Study says working four days a week without pay cuts reduces burnout

ABC NEWS (Australia)

New research has found a four-day work week improves the physical and mental health of employees and reduces burnout as long as there's no change in income. Some experts say the federal government's productivity round table in august could help reframe work from being focused on hours to outcomes.

Transcript

00:00it was quite a significant study of over 3 000 employees across over 140 organizations in six

00:07countries and so what they did is take a control group of organizations and then this group of 140

00:13companies and they made an intervention beforehand to say how can we change perhaps the way we work

00:19to get more efficiency and then they did a six-month trial looking at the effects of employees

00:25working four days a week so there were significant effects for both health and well-being for

00:29employees and for business performance so only 23 companies reported significant data in terms of

00:36revenue but those that did noted a 1.4 percent increase over the trial in terms of revenue

00:43they also found generally increased productivity reduced staff turnover which is a huge cost for

00:49organizations and 32 said this policy had noticeably improved their recruitment as well there are many

00:56things in all businesses that can be done differently that can be done better i think most viewers would

01:01agree that they spend too long in meetings that there are meetings that they don't even need to

01:06have as a meeting that perhaps could be an email or done some other way and there's a lot of what we

01:11call busy work in terms of producing reports sometimes that may be written for people who

01:16don't read them or who are no longer here and so we take work and look at how can we design it better

01:21to be more effective for both employees and to get the outcomes for organizations that really matter

01:27we know there is also research that shows that we're working a lot of unpaid overtime we don't

01:32take our annual leave we have a lot of accrued annual leave and i think part of that is that

01:37organizations haven't restaffed to the levels that they had before the pandemic and so there was

01:43sort of an idea that look we can get away with less staff during this crisis time and while that might be

01:49true for a short period of time i think not replacing those staff and not resourcing correctly

01:54is leading to the really significant rates that we're seeing in terms of burnout and staff stress

02:00and in this trial 39 of employees experienced less stress and 71 found they had lower burnout

02:07and those are huge costs for society

02:09right

02:13um

02:15love z

02:25i

02:26love z

Category

Transcript

Recommended