Unilever New Zealand to trial four-day working week

The consumer goods company Unilever is poised to try out a four-day working week for all its New Zealand employees.

Unilever said all 81 staff members at its offices across New Zealand would be able to participate in the trial, starting next week and running for 12 months until December next year. The employees would be paid for five days while working just four.

The Unilever New Zealand managing director, Nick Bangs, said the aim was to change the way work was done, not increase the working hours on four days.

I pioneered the four-day week – now policymakers must adopt it to fight the climate crisis | Andrew Barnes

Read more

“If we end up in a situation where the team is working four extended days then we miss the point of this,” he said. “We don’t want our team to have really long days, but to bring material change in the way they work.”

After 12 months Unilever will assess the outcome and look at how it could work for its 155,000 employees globally.

“It’s very much an experiment. We have made no commitments beyond 12 months and beyond New Zealand. But we think there will be some good learning we can gather in this time,” he said.

There is no manufacturing in New Zealand and all the staff are in sales, distribution and marketing.

A shorter working week has been debated for a while in New Zealand with estate planning firm Perpetual Guardian making headlines in 2019 for pioneering the idea with its 250 staff and declaring it had seen big productivity increases.

Perpetual Guardian’s founder, Andrew Barnes, said it had been a success. “For us this is about our company getting improved productivity from greater workplace efficiencies … there’s no downside for us,” he said.

The idea gained momentum this year when the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, encouraged firms to look at four-day weeks to offer flexibility to employees amid the coronavirus pandemic. She also said it may help boost domestic tourism while international borders remained shut.

“When the prime minister talked about it in the context of what the future of work would look like, that was encouragement for us,” Bangs said.

The New Zealand government has not yet adopted the idea itself.