Alida, a Toronto software company with 500 employees, will introduce a four-day work week

Alida Inc., a Toronto-based software company with nearly 500 employees, is piloting a four-day workweek program for all of its staff in five countries, making it one of the largest Canadian companies to experiment a shortened work week.

The company, formerly known as Vision Critical Communications Inc., will launch the program beginning in July. Employees will be allowed to take Friday off and keep the same pay and benefits.

Alida chief executive Ross Wainwright said the decision to experiment with a four-day work week was a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The vast majority of employees reported being exhausted from working through stop-and-start lockdown mandates and school closures for years.

“It’s not like employees are specifically asking for a four-day work week. But they asked for help dealing with burnout and stress, like being in a 1,000 square foot condo with two adults working from home and two toddlers running around,” Mr. Wainwright told The Globe and Mail.

Alida’s management team considered various options to reduce employee stress levels, including increasing vacation time and allowing staff to work flexible hours. But they’ve made the four-day workweek the best way to give employees more time away from work.

Mr Wainwright noted that Alida’s version of the four-day work week would not necessarily involve reducing the number of hours employees work in a 40-hour week to 32 hours. The company expects employees to maintain the same level of productivity, but in a reduced time frame.

“It is certainly not a question of reducing working hours by 20%. It’s about giving employees the ability to work smarter,” he said, adding that he was confident employees would be able to work the same amount over four days.

Alida creates customer management software – programs that help businesses track and analyze user feedback online. A third of Alida’s employees are engineers and software developers, and the rest are in sales and administration.

The company, which was headquartered in Vancouver, now has offices in five countries: Canada, the United States, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. Wainwright said one of the reasons the pilot won’t start until July is that Alida needed time to figure out how to implement the program in multiple jurisdictions, with different time zones and laws around the world. different work.

“We want it to become a permanent part of Alida. But of course if productivity levels go down we’ll have to reconsider. I don’t think that will be the case,” he said.

The concept of the four-day workweek has gained traction in the white-collar world during the pandemic, especially among tech companies. Even so, there are still many more companies – usually large, well-established companies – that seem to worry that their employees will be working less.

There are two schools of thought regarding implementing a four-day work week. Under one, employers allow employees to fundamentally reduce the number of hours worked from an average of 40 hours to 32 hours for the same pay, regardless of productivity. The idea is that productivity levels will be maintained because employees will learn to work smarter in fewer hours.

The other, more widely adopted form of the four-day work week requires employees to maintain the same level of productivity or output, but on fewer days. This could see employees potentially working longer hours per day.

“The principle of the four-day work week is that employees will be more motivated with extra free time. And they’ll express that motivation by being more productive in other parts of the workweek,” said Jessica Kearsey, employment lawyer at Deloitte Legal Canada LLP.

“But it’s important to remember that this idea isn’t particularly applicable to employees. [who] earn an hourly wage, whose pay depends on how long they work in a given day, and who may want to work longer hours for this reason,” she added.

A number of other Canadian companies – large and small – have recently announced the adoption of a more flexible way of working. 3terra, a Mississauga-based software company with about 25 employees, announced last week that it would move to a 32-hour work week in response to employee burnout and absenteeism.

In a post on LinkedIn, the company’s managing director, Akeela Jamal, said a lot could be accomplished in “32 targeted hours each week” and that we needed to “reclaim some of our precious personal time”.

Accounting and consulting giant KPMG Canada said last week it would give its 10,000 employees long weekends in July and August this year, in response to the “physical, emotional and mental toll” that the pandemic has taken a toll on employees.

Company spokeswoman Roula Meditskos, however, noted that KPMG does not plan to implement a permanent four-day working week.

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