percent of Icelanders say they have either switched to a shorter work week or are planning to do so soon.

Surprisingly or not so much, but the pandemic and work from home have further accelerated this process.

Will Stronge, head of the entire study, told ABC that this was actually the largest four-day work week experiment ever conducted. He is adamant that the business is ripe for this change and it is time for it to happen.

Strong admits that he started the experiment with great concern that a shortened work week could lead to overload. The results dispel all his fears, and the project manager currently sees fewer working days as a “gift from the gods,” as he describes it.

According to him, fewer working hours have led to direct results in employee productivity. They have become more inventive, they have invented completely new work strategies and approaches to their tasks and the overall performance has reached completely new levels.




However, in his conversation with ABC Strong points out that everything lies in good organization.

Reducing working hours actually makes people more organized and executive, but also more willing to try new tactics in their work. For example, employees are beginning to replace long and sometimes boring online appointments with emails and instant messages through programs like Slack to save time.

However, the experiments also lead to an improvement in the overall well-being of workers. Feelings of stress and anxiety decrease, and the balance between career and personal life becomes much easier.

The Reykjavik City Council also agrees with the conclusions of the experiment. In their opinion, the shorter working week is seen as an opportunity for more control over the work process and as providing more freedom in time outside of work tasks. “Less is more”, the authorities in the Icelandic capital are categorical.

That is why more and more companies are switching to part-time work. In Iceland, this change is starting with smaller companies, which are timidly experimenting with a four-day work week, but now a number of large companies are choosing to take a positive example.

Among the names that are ready to try the four-day scheme are brands such as Microsoft.

The software giant has already tried a four-day work week in Japan and marked it as a success. He now plans to do the same in other branches around the world.

Strond is also convinced that the time has come for the next great revolution in the field of work, just as it happened in the transition from a six-day to a five-day work week.

Many people rely on this, but in fact it turns out that this idea also hides its pitfalls.



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