How Do Businesses Make a 4 Day Working Week Work?
The world’s biggest trial of new working patterns commenced just over a month ago, enabling over 3,300 workers from 70 companies around the UK to be the guinea pigs for the 4-day working week. The trial is operating under the premise of 100% pay for 80% of workers’ time but remaining at 100% productivity and is due to run for 6 months.
The trial would seem to be a natural progression of the more flexible working adopted during the pandemic, allowing employees a better work-life balance as well as numerous other benefits such as improved retention levels and productivity for businesses through happier and motivated teams.
A study conducted by Microsoft undertaking a similar trial resulted in a 40% increase in productivity. The benefits of working fewer hours are well known, with countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway respectively working an average 4 hours less per week than the UK and having some of the happiest people in the world.
Whilst the benefits are clear, the change might not work for all industries and there are still concerns regarding increasing demands on services and how organisations would be able to meet these with fewer resources 5 days a week. So, the question for businesses is, how can they do more with less? Intelligent Automation could offer a solution, enabling businesses to run services and processes 24/7 with minimal human support.
Intelligent Automation solutions combine technologies such as RPA, intelligent document processing, and Conversational AI to streamline end-to-end processes, delivering efficiencies and crucially freeing up employees to focus on higher-value or more rewarding tasks.
From the extracting and processing of data from inbound documents in the back office to the conducting of conversations with customers in the front office, intelligent automation reduces repetitive, manually intensive, and high-volume tasks needing to be performed by employees and can do so on-demand 7 days a week.
Organisations that implement some form of the technology, to help deliver efficiencies today and for the future, in combination with more engaged employees means that they will be able to create more productive and balanced workplaces.
If you would like to find out more about Intelligent Auotmation solutions, explore the links below.