The health insurer giant, Medibank is set to trial a four-day working week to improve health and wellbeing in the workplace.

Medibank has become one of the latest Australian companies to launch a four-day working week trial introducing time off as “The Gift’ program. The insurer company has given the name “the gift” to time off.

This program experiments with a scheme being widely accepted by employers across Australia. Medibank will start a six-month program at the end of October for its 250 employees.

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Medibank’s “The Gift” program details

About 250 employees of Medibank will move to the 100:80:100 model at the end of October based on “The Gift”. It will allow employees to reserve one hundred percent of their pay reducing their hours to eighty percent of the time while maintaining a hundred percent productivity in a month trial. It will be re-evaluated and scaled to the wider organization of nearly 4,000 staff.

However, this trial does not have a specific start date. Different teams across Medibank including frontline customer service have started participating in workshops to assess their workload. And to stop low-value or time-consuming tasks like meetings and emails.

Chief Customer Office Milosh Milisavljevic said that “The Gift” program will boost the productivity of working staff. Full-time employees of Medibank will get one full day off while part-time employees will get time off based on pro rata.

Milisavljevic said a high number of employees showed interest in contributing to the trial. However, the company chose to keep it on a smaller scale before expanding it out to the wider organization.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Australian workplaces have transformed dramatically. It has changed the way employees approach work which results in increased demand for flexible work arrangements.

A number of companies have already experimented with the four-day workweek. It has proved beneficial involving improvements in productivity and a reduction in absences or resignations of employees.