At the Growara human resources consultancy, this week that begins today will be different from those of the last six months. They will change Friday's payroll for today's, since Valencia, the city where they settle, begins today the pilot program that implements the four-day working day for a month.
"We are very curious to see how it affects other companies because it is a mandatory stop. We apply it and we will not go back," says Julio Braceli, CEO of the firm that attends us during his vacations, on a new bridge that is already accustomed because since last year he and his employees have not worked on Fridays.
In Growara, they blocked a total of five Fridays from the calendar and began to change routines to establish a 32-hour day that they also advise their clients to implement. They currently work with a Belgian company whose founders are Spanish and with a Spanish marketing agency.
"There are many mental barriers. The main concern is whether customers are really going to understand it and second, how it will affect team productivity. What we are trying to do is teach companies that it is not about cramming hours, but about work 32 very good hours", reflects Braceli. In the company they analyzed productivity, employee satisfaction, absenteeism and turnover, the four indicators that they maintain "can be used" to begin to measure the effects of this proposal.
Like Growara, there are other companies that have also joined the bandwagon, such as Fresh People or BigBuy, which opted for a four-day workday so that its team could reconcile. “We are convinced that a team made up of happy people translates into greater productivity and increased profits”, points out Salvador Esteve, CEO and co-founder of this wholesale platform for electronic commerce.
In fact, technology companies increasingly assume that the four-day shift is already becoming an added value in their job offers, and for example "for programmers, who are so in demand now, it is almost a commodity. Now we feel that the who have taken part in this event have a competitive advantage over others in attracting talent", says Braceli.
But apart from these types of advantages, there are others of an economic nature that the Valencian government is already promoting -Growara did not want to choose because they felt that they have "more credibility" that way. They are subsidies for plans or projects to reduce the working day and increase or improve productivity that can be requested from next Tuesday, April 11 and until May 31, and that are granted to work centers that make a minimum reduction in 20% of the workday in weekly calculation, when the ordinary workday is equivalent to forty hours per week.
The Ministry of Sustainable Economy has worked in this last legislature to promote this proposal, which has been promoted with initiatives such as the Four Day Week Summit international congress, organized last year by the Valencian Employment Service or in the debate The day of 4 days to debate: a reality or a utopia? that took place last week in Valencia promoted by the City Council, which promotes the pilot test that begins today.
There, some companies explained their experience and the most representative unions in the Valencian Community also intervened, whose leaders are facing the debate that is now opening with different perspectives. Just as Ana García Alcolea, general secretary of CCOO-PV, believes that this debate can be opened "also from the point of view of sustainability, betting on the change of the productive model and with the reconfiguration and placing in the center of a policy of public care", from the UGT-PV, Ismael Sáez stresses that the focus must be placed on work productivity, so that "this improves, and taking into account that perhaps the solution is not a four-day shift but a six-hour day." Sáez was also not very optimistic when he affirmed that "we are not going to convince any employer that you can work with the same productivity four days as five days, I'm already progressing it."
All in all, the experience in Valencia will analyze not only the impact on work, the main concern for employers and unions, but also issues such as the use of time, the reconciliation of working life, the feeling of well-being, rest, the impact on greenhouse gases, air quality, silence, energy consumption, traffic, the public transport network, inland tourism, hospitality, commerce and purchases in shops and stores, among other issues. The municipal proposal has the approval of the citizens, who in the last municipal Barometer rated the measure with 7.9 points out of 10.
