Vilnius city heating company decides to experiment with four-day work week

Karolis Blaževičius, a partner at recruitment firm Indigroup, told 15min that a four-day work week is not suitable for all companies. He believes that such a practice can be successfully applied in an IT company, but it is difficult in a manufacturing or sales company, where a lack of manpower can affect the company’s volumes.

The main risk for a private sector company that decides to introduce a four-day work week is a loss of competitiveness. If all companies in the sector work a full work week and one company works a day shorter, its customers may be poached by others.

Blaževičius therefore advised companies considering such a working model to take a good look at the results of the employee satisfaction survey and the performance indicators (KPIs) for the four- and five-day work weeks. Another expert’s advice is to move to this innovation gradually. For example, allow employees to work four working days for two weeks and five working days for two weeks in a month.

Moreover, Blaževičius believes that it is important that the whole company works to this schedule, because if only some of the employees are given an extra day off, others will feel disadvantaged. “There has to be equality – otherwise, how can you explain to employees in one department why they have to work five days when their colleagues work four days?”, stressed the HR expert. Blaževičius usually hears about this practice from IT companies, but such a work schedule is not formalised – often developers agree with their manager to work four days a week for longer and take Friday off.

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