A technology company in Franca, 400 km from São Paulo, reduced the working week from five to four days without changing the salary of its 40 employees. The proposal, called “Free Wednesday”, began to be designed more than a year ago at the company in the interior of São Paulo, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and has been in the experimental phase since March.
“When we started to prepare for the post-pandemic world, at the beginning of 2022, we felt it was the perfect time to put our plan into practice,” said Leandro Pires, CEO of NovaHaus.
The pilot project should last eight months and continue until November, when the company will evaluate the results, with satisfaction surveys to measure internal productivity and individual gains, and decide whether the change will be permanent.
In addition to maintaining the original salary, when implementing the four-day workweek, the company created a benefit card, worth R$400, valid for food, meals, mobility, culture, home office, health and education.
Employees can spend it on music and movie app subscriptions, as well as bookstores, pharmacies, gas stations, cinema, theater and concerts.
“All salaries were maintained and are guaranteed in the contract. Our intention is to revolutionize the Brazilian job market and bring the future to people’s present, starting with those who work with us,” said Pires.
The company was founded in 2008 and specializes in developing digital programs and commercial websites and currently serves national and international brands. NovaHaus has an office in São Paulo that has also adopted a four-day-a-week working model.
In Brazil, the “leanest” working day is still new, but it is already a trend in countries like Spain and New Zealand. Franca’s company plans a more detailed assessment of working hours reduction, but already notices the effect of the change on its team.
“We plan to optimize each of our processes so that Quarta Livre does not impact deliveries. Today, in addition to keeping deadlines, we have achieved a more agile and objective routine”, stated Ginaldo Terencio, NovaHaus’ technology director.
According to the CEO of the francano group, the expectation is that the reduced load will reduce stress, increase the quality of life and reflect positively on productivity, as has happened in companies that have already implemented the model.
At the age of 22, systems analyst Leandro Cesar Silva, the group’s front-end programmer, started working four instead of five days a week. The days off on Wednesdays, in addition to Saturday and Sunday, meant a leap in quality of life for him.
The midweek break became an opportunity to go back to the cinema, rest and spend time with the family, in addition to relieving mental fatigue.
“It was rare for me to go to the movies, even though I’m a movie lover, and now I’ve been going a lot, I’ve been visiting new places and mainly I’ve been spending more time with my family,” said the programmer, who recently completed four years with the company.
“With the tight schedule, I was rarely able to talk for a long time with my family members. It took a while for them to believe that I wasn’t going to work on Wednesdays anymore. Even for me, sometimes it’s hard to believe.”
According to him, the voucher that employees started to receive was an incentive to buy books and restore the habit of reading.
Journalist Juliana Teodoro Silva, 22, has worked as a copywriter at the company since 2019 and said the team was euphoric when director Leandro Pires announced the news.
Juliana stated that her professional performance has improved after the workday has been shortened and that she takes advantage of her breaks to rest, sleep later, watch series, soap operas and intensify her French lessons.
“It’s been great. The income, especially on Thursday and Friday, has improved a lot. You know that thing about working happier on a holiday week, because you know you have time off? It’s the same thing every week,” she said.
Business labor lawyer Débora Brazil highlights that the working day of up to eight hours a day or 44 hours a week, provided for in the CLT (Consolidation of Labor Laws), is a format applied as a general rule in recent decades in the face-to-face model. However, as a consequence of the pandemic, the complete implementation of remote work has become the norm.
“With this, the quality of life at work in search of the much talked about mental health, sacrificed during the pandemic, has been the focus on the return to face-to-face work in companies. In this context, the four-day working model is starting to be implemented in Brazil, especially by the avant-garde technology companies”, she said.
According to the specialist, it is important to note that the new format is in accordance with current labor legislation, as the employment contract can be changed to benefit the employee, without generating any reduction in salary or damage to the employee who had the change of your employment contract.
Débora also highlighted that the employee has the right to disconnect from work, based on the principle of human dignity.
“The four-day model can be understood as an unfolding of the right to disconnect, in view of the perceived need by society to extend the worker’s rest and leisure period”, said the labor lawyer.
She also points out benefits such as productivity in the balance of life and work. “With this, the change in mentality and paradigm shifts are the watchwords to guarantee the long-awaited mental health in the work environment”.
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