Four-day work week for same salary in New Zealand

The New Zealand-based company Perpetual Guardian has carried out an experiment allowing its employees to work four days a week for the same salary for a couple of months for the purpose of a survey. The management primarily looked to implement the measure in order to make it easier for its employees to establish a home-work life balance.

University experts in the field of HR management were involved in the experiment, aiming to define how one such measure affects the productivity. The final results says that employee productivity rose by 5% at the very beginning, while the level of workplace stress dropped by 7% in the same period.

Perpetual Guardian founder Andrew Barnes came up with the idea in an attempt to enable his employees to spend more time with their children, because he believed that this would increase their workplace productivity.

– If you can have parents spending more time with their children, how is that a bad thing? Are you likely to get fewer mental health issues when you have more time to take care of yourself and your personal interests? – asked Barnes, emphasizing that he hoped that other employers would enable the same to their employees, inspired by the results of the experiment.

The percentage of employees feeling they were able to successfully manage their work-life balance rose to 78%.

Jarrod Haar, Professor of Human Resources Management at Auckland University of Technology agreed with the conclusions of the research, emphasizing that home-work like balance has an extremely positive effect on all sectors of productivity at the workplace.

He added that well rested and carefree workers are much more efficient, which, in the end, benefits the employers the most.

New Zealand’s workplace relations minister, Iain Lees-Galloway, said the results of the trial were “very interesting” and added he would encourage businesses to trial new and improved work models.

– I’m really keen to work with any businesses that are looking at how they can be more flexible for their staff and how they can look to improve productivity whilst working alongside their staff and protecting terms and conditions – Less-Galloway said.

Perpetual Guardian

four day work week

Andrew Barnes

Jaarod Haar

Auckland University of Technology

Iain Lees Galloway

work week in New Zealand