Employers in the UK are increasingly providing "early finish Fridays" in an effort to fill open positions in the face of a continuous staffing crisis.

Employers in the UK are increasingly providing "early finish Fridays" in an effort to fill open positions in the face of a continuous staffing crisis as they scramble to attract and keep Gen Z workers.

Shorter days on Friday are increasingly being advertised on the online job board Adzuna, allowing employees to begin their weekends a few hours sooner.

In comparison to only 583 in the same month five years prior — before the Covid-19 outbreak disrupted working life — there were 1,426 employment listings on the site this March stating "early finish Friday."

According to Adzuna data that was supplied to Bloomberg, the benefit appears to be aimed at junior staff members in positions with wages between £20,000 and £40,000. Adzuna's active advertising as of April 3 showed 348 early finish Friday opportunities in engineering, indicating that it is more prevalent in some industries. Similar benefits were provided for 207 sales employees, 156 information technology positions, and 90 graduate positions.

The change, according to Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna, underscores the reality that following the pandemic, workers are "demanding extra" from their employers.

A number of mid to large-sized businesses are among the employers who provide the benefit. In order to recruit employees in the face of record-high job openings, businesses have been testing a number of strategies, including a four-day workweek.

Staff can take an extra day off work when planning holidays, but it will only count for half a day if there is a formal, or temporary, decrease in working hours.

Attempts to change the terms and circumstances, nevertheless, have not yet helped the UK's labour shortage issue. Britain is the only Group of Seven economies that has not recovered to pre-Covid levels since there are 216,000 fewer individuals of working age employed now than there were before the outbreak.

(bloomberg.com, adzuna.co.uk)