Magyar Telekom to Introduce Four-Day Working Week

Magyar Telekom will be the first company in the Hungarian corporate sector to test the four-day working week as part of a pilot project, the company announced in a statement this Thursday. The large-scale experiment, which will run for four months with the involvement of several departments, is primarily aimed at gathering experience and information.

According to the statement, Magyar Telekom is launching the experiment after four-day working week trials in several locations around the world (including Brussels, Japan, Iceland and Spain), most recently in the UK, with encouraging results.

At Magyar Telekom, four teams – including both support and customer relation areas – will switch to four-day working between July and October as a trial.

Chief People Officer Zsuzsanna Friedl says the company has always been characterized by experimentation and the courage to try new things. Especially when it comes to initiatives that are expected to improve the development of colleagues, their operations and their quality of life. The current four-day working week is expected to improve the work-life balance of their employees and make work itself more efficient.

An important rule is that the reduced to four-day working week will be introduced on a trial basis, with colleagues taking home the same basic salary, while trying to make work organization within the company as smooth as possible.

Magyar Telekom is also launching a national representative survey to assess in which sectors and whether it is feasible at all, and if so, how the four-day working week could be organized. It will also ask Hungarian workers for their views on the introduction of a four-day working week and launch a social dialogue on the issue.