The Catalan fashion brand Desigual is ready to implement a four-day work week, with three in-person days and one day of teleworking, starting next October. The proposal, currently addressed to employees at the company's corporate headquarters in Barcelona, responds to the interest of Thomas Meyer's firm, owner and founder of the brand, to seek new disruptive models of work and work-life balance.
The pandemic period has shown that the company has been able to "organize work and teams in a different way and remain efficient, prioritizing what is truly important," explains Alberto Ojinaga, general director of Desigual. The chief executive argues that the labor measure "is a challenge that makes us more attractive as an organization, that will allow us to attract the best talent, and that reflects that we are a different, disruptive, young and optimistic company, in constant transformation and not afraid to propose new things."
For its implementation, the measure must have the support of 66% of the people who can benefit from it, about 502 workers from the central offices (excluding sales and operations areas), who will vote on October 7. This half a thousand employees will reduce their weekly working hours by five hours, from the current 39.5 hours to 34.5 hours.
The new format will imply a 13% salary reduction, but the company will assume half the cost of this reduction, so the monthly remuneration of workers will only be reduced by 6.5%. In this way, the brand's managers emphasize that this is not a measure to reduce fixed labor costs with a reduction in the wage bill and mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic on results.
In 2020, Desigual closed the year with a 40% drop in turnover, to 360 million euros, and losses of 80 million, after having earned 7.5 million in 2019. The drop in sales was concentrated in physical stores, with a 45% decrease, while the online channel grew by 48.6%, to one hundred million euros, during 2020. It is currently present in 89 countries through 10 sales channels, 438 single-brand stores and six product categories: Woman, Man, Kids, Accessories, Shoes and Sport.
The brand has already announced that the four-day week is part of a broader plan to offer disruptive work and reconciliation models and that it also involves implementing improvements for the rest of the groups that cannot avail themselves of this working day due to the specificities of their positions ---such as store workers, sales and operations teams--- and to strengthen service to stores and logistics centers. "We want to strengthen an environment in which well-being and health, together with the enjoyment of what we do, allows us to increase the motivation of our employees and be attractive to new generations," explains Coral Alcaraz, director of Desigual's People area. In total, the group's total workforce amounts to 2,700 employees.
The new plan is part of the brand's labor strategy, which already took a step forward in 2013 with the inauguration of its global corporate headquarters in Barcelona, with a 24,000 square meter building designed by architect Ricardo Bofill, on Passeig Mare Nostrum, in the Barceloneta neighborhood, next to the beach. A property with open and diaphanous interior spaces, where no employee has an assigned work desk to encourage the exchange of knowledge between different teams. The company's values that respond to the motto fun and profit, such as positivism, commitment, respect, innovation and creativity.
"We want to strengthen an environment in which well-being and health, together with the enjoyment of what we do, allows us to increase the motivation of our employees and be attractive to new generations"Desigual is immersed in a global business reorientationnot only due to the economic consequences of covid-19. The brand had already defined some new lines of action in mid-2019, after four consecutive years of sales decline. The company is committed to smaller collections that provide more value to the consumer (for example, by promoting sustainability); to reconquering its target customers aged between 40 and 50, but also attracting new generations aged between 25 and 35; to redirecting production to closer locations and to working to strengthen its alliances withmarketplaces, in addition to reorganizing its network of points of sale.