there 4-day work week in Portugal to start pilot project in June 2023 In private companies that volunteer to participate, for six months and without public financial assistance, and later extending to the public sector, if they make “satisfactory progress”. We will find out everything you need to know about the 4-day working week in Portugal.
4 day work week in portugal in 2023
According to the design of the 4-day week pilot project which will be presented by the government, only in the “second phase”, and “in case of satisfactory progress of the pilot project”, 4 days a week experience ” It can extend to the public sector.In fact, according to the executive, “the pilot targeting this sector requires the adaptation of impact assessment tools and will be subject to different legal and budgetary constraints.”
Gradually, and in a third stage, the intention is that Creating the conditions for testing a more ambitious model “Which involves a quasi-experimental design, where one group of companies adopts the change and another group acts as a control,” a government document says.
How will the 4-day pilot program work in Portugal?
Initially, it was limited to private sector companies.The trial will run for 4 days a week for 6 months and will be ” voluntary and reversible 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. There will be no set number of weekly hours. – “It can be 32 hours, 34 hours, 36 hours, and is determined by agreement between management and employees” – but the experiment must “include the vast majority of employees” of the company, “with the exception of large companies, where it can only be tested in a few institutions or services.
The pilot project timeline anticipates that in the coming months, Until January 2023, there will be periods for companies to express their interest. And explanatory sessions “to explain how the study will be conducted”, with a date set for selecting participants in February of next year.
Between March and May, preparations will be made for the four-day pilot experiment. It will then start in June and run through November.During December 2023, there will be a “reflection period,” during which “management will reflect on the experience and determine whether to maintain the new organization, return to a five-day workweek, or adopt a hybrid model.”
The government also states that if the pilot project has fewer than 40 companies, it will be implemented with all of them. If there is a larger number of companies, the companies can be divided into two groups – one for treatment and one for control – which will allow for “a A more robust assessment of the effects of the four-day week “
While acknowledging that the fact that this experiment is based on self-selection of companies “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 pilot project evaluation will focus on the impacts of the 4-day work week 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 job“The overall focus will be on productivity, competitiveness, average costs and profits,” with the following impacts assessed:
- Short-term and long-term absenteeism rate, employability,
- Organizing internal operations,
- Financial and non-financial performance indicators (such as customer/user complaints),
- Recurring work accidents,
- Consumption of intermediate goods, whether raw materials or energy costs.
to’Evaluation will be done through surveys. (before, during and after the experiment), which “will be designed to be comparable to other international experiments, but adapted to the Portuguese reality”, with the aim of “encouraging the validation of the data generated in these surveys with databases of official data”.
The trial period will be 4 days. Coordinated by Pedro Gomez, author of the book ” Friday is the new Saturday “Also, relying on the advice of Rita Fontina, Associate Professor of Strategic Human Resource Management at Henley Business School, University of Reading, on the external team that assists the CEO.