Compressed Workweek

What a compressed workweek is

A compressed workweek (أسبوع العمل المضغوط), also written compressed work week, is an arrangement under which an employee works the hours of a week in fewer days. Each working day is made longer, and in exchange the employee has an additional day off. The arrangement does not reduce the total number of hours worked.

The definition has three parts. The hours of the week stay as they were. The number of days over which those hours are worked falls. The day that is freed becomes an additional day off, and the hours that would have been worked on it are carried by the remaining working days, each of which is lengthened to hold them.

What a compressed workweek is and what it is not

The essential difference is that the total does not change; only its distribution does. A compressed workweek is therefore not a reduction in working hours, and it is not part time work. The employee performs the same amount of work in days that are fewer in number and longer in duration.

A reduction in working hours lowers the total, so the employee works fewer hours across the week. In a compressed workweek the total stays where it was. What moves is the way those hours are spread over the days of the week.

Part time work differs on the same point. Under item 1 of paragraph One of Article 27 of the Implementing Regulation (اللائحة التنفيذية) of the Saudi Labor Law (نظام العمل), the contract for part time work states working hours below half the usual daily working hours of the establishment, whether the work is performed daily or on some days of the week. An employee on a compressed workweek keeps the full hours of the week and works them over fewer days.

Who benefits from a compressed workweek

• The employee: a whole day becomes available, and there is less travel to and from work across the week.
• Work made up of extended tasks: a longer day reduces the time spent on setting up and handing over, which recurs each working day.
• Coverage: distributing the working days between two teams extends the hours of service without any increase in the total.

The employee’s gain is the day itself. When the hours of the week are worked over fewer days, a day that used to be a working day becomes free as a whole. Because the employee comes to work on fewer days, the journeys between home and the workplace across the week fall in number as well.

With work made up of extended tasks, the gain lies in the time spent getting the work started and passing it on. Setting up and handing over recur with each working day. In a week of fewer and longer days, they recur on fewer occasions.

Coverage gains from how the days of two teams are arranged. Where the working days are distributed between two teams, the hours during which the service is staffed are extended. The total hours worked by the teams do not rise to achieve that extension.

What makes a compressed workweek fail

• Roles that depend on communication: an employee who needs colleagues or clients every day loses a whole day of working at the same time as them.
• The fatigue of a long day: the last hours of an extended day can be less productive than the first, so what is gained in scheduling may be lost in quality.
• Fixed personal commitments: for someone with a daily commitment at a set time, the longer day may work against them, not for them.

A role that depends on communication needs the people it works with to be available when it is. If the work calls for contact with colleagues or with clients on every working day, the additional day off is a day on which that contact does not take place for the employee concerned. The hours are all still worked, but a whole day of working at the same time as colleagues or clients is lost.

The fatigue of a long day concerns how the hours are worked, not how many there are. The final hours of an extended day can be less productive than its opening hours. A compressed workweek can therefore gain on the schedule, by freeing a day, but lose on quality, through the work done in the last hours of the longer days.

Fixed personal commitments turn on timing. A person who has a commitment at a set time every day is affected by the length of the working day, and in a compressed workweek each working day is longer. For that person, the longer day may be a burden and not a benefit, even though the same arrangement frees a full day elsewhere in the week.

The statutory side of a compressed workweek, which comes before the schedule

Lengthening the working day is an operational arrangement, but it does not release the establishment from the provisions on working hours, rest periods, the weekly rest and overtime set out in the Labor Law and its Implementing Regulation.

Article 98 of the Labor Law sets a ceiling on actual working hours under one of two alternative standards: eight hours a day where the employer has adopted the daily standard, or 48 hours a week where the employer has adopted the weekly standard. In Ramadan, actual working hours for Muslims are reduced under Article 98 of the Labor Law to no more than six hours a day or 36 hours a week.

Article 101 of the Labor Law provides that the worker is not to work more than five consecutive hours without a period for rest, prayer and meals of not less than half an hour on each occasion, and is not to remain at the workplace for more than twelve hours in one day. Under Article 102 of the Labor Law, those rest periods are not counted within actual working hours.

Article 104 of the Labor Law provides for a weekly rest day on full pay, of not less than 24 consecutive hours. Overtime is governed by Article 107 of the Labor Law, which provides that, where the establishment operates on the weekly standard, hours beyond those adopted for that standard are overtime hours.

Royal Decree M/44 amended Article 107 of the Labor Law. That decree did not amend Articles 98, 101, 102 or 104 of the Labor Law. These provisions, and the cases in which they apply differently, are covered in our guide to working hours and the weekly rest in the Saudi Labor Law.

The correct order is for those limits to be set first and for the schedule to be drawn up inside them. Building the schedule on operational need and reviewing it against the statute only after it has been applied reverses that order.

Where the arrangement touches the working hours set out in the employment contract, it changes a term of that contract. The parties to the contract are the employer and the employee, so the change is one for the two of them to agree, not one for an understanding reached with the line manager alone. Article 51 of the Labor Law, as amended by Royal Decree M/44, requires the employment contract to be written in two copies, one held by each party, and allows either party to demand at any time that the contract be put in writing. In the sources we reviewed, we found no provision of the Labor Law that sets the form a change to contracted working hours must take.

How a compressed workweek is piloted

A compressed workweek is applied to a single team, for a fixed period that is announced in advance, with indicators measured before and after it: the absenteeism rate, the quality of output, the time taken to respond to clients, and the views of the team itself.

Measuring the same indicators before the pilot and after it allows each indicator under the compressed workweek to be compared with the same indicator under the ordinary week.

A pilot with no announced end date can become an established fact that is difficult to reverse, whatever its results turn out to be.

This is an explanation of the concept and of the statutory provisions cited, not legal advice.