This Labour Day weekend wasn’t about labour for Elliot Chan.
Instead, the Vancouver startup employee focused on completing a triathlon in Stanley Park, after clocking significant hours training for his first race.
“It would have been much harder to train for it if I didn’t have the work flexibility,” said Chan, the digital marketing manager at Produce8, an online software-solutions company.
The flexibility that Chan is talking about is part of an emerging trend in some areas of the labour market: working fewer hours in the week, while still doing the same job with the same pay. It’s been spurred on, in part, by the COVID-19 pandemic sparking a global conversation about how and where people can work.
Experts argue productivity, retention and happiness improves when employees have more time off to recharge their batteries. But this movement also requires some ingenuity as it typically means employees doing their usual work in a condensed week of about 32 hours — not just working 40 hours in four days.
The recognized leader of this idea is 4-Day Week Global, a New Zealand non-profit created in 2019 to help companies transition from a traditional five-day week. This year, it made Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential companies in the world.
In July, the non-profit released a report that analyzed the outcomes of year-long pilot projects run by 41 companies in the United States and Canada. At the end of the year, 90 per...
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