Five days work-week

Here’s a discussion in CiteHR about the pros and cons of five day work week http://www.citehr.com/249462-five-day-week-six-week-better.html

The term ‘Workweek’ stands for the time spent at work and ‘Weekend’ for the time spent away from work. During the first few years of industrial revolution, the number of work hours would go up to 10 hrs a day. There were no standards defining maximum number of day for weekend till Henry Ford declared the five days work-week with a pay of six days. The concept was to pay the employees and worker more and create time away from work. The ‘Leisure time’, as described by him was quintessential for productivity. The extra cash would be spent on consumerism hence add on to the GDP. His concept was ,a well managed business pay higher wages and sell at low prices.

This was successfully managed at the service and administrative sector. However, the logistics, health care, manufacturing and defence had to manage it differently. The continuity in the business in addition to scaling up of productivity and talent shortage in different pockets made it difficult to implement. The work timings were then divided into shifts and weekends were allotted other than usual Saturday or Sunday. This worked till a point where the cost of production was manageable. During economic recession, the production had to be managed and increased to meet the cost. Certain verticals such as IT which had five days work-week since the very beginning, switched to six days work week to justify the billability of the talent. Paradoxically, few companies offered more time off from work as a non-monetary benefit to the employees. During downturn even manufacturing companies offered time off from work to apportion the cost of talent rather than retrenching them. For e.g.; if a company had to retrench talent because of a limited production and cost of productivity running high, they offered lower pay and lesser work time but did not retrench anyone.

To continue reading http://www.citeman.com/10834-five-days-work-week/