Here comes the first test of the four-day week in Portugal
The pilot project of the week of public days in June 023 in private private companies, lasting 2 months, later extends to the public financial sector, later extending to the financial sector, carrying out an initiative without “evolution if an initiative of work”.
How will it work?
Initially limited to private sector private companies, the four-day week’s pilot experience will last six months and will be “voluntary and reversible”.
According to the executive, an experience “it cannot compromise the salary cut and must imply a reduction in the hours of the week”.
Since the State cannot be hired for an agreed time, it will not be a number of hours according to 32 hours, 34 hours, 36 hours, management and experience cannot by agreement between the stipulated week the hired employees” – but the stipulation has to “involve the vast majority of workers” in the company“except for large companies, where it can be tested in only a few establishments or departments.”
When does it start?
The pilot project schedule foresees that in the coming months, until January 2023, periods of expression of interest by the clarification sessions will take place to “explain how the study will proceed”, is a selection of participants scheduled for February next year.
Between March and May, the pilot experience will be prepared, which will then start in June and will last until November. During the month of December 2023, “a period of reflection” will take place, during which “the company will reflect on an experience and determine whether they will maintain a new organization, the five-day management week, or adopt a hybrid model”.
The Government also establishes that, if less than 40 companies join the pilot project, it will be carried out with all of them. If adherence to control companies can be a more robust assessment of treatment in two – which will allow “the four-day effects groups”.
When in public service?
According to the design of the pilot project to be presented by the Government at the Wednesday meeting of the Permanent Commission for Social Dialogue — only in a “second phase”, and “through modern pilot evolution”the four-day week “must be public sector inclusion”.
This, according to the executive, is a pilot experience that requires the adaptation of instruments to impacts and which may differ from the assessment of defined legal and budgetary constraints.
“Progress and in a third moment there is the intention to create as conditions, to test a closer-to-control model, a study that an ex-project group will adopt of elementary control, in a project that a group of companies adopt to adopt a document- if the document do Government.
While admitting that the fact that this experience from a self-selection of companies “can send the results”, the executive believed that the results of the pilot project.
What will be evaluated in this test?
On the workers side, they will be average “the effects on well-being, quality of life, mental health and physical health, as well as your level of commitment to the company, job satisfaction and intention to remain with the organization”also being studied “the use of time of rest workers, to understand where and how the non-worked time is used”.
On the business side, “the generic focus will be on productivity, competitiveness, intermediate costs and profits”evaluating “the effects on long-term and customer absence rates, on the ability to recruit, on the capacity of internal processes, on financial and non-financial performance indicators (for example, organization/user complaints), on the incidence of Problems Work accidents and non-consumption of intermediate goods, work accidents and energy consumption.
The evaluation will be done through surveys. (before and after the experience), “to promote the crossing of the data generated in these surveys with the official databases”.