Laundry and food group Unilever is going to try out a four-day working week in New Zealand. With this, the organization wants to increase the productivity and well-being of employees.
In New Zealand, 81 people work at Unilever, all of whom come to work for four days for a full salary. The majority of them work from the Auckland headquarters and distribution centre.
The trial will start this month and will last a year, and will only be conducted in New Zealand for the time being.
Together with the technical university in Sydney, the company will investigate the results of the experiment to see whether the four-day working week is also a good idea on a larger scale. Unilever employs 150,000 people worldwide.
“Working five days a week is old-fashioned and no longer efficient,” said New Zealand director of Unilever Nick Bangs. “We want to measure performance based on returns, not time.”