If you’re a game developer who’d prefer to spend more time at home rather than in the office, Bandai Namco Mobile appears to be the place to be, as the Barcelona-based developer has begun distancing itself from the traditional workweek.
Bandai Namco Mobile has begun testing the benefits of a four-day workweek, according to a post from the company shared on Medium. During the trial period, which will last for six months, Fridays will become non-working days for employees. And, to the glee of staff, salaries and benefits are to remain the same, although they’ll now have to work smarter and more efficiently.
The developer is confident that fewer working hours will still allow for a similar output despite the additional day for rest. Over the next six months, Bandai Namco Mobile will share more of its findings as it continues to push the boundaries.
BANDAI NAMCO Mobile transitions to the four-day workweek (Medium)
As is the culture, we believe that processes are never written in stone, and we should always be looking to improve the status quo. Today, we are announcing a big step in challenging the norm, as we transition to a four-day workweek. We are proud to be one of the first game studios in Europe to implement this.
We have monitored pilot schemes across Canada, Iceland, and the UK and have found the results to be strongly in favor across most industries including Video Games. Taking the learnings from other trialists, we are confident that moving to a four-day workweek, will improve our ability to innovate and breakthrough new barriers in the Mobile F2P market.
Trialing the move to the four-day workweek is the next logical step for us to continue striving to reduce stress, increase creativity and enable our teams to do their very best work. This model has shown significant mental health improvements and a reduction of mental health days off by employees, as an industry that has close links with burn-out, wellbeing is a top priority for us and has been a key factor in us adopting this change.
Discussion (2 replies)
Join Discussion →I really wish more companies in the U.S. would do this.
I wonder what hours.... 4x10 makes for long days, but the payoff is 3 days off. When I did it though, we were required to work at least 1 weekend day, so not exactly long weekends. OTOH, it is nice to have a day off during the week to accomplish things like oil changes, shopping, errands, etc.
My old company played around with 3x13 for a while.... that sucked. 6am-7pm. Those were some LONG azz days let me tell ya. On top of that we had regular oncall rotations, so even if you were up all night supporting India/offshore, you still got to work your 13 hour shift the next day. We had a little worker's revolt about that, we got a little petition together (95% of the peeps in our dept signed it) begging them to stop. Finally they gave up and went back to 4x10 (they ended up laying off 80% of us anyway after a while, shifted to majority offshore workers who don't complain about hours).