Five-Days Work Week

The organisation that I work in is proposing to support the idea of having a five-days work week. At the same time, there are concerns that the organisation should continue to provide services to the community at large on Saturdays. Somehow, it is perceived that there are people who may find it more convenient to visit a family service centre like the one I am working in on a Saturday.

For your information, the proposal for a five-days work week is intended to be a family-friendly practice, so that staff could have more longer weekends to spend time with loved ones.

So to strike a compromise, the final decision was for every staff to work one Saturday a month. Currently, each staff has to work on every alternate Saturday. What still remains is that the centre will continue to open every Saturday. This means that there will be fewer staff on duty in the centre everySaturday.

I think I am having mixed feelings about this five-days work week. I did not rejoice to the news when I heard about it. I do not know if I should. I have no idea how it would feel like to work one less Saturday per month. It didn't quite matter to me that we would have to start work 15 minutes earlier each day because of the switch to the current five-days work week, but I have concerns whether we would be as effective in serving our clientele with the much reduced staff strength on the Saturdays to come. I could say that with the five-days work week arrangement, we would have about two or three staff only every Saturday. From what I understand, we are expected to handle phone calls, attend to walk-ins, have sessions with our clients, handle intakes and so forth even with two or three staff.

Maybe my worries might be unfounded. If we have not tried the new system, we would not know how it would turn out to be. I just keep my fingers crossed that things would turn out to be fine.