4-day work week in Portugal to kick off in June in some private companies

The 4-day work week in Portugal is starting its pilot project in June 2023 in private companies who have volunteered to take part, with a duration of six months and without public financial incentives, extending later to the public sector, if it has a "satisfactory evolution". We have a look at everything you need to know about the 4-day work week in Portugal.

4-day work week Portugal 2023

According to the design of the pilot project of the 4-day week to be presented by the Government, only in a "second phase", and "by satisfactory evolution of the pilot", the experience of the 4-day week "could be extended to the public sector". This is because, according to the executive, "a pilot experience directed to this sector requires adaptation of impact assessment instruments and will be subject to different legal and budgetary constraints".

"Progressively, and in a third phase, there is the intention to create favourable conditions to test a more ambitious model that involves a quasi-experimental design, in which a group of companies adopt the change and another group will serve as a control," reads a Government document.

How the 4-day week pilot project will work in Portugal

Helena Lopes @Pexels

Initially limited, then, to private sector companies, the 4-day week pilot experiment will last 6 months and will be "voluntary and reversible", with the participating companies having no financial counterpart from the State, which will only provide "technical and administrative support to support the transition".

According to the executive, the experience "cannot involve salary cuts and must imply a reduction of weekly hours".

As the State does not offer any financial counterpart, no exact number of weekly hours will be stipulated - "it can be 32 hours, 34, hours, 36 hours, defined by agreement between management and workers" - but the experiment has to "involve the vast majority of workers" of the company, "except for large companies, where it can be tested in only a few establishments or departments".

The pilot project schedule foresees that in the coming months, until January 2023, there will be periods for companies to express their interest and clarification sessions to "explain how the study will take place", with the selection of participants scheduled for February next year.

Between March and May, preparations will be made for the four-day week pilot experiment, which will then start in June and run until November. During December 2023 there will be "a period of reflection", during which "management will reflect on the experience and determine whether to maintain the new organisation, return to the five-day week, or adopt a hybrid model".

The Government also establishes that, if the adhesion to the pilot project is less than 40 companies, it will be carried out with all of them. If the adhesion is greater, companies can be divided into two groups - one for treatment and the other for control - which will allow for "a more robust evaluation of the effects of the four-day week".

Although admitting that the fact that this experiment starts from a self-selection of companies "may bias the results", the executive believes that the results of the pilot project will be significant.

How will the impact of the 4-day week for workers and companies be evaluated?

Christina Morillo @Pexels

According to the Government, the evaluation of the pilot project "will focus on the effects of the 4-day week on workers and companies". On the workers' side, besides being studied "the use of workers' time on rest days, to understand where and how the non-working time is used", the following will also be measured:

• effects on well-being,
• quality of life
• mental health
• physical health,
• level of commitment to the company,
• job satisfaction.

On the company side, "the generic focus will be on productivity, competitiveness, intermediate costs and profits", evaluating the effects:

• on short and long-term absenteeism rates, on recruitment capacity
• the organisation of internal processes,
• on financial and non-financial performance indicators (e.g. customer/user complaints)
• the incidence of accidents at work,
• consumption of intermediate goods, both raw materials and energy costs.

The evaluation will be done through surveys (before, during and after the experiment), which "will be designed to be comparable with other international experiments, but adapted to the Portuguese reality", with the aim of "promoting the cross-checking of data generated in these surveys with official databases".

The pilot experiment of the 4-day week will be coordinated by Pedro Gomes, author of the book "Friday is the New Saturday", also counting on the guidance of Rita Fontinha, associate professor of 'Strategic Human Resource Management' at Henley Business School, University of Reading, in the external team that is helping the executive.