La semaine de quatre jours à Tel-Aviv. Est-ce possible? le groupe industriel Sage de Newcastle, implanté en Israël, tente le coup. « The Sage Group » est une société multinationale éditrice de logiciels dont le siège social se situe à Newcastle.
Sage est le troisième éditeur européen de progiciel de gestion intégré, derrière l’allemand SAP et le français Dassault Systèmes et devant les allemands Software AG et DATEV.
Un ministre des Finances avait envisagé dans le passé de supprimer progressivement le travail le dimanche, alors que les vendredis et samedis sont déjà chômés en Israël.
CALCALIST. « After some companies around the world have already moved to a four-day work week, the trend has started to reach Israeli high-tech as well.
Sage’s development center in Israel, which employs 30 people locally in a company that employs 12,000 people worldwide, will begin a year-long pilot in which workers will work a four-day work week – Monday through Thursday.
The pilot at Sage, which provides business management solutions for medium and small customers, is expected to begin on April 3rd, the first day of the coming quarter and its goal, says Segev Baron, Head of Sage’s Israel R&D Center, is to reduce employee stress levels and provide more balance between home and work life. « One of the things we noticed during the pandemic is that people do not leave their computers. You start working in the morning and the fact that your friends are also working also creates work for you and in the end you have no time for anything so we thought of this step which can really lower stress levels, » he says.
With this decision, the directors of Sage’s development center in Israel approached the corporation’s headquarters three months ago and received their consent for a one-year pilot in which the 30 company employees in Israel will move to a working week of Monday to Thursday. The pilot will last a year so they can measure if there is any decline to productivity.
Today many high-tech companies work or are connected to work even on weekends and are available at all hours of the day. There are deadlines and unexpected things that come up, especially in development, how can this work along with a shortened work week?
« We reached a collective agreement among the workers regarding what needs to be done for it to work and one of the things we agreed upon is that there are special cases where we must work, especially when there is a customer crisis or a problem in production. It happened once last year and I estimate that the next time it happens we will work, even if it falls on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, but it’s really very rare and because we’re a big company we do not have the deadlines that start-ups do. »
The company is not the first in Israel to announce a transition to a four-day work week. In June 2020, Forter, which deals with the prevention of e-commerce fraud, moved to a four-day work week once every two weeks, unlike Sage, which will adopt the model every week ».
