Four day work week to entice workers who seek better work-life balance

Washington: Working four day a week seems too good to be true, right? Well, here is some salt for your wounds - there are companies out there offering four-day workweeks to entice workers seeking a better work-life balance.

In the corporate world, where getting weekends off feels like a luxury, there are employees who only have to work 4 days a week and get the other three days to themselves. When provided with flexible schedules employers "see an increase in productivity," Bill Castellano, a professor at Rutgers' School of Management and Labor Relations, told CNN.

"It does have a positive impact on engagement. People who have flexibility feel reciprocity. They want to give back to the company," Castellano explained. According to CNN's report, different companies use different techniques when it comes to delivering on the promise of the four-day workweek concept. Some employers have employees working for 10 hours per day, while others shorten the number of hours worked each week.

Some companies design the schedule in such a way that the employee ends up doing eight nine-hour of shift for 3 days and one eight-hour day and gets every other Friday off. Shake Shack, an American casual restaurant chain based in New York City, recently announced its plans of testing out the concept of a four-day workweek at some of its outlets.

"The days of the restaurant business have been -- you work really hard, you're never home, you work six, seven days a week and 12 to 14 hour days. Lately, we started challenging that notion," Shake Shack CEO Randy Garutti told CNN.

Already following the 4-day-work idea, employees at software company Wildbit have been working for 32 hours per week, i.e. four-day work week for more than two years now. The practice which started out as an experiment shortly proved to be beneficial for both, employees and work outcome.

"We continued to extend it each quarter and a year later when we reflected, we realised we had gotten more done that year than we had in a long time," said Natalie Nagele, Wildbit's CEO and co-founder.

According to Nagele, getting an extra day off, in addition to the weekends, provides the employees time to regenerate and come back to work all reenergized to give their 100 per cent.

"By Monday morning, everyone is kind of running to work. You can process challenges and think through things you were blocked by and then by Monday you feel more empowered to get work done," she asserted. Castellano suggests that the trick of making a four-day workweek sustainable is setting measurable goals for the employees.