The consumer goods company is all set for a four-day working week trial with its employees in New Zealand.
The Unilever New Zealand managing director said – In order to assess the whole outcome company is going to try out four-day working week for an year, by not increasing the working hours but changing the way of work to be done. The employees would be paid for five days while they will be working for four days only. Director stated that they certainly want to bring a material change and don’t want to have their team work for really long days. If the assessment over outcome goes well, they might apply it to their 155,000 employees working globally.
All the staff Of Unilever New Zealand is right now in sales, distribution and marketing, there’s no manufacturing there.
With estate planning firm Perpetual Guardian the topic of short working week has been widely debated in New Zealand in 2019, but a vast productivity increase has been seen. Perpetual Guardian’s founder, Andrew Barnes said that it really had been a great success. As for them, their company gained a improved productivity through such effective decision of four-day week.
But as said many a times, good things takes times. The idea of short working week started gaining the momentum when Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern encouraged more firms to look after the idea of four days working week in order to offer flexibility to the employees in such pandemic. She also stated that as international borders remain shut, it may help to increase the domestic tourism. Though the New Zealand government has yet not adopted this widely growing idea by itself.