Original Image Source: Yury Kim- Pexels
Currently, a 5-day workweek is the standard that companies adheres to when it comes on how many days an employee works in a week with some exceptions, depending on the person's nature of work and the industry that they belong. So the idea of reducing the days of work to only 4 days from the standard at first sounds to be a good idea as employees will have an extra day to take a break but if it was made in a way that employees will need to work extra hours to compensate for the missing day, it would just end negatively both for the employees and companies in the long run.
In order for a 4-day workweek system to work, the amount of hours that an employee works in a day needs to be divided into 4 so assuming a person works for 8 hours, that will be an additional 2 hours that will be added in a days work for a total of 10 hours of work per day. Seems like not much of a time added but what we need to consider was the additional fatigue that it will bring to the employee. People gets tired and an 8 hours of work is already exhausting for many people specially those who work on physical jobs such as factory and construction. As people gets more tired, the quality of their work deteriorates and chances are they will be more prone on making mistakes, mistakes that not only can endanger the well- being of the employee but also cost the company lose a substantial amount of revenue.
Another thing to take into consideration was the time that it takes for people to reach their work. Not everyone lives close to their work. I for example needs around 3 hours of time combined, going back and forth to work and that could take longer if I was caught on a traffic jam so by the time that I arrived home, it will be around 9:00 P.M. so I hardly have enough time to do anything else aside from preparing my stuff for the next days work. Now, imagine if it was an employee that has children to take care. Not only they need to attend to the needs of their children but also need to spend time with them as children needs attention. Add this things to what a person needs to prepare to work and they will be left with little amount of time to rest both their body and mind.
On the company side, having a 4-day workweek may also hurt specially for service and retail industry which runs 7 days a week. Not only they would need to deal with the dropping productivity of their employees, they would also need to add more people to fill for the day that becomes vacant due to the reduced day of work. And since, the newly hired employees also needs to work for 4 days, it will result on scheduling issue or there will be days where there are too much manpower.
In the end, I would still prefer the 5-day workweek standard where I have more breathing grounds to balance my time between work and my personal life rather than having another day of break on the expense of working for a longer time.
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