Belgium is the latest country to allow its residents to work a four-day week in a bid to provide greater flexibility options for employees.
The government's new law reforms allow people to request working 10-hour days across four days in order to have an additional day off in the week, without a reduction in salary.
Belgium's Prime Minister Alexander De Croo announced that employees' new rights will aid in their productivity after the COVID-19 pandemic required the global labour market to change rigid working arrangements.
"The COVID period has forced us to work more flexibly, the labour market needs to adapt to that," Mr De Croo said.
Belgium's new measures have prompted questions about whether it's time for Australians to follow suit.
Since Australia's COVID-19 outbreak in March 2021, workplaces were forced to shift conventional working arrangements to ensure the safety and wellbeing of their staff.
For many Australians, this meant working from home where possible and allowing them to work flexible hours to cater for individual circumstances.
Connie Zheng, an associate professor of human resources management at the University of South Australia, said COVID-19 was a trigger for many places around the world to realise a shift in behaviours was necessary for greater productivity.
"Sometimes human beings need to have a dramatic event to cause them to take some actions," she told SBS News.
Connie Zheng is an associate professor of human resource management at the University of South Australia. Source: Supplied/Connie Zheng
Associate Professor Zheng - also the co-centre director of the Centre for Workplace Excellence - said this was an opportune moment for Australia to consider the wellbeing of its residents, who have felt the rippling psychological effects of COVID-19 sweep the nation.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported a record number of phone calls made to Lifeline during the Delta COVID-19 lockdown between August to September 2021.
The volume of mental health-related prescriptions also took a dramatic spike since 2020 when COVID-19 first hit Australia's shores.
Organisational psychology consultant at Associated Employee Assistance Providers, Dan Auerbach, said that the pressures of COVID-19 on Australian employees have shaped what they now want in a workplace.
"What we're seeing is that there is a huge degree of burnout and there's a massive increase in the desire for flexibility," Mr Auerbach told SBS News.
He said Australians had clocked up more working hours during the pandemic, despite being at home more.
Dan Auerbach believes companies should think more creatively about how to improve employer wellbeing in the long-term. Source: Supplied/Dan Auerbach
"Rather than taking back their travel time as leisure or exercise or family time, they devoted it to work."
But Mr Auerbach said the answer does not simply lie in providing four-day weeks for Australians, and more creative options can be considered to benefit each person's circumstances.
If workplaces don't limit the expectations of pressured staff, Mr Auerbach warned sustained output levels with fewer working days won't be a productive solution.
"I think while we can look creatively at what's happening overseas, we really have to be the answering the more fundamental questions with understanding how much do we really expect from a limited labour force?"
"It's really looking at how much work an employee is expected to do that should be the priority rather than the number of days that they would work."
Iceland is one of the few countries in the world that adopted a 36-hour working week after a successful trial between 2015-2019 showed a huge boost in labour productivity.
Now, 86 per cent of workers in Iceland have shortened their hours for the same pay, or have the right to, according to the researchers in 2021.
Japan, New Zealand and Finland are other countries that have encouraged companies to consider the four-day model to better improve work-life balance - a sign that Associate Professor Zheng says Australia should seriously consider this approach.
"Other countries have already done it, so Australia should start to follow suit and take the benefits of it," she said.
"I think organisations, individuals, even governments, need to be very calculative to see the long-term cost versus the long-term benefits [of four-day weeks]."
Both she and Mr Auerbach agree that employee wellbeing is the instrumental key in ensuring organisational success and strength in the economy.
"If you want organisations to be sustainable, employee wellbeing and health should be the centre of the discussion," Associate Professor Zheng said.
"I think the workplaces will thrive in the longer-term are those that are going to be prioritising employee wellbeing and looking to that as a longer-term productivity gain rather than looking at short-term productivity at the expense of employee wellbeing," Mr Auerbach said.
