In recent years, the idea of a 4-day work week is gaining popularity. If you are also confused about a four-day working week, we are going to tell you some of the challenges that you will face when you opt for this idea. Don’t worry; you can overcome the challenges by taking some simple steps and with an innovative HRMS.

A four-day week can improve employee engagement, reduce operational costs, enhance productivity, and promote a healthy work-life balance. But for all this, you have to take serious and necessary steps. 

The shift from a traditional five-day week to a four-day week can be beneficial both professionally and personally. If you are not able to decide on whether or not they should make the change, this article will solve your problem. 

If, till the end, you can solve the coming challenges easily, you can make the changes easily without a second doubt. It will increase the employee’s trust in you, and they will get more attached to your company.

On the other hand, if you find doubts, then don’t panic; smart HRMS software tools are there to solve all your doubts. So, let’s begin the topic.

5 Challenges and Solutions for Implementing a 4-Day Work Week

Implementing the 4-day work week is not as easy as it is seen. But with the help of smart human resource management software, you can make your journey easier for you and your employees. It helps to automate and streamline many of the tasks that make your workforce feel special. 

HR and managers are relaxed in the scenario of a sudden change. So smart HRMS provides solutions to all the challenges that will be faced by employees during the adoption of new working modes. These are:

1. Schedule Inflexibility

Working more than 12 hours from Monday to Thursday is not for everybody. The fixed schedule causes many problems in the company as employees can’t devote their time to doing other things. They miss the flexibility in their work. It will make you more stressed, and less effective due to the sudden pressure of work.

Solution: Flexibility can be achieved with the right choice of HRMS. You can give them short breaks and flexibility to log in according to their time, as the software is there to look after their working hours. It keeps watch on the employee’s work and gives him the flexibility he demands.

2. Maintaining the Same Workload

Completing the five-day work in four days will be hard for the employees. But they should finish it on time so that they can avoid backlogs. The tension of completing work can overpower employees and make them worried. All things get messed up as employees don’t know how to cope with the new trend.

Solution: To maintain the same workload, the company needs to have a full-proof plan of how things will be done in a 4-day working week. The work should be assigned before so that employees can set up their minds accordingly. This will make the situation better and less stressful. 

When an employee knows their tasks for the coming week, they make up their mind according to the situation and be more efficient and productive.

3. Poor Work-Life Balance

Working for long hours so that you can have a three-day weekend is exhausting and leads to poor work-life balance. During the four working days, employees don’t get time for themselves and their loved ones. It can lead to mental stress and thus the poor quality of work that results as a hindrance to the company’s growth.

Solution: This balance can be maintained by making proper planning and a smart HRMS. With the growing workload, don’t let any way make their free time compromised. Make them feel valued, and arrange small parties at lunch so that they can enjoy that gap. It helps to bring down their work stress and make them happy. HRMS displays the name of star performance, which brings motivation and energy to do work.

4. Measuring Productivity

The most challenging thing about a 4-day work week is maintaining productivity. It should remain the same or increase compared to five-day week work. The decrease in productivity will harm the company’s image in the market. The increased workload should not impact the productivity of the work in any way.

Solution: To solve this problem, HRs and managers have to make the departmental heads aware of the change, and they should discuss their own productivity goals with their team members. When all departments set their goals individually, it leads to a sense of investment in their work. This results in increased productivity during a four-day week.

5. Lack of Communication

Last but not the least, the most impactful thing is the poor communication in a four-day working week. As the workload increases, people don’t have time to reply to an email, Whatsapp messages, etc. It leads to more error as employees don’t know what other demands from them, thus causing poor productivity.

Solution: Easy-to-use and collaborative HRMS software offers a social intranet that helps to improve communication. It serves as a unified platform in which employees get everything in one place. From employees to managers, all can communicate with each other, and there is no restriction. It makes communication easy and makes employees free from unnecessary emails and messages.

Conclusion

A 4-day work week is not for every organisation, but to remain in the market, most of them have to adopt it. But remember to have a deep understanding of the changes it will have on the business so that your business doesn’t fall behind. Do uKnowva and have a great partner in the change.