How forever free Fridays have changed things for this company in India

Beroe, a SaaS firm with 80% employees in India, has been on a four-day workweek for six years

The four-day workweek debate has resurfaced, with many countries, including Belgium and the United Kingdom, adopting it. Experts in India doubt its viability. However, Beroe, a North Carolina-headquartered company, says it has seen a 150 per cent increase in productivity since switching to a four-day workweek in India as far back as 2017.
 

About 80 per cent of Beroe’s workforce, including its chief executive officer (CEO) and vice-president, is in India and operates out of its Bengaluru and Chennai offices.

It started when Anand Narayanan, a marketer with no formal background in human resources management, took over as interim head of HR at Beroe in 2016. The software as a service (SaaS)-based procurement intelligence and analytics firm was facing a daunting challenge as it struggled with high attrition rates, particularly among its women employees.

So, Narayanan decided to continue operating like a marketer even as the HR head, treating his employees as customers.

He says he quickly identified long working hours, lack of work-life balance and a productivity-led operating model as the primary pain points.

Two key policies were introduced to arrest attrition rates: long-term work from home and a nine-month maternity policy, which was later extended to one year. These policies not only helped reduce attrition but also shifted the mood across the firm.

Inspired by the success of these policies, Narayanan says he broached the topic of reducing work days and giving an additional day off to everyone to solve the twin issues of work-life balance and productivity. Beroe's CEO Vel Dhinagaravel was an admirer of the work ethic of Nordic countries: getting work done in a lesser amount of time and not compromising on time away from work.

He was supportive, and a three-month pilot was rolled out. In a town hall announcement, the CEO said that “everyone gets a Friday off, not just this Friday or the next Friday, but every Friday here on”. The announcement was met with a celebratory applause.

The results were remarkable, says Narayanan.

The company’s internal surveys found that the quantum of work output rose by 150 per cent. Clients overwhelmingly supported the four-day workweek initiative, with their satisfaction scores increasing from 3/5 to 4.5/5. Employee satisfaction scores, previously hovering around 3.2 to 3.3, and went well above 4/5.

Attrition rates, too, have since plummeted, he says.

The workweek at Beroe is Monday through Thursday, with a day off on Friday and then the weekend. Everyone receives their full entitlement to pay, with no reductions in benefits, vacation time, or public holidays.

Six years on, Fridays are still off. The company measures the quantity and quality of defined output that must be delivered to the client, not the number of hours that its employees put in at work.

Both client feedback and employee satisfaction scores have not dropped below four since, says Narayanan who continues as the head of HR (he is also the company’s vice-president). 

Shortening the week

Globally, while employers have become more accommodating when it comes to implementing changes since the Covid-19 pandemic, experiments on the shorter week have been carried out in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The world's largest four-day workweek trial, which was carried out in the UK last year, discovered that the majority of the 61 companies that participated over a six-month period will continue with the shorter hours, and that most employees had better work-life balance and experienced less stress and burnout. 

The Union government labour codes in India allow for the increase in daily working hours from eight to 12, while weekly work hours minimum limit stays at 48. This opens the doors for a four-day workweek for employees who are willing to work 12 hours a day. This may not be feasible in a majority of industries such as manufacturing, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), healthcare, and so on.

Furthermore, the Factories Act of 1948 stipulates that no establishment may require employees to work more than nine hours a day. 

Several sectors in India, such as hospitality, manufacturing, and retail, among others, still follow a six-day workweek.