Smarter, more enjoyable, and even shorter work?
Fridays will soon be quiet at our partner AFAS. Starting in 2025, the company will introduce a four-day workweek for everyone. Friday will become a development day that every employee can use as they see fit. A service team will remain available for emergencies; the rest of the staff will not be working that day. On this day they can, for example, go to the park with their family, help a relative or neighbor as a caregiver, or do volunteer work at the community center. No one will take a pay cut, and all other employment conditions remain unchanged. And if you already work four days a week, your salary will increase. In short, next year starts off well for AFAS employees. At most, their neighbors may look a bit envious when they head to work on Friday.
Is that even possible?
Not every company can simply implement a four-day workweek. Ultimately, the business must still generate revenue, especially since people will earn the same and staff are not expected to work harder on the remaining days.
This is only possible because there is a clear plan and it has been carefully considered. As an IT specialist, the company has seen employee productivity rise dramatically for years, by 650 percent over 25 years, and they expect that trend to continue. They have intentionally driven this by designing smarter ways of working, advancing automation, and applying artificial intelligence. AFAS employees have collectively made the company operate smarter, which now makes it possible to accomplish the same work in one day less.
But there is more. It is also an investment in employees that can pay for itself. The extra day off is called a development day for a reason. No one will be stopped if they want to spend the day watching Netflix, but the expectation is that many will use at least part of the extra time for personal development or socially valuable activities. Such as taking a course, exercising more, spending time with their children, or volunteering. Personal enrichment that often benefits the company directly or indirectly. A better trained colleague helps your company run better; a healthier employee is less likely to drop out; and someone who worries less about caregiving for a family member has the mental space to have that brilliant insight for a problem they have been struggling with for some time. In short, there is a genuine win-win behind it.
How does working smarter work?
What should you think of when it comes to working smarter? You could think of various individual innovations, ranging from online job applications to ways to reduce energy costs. For an IT organization like AFAS, however, it is primarily about structurally streamlining product development and service delivery. In many organizations, many people still spend a significant portion of their time on the wrong things. Unnecessary steps, duplicate work, and fixing errors take a lot of time and do not improve quality or productivity. For AFAS it is important to automate administrative work as much as possible so that work is more enjoyable and people have time left. The company is therefore doubling down on innovation and efficiency. Support is increasingly set up proactively: by actively monitoring software usage, they see issues coming and intervene proactively to prevent incidents. Scheduled and proactive work is more enjoyable and ultimately costs less than solving problems reactively.
Can Tools4ever help with this?
Absolutely. Tools4ever and AFAS often work together to streamline and automate processes at organizations, and together we help make operations for customers smarter, more efficient, and more enjoyable.
As an IAM specialist, we ensure that new colleagues receive a seamless onboarding on their first day. They have immediate access to all relevant applications, tailored to their role within the organization based on the information as registered in AFAS. Subsequent name changes for employees (for example after marriage or divorce), job changes, or changes in cost center or location are also executed automatically without issue in an HR system such as AFAS. We can continually expand that automation because, through our connector library, we can connect more and more source and target systems to our "HelloID" platform. It saves a great deal when you know that these kinds of tasks are simply handled properly. It is much calmer to take a moment for a cup of coffee with a colleague instead of waiting fifteen minutes at the help desk.
That also makes work much more pleasant for those IT support colleagues. In modern, dynamic organizations, it is common that roughly 20 percent of users join, leave, or require changes to access rights each year. And if you know that handling this manually can easily take fifteen or even thirty minutes per request, not even counting the actual lead time, it can result in one or more IT colleagues spending the entire day on tedious administrative changes. If you can automate this, your organization acts efficiently, compliantly, and responsibly. This makes the work significantly more enjoyable for employees and enables IT staff to focus on the real challenges.
Automation makes work safer, smarter, more enjoyable, and more valuable. Which means that at more and more organizations, employees can go to their yoga class on Friday instead of to the office. Want to know how HelloID makes work more pleasant and efficient for your employees and IT team? We would be happy to explain in our white paper or contact me.