UK bosses try to lure Gen Z workers with ‘early finish Fridays’

LONDON – British employers desperate to recruit and retain Gen Z workers are increasingly offering “early finish Fridays” in a bid to fill vacant roles amid an ongoing staff shortage crisis.

Online jobs portal Adzuna has seen a sharp increase in postings offering shorter days on Fridays, effectively meaning that workers can start their weekends a few hours earlier.

There were 1,426 job ads on the site citing early-finish Friday this March, compared with only 583 in the same month five years earlier – before the Covid-19 pandemic upended working life. 

The perk appears to be targeted at junior staff, in roles with salaries between £20,000 (S$33,100) and £40,000 a year, according to Adzuna data provided to Bloomberg.

It is more prominent in certain industries, with Adzuna’s live ads showing 348 early-finish Friday jobs in engineering as at April 3. There were 207 similar perks offered for sales jobs, 156 in information technology roles and 90 for graduate positions.

Mr Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna, said the shift reflects the fact that employees are “demanding more” from employers after the pandemic. 

For job seekers, a company offering early-finish Fridays signals that it is flexible in its attitude towards working hours and that it cares about its employees’ well-being – “two factors of utmost importance in today’s jobs market”, Mr Hunter said in an e-mailed statement.

Employers offering the perk include several mid- to large-scale companies.

Fashion supplier DCK Group includes an early start to the weekend in its list of benefits for a merchandising graduate position. Aerospace firm Raytheon Technologies is offering the perk in a job ad for a contracts manager.

Companies have been trialling a variety of measures, including a four-day work week, to attract staff in the face of record vacancies.

Ms Emma, a 21-year-old worker at a music publishing firm in London, whose employer is planning to relax its working hours on Friday during July and August, said she is excited about the idea of finishing early and taking advantage of the better weather. 

A formal – if temporary – reduction in working hours also means that staff can take an extra day off work when booking holidays and it will only count for half a day, said Ms Emma, who did not want to use her full name when discussing her employer.

However, attempts to tinker with terms and conditions have not yet eased Britain’s labour shortage problem.

There are 216,000 fewer working-age people in the workforce than before the pandemic, making Britain the only Group of Seven advanced economy not to have recovered to pre-Covid-19 levels.

In his budget speech last month, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt removed the lifetime allowance on British pension savings in an effort to attract older workers back into the job market.

Some firms remain sceptical of the value of using benefits to attract younger staff.

“At some point, you will be doing things you don’t like,” Mr Lewis Kemp of Manchester-based Lightbulb Media wrote on LinkedIn recently. “Being trusted, respected and paid appropriately are worth much more than pizzas, holidays and early-finish Fridays.” BLOOMBERG