Banks Benitez had great plans for his staff for 2020: a four-day week on full pay. Then the pandemic struck.
The lockdown and economic downturn caused the chief executive and co-founder of Uncharted, a Denver-based accelerator helping start-ups aiming to solve social and community problems, to doubt whether the four-day plan would work. “The question became, is this the best time to do it? Or is it the worst time to do it? We had lost some funding and revenue and things were tight. We had to lay off a few people in early April.”
It seemed logical to encourage workers to put in more rather than fewer hours. Yet after a few weeks of remote working, Mr Benitez saw employees were overloaded from video calls and juggling work with home schooling. “We decided [it] was not the worst time but actually the best time [to go to four days].” So in June, to boost productivity, he cut his 13 employees’ working week.