In a first, a hundred companies in the United Kingdom signed up for a permanent four-day working week for all employees without any loss of pay.

The 100 companies employing around 2,600 employees are hoping that they will be leading a major shift in Britain’s approach to work, The Guardian reported.

The proponents of the novel plan have said that the five-day working week was a hangover from an earlier economic age.

The new idea, applied to only a tiny fraction of the UK’s working population, is said to improve productivity, where the same amount of work can be done in fewer hours. The two big companies that will apply this policy are Atom Bank and global marketing company Awin, whom each have around 450 staff in the UK.

Awin’s chief executive Adam Ross said that adopting the four-day week was one of the most transformative initiatives seen in the history of the company. “Over the course of the last year and a half, we have not only seen a tremendous increase in employee wellness and wellbeing but concurrently, our customer service and relations, as well as talent relations and retention also have benefited,” he said.

The report said that the policy could also prove useful to attract and retain employees.

The UK campaign is also conducting the world’s biggest pilot scheme where about 3,300 workers working for about 70 companies are working on a four-day week in a trial with researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, Boston College and think-tank Autonomy.

In a survey in September, 88 percent of the companies in a survey at the middle of the trial said the four-day week was working “well” for their business. Around 95% of the companies’ surveyed said productivity had either stayed the same or improved since the implementation of the new plan.

Image source: MSN