An extra hour of work a day, in exchange for one less day in the office. Final balance: the week is shortened, from 37 and a half hours to 36 overall, the salary remains the same, some time is regained, company and employee save (net, ça va sans dire, of the arm wrestling trade union in place: what to do with the meal vouchers of the day off earned?). Intesa Sanpaolo has 76 thousand employees, like no one in our country. Here then is that the proposal that the bank has made to employees, excluding branches, could mark in a few hours (tomorrow the possible go-ahead) a watershed in a labor market, the Italian one, that the great leap in flexibility only made it when was forced by the pandemic. To then hastily go back as soon as the health emergency has returned, letting mistrust and traditionalism resurface for everything that differs from the classic eight hours at the desk from Monday to Friday.
This is not about smart working, which has also been widespread in the banking sector since the pre-pandemic, when the category contract had entered ten days from home a month, that is almost 40% of working time. The short week model looks in two directions. The first is contingent and of portfolios: fewer people in the office means savings on their bills for the company in the season of the energy crisis and for employees a nice cut in transport costs. The second is structural and of the so-called work-life balance: improving the quality of life of workers. And there’s no need to explain why it makes a big difference to close the week on Thursdays at 6pm instead of Friday at 5pm or go on a trip on Wednesday.
The model is growing, but still an exception in Italy. His guru is on the other side of the world: entrepreneur Andrew Barnes, founder of New Zealand’s largest trust company, the Perpetual Guardian, has set up a foundation to convince everyone that the future is in the short week, as is done in the company. of him. The “4 Day Week Global Foundation” has an evangelizing mission: you all work four days a week and global well-being will improve, we are here to talk about it and teach you how to organize it.
The guiding principle, also in the Intesa Sanpaolo scheme, is flexibility, therefore it does not impose to enjoy the third day of rest at the weekend to close the office on Thursday: the worker can choose, by agreeing, when to take the additional break . Free on Tuesdays, at work on Fridays. Or vice versa, without stakes. In a philosophy that finds a compromise between the old organizational models and that great hunger for reappropriation of one’s own time that the lockdowns left us and that has pushed phenomena such as the great American resignation, the mass resignation born of a conception of life in which the work has moved down several steps on the priority ladder.
On the business side, there is not only saving on bills or the possibility of tightening the office: the idea is that an employee who is less stressed and more in control of their time ends up feeling better, doing more and increasing that productivity. which in Italy always remains dramatically lower than in the rest of Europe.
“But be careful, because the idea of staying in the office one day less attracts a lot, but the quality of life and therefore efficiency does not necessarily improve – warns Mariano Corso, scientific director of the Smart Working Observatory of the Milan Polytechnic. -. Let’s try to think about how much effort is already done from Monday to Thursday, imagining adding an hour is not a detail at all. One thing is certain: the choice of the additional day off must be ensured with maximum flexibility, otherwise it is of little use. In general, the well-being of the worker and therefore his productivity certainly increase more with smart working than with the short week, because there is greater freedom ». –