Amazon Testing A 30-Hour Work Week For Some Employees

Image courtesy of DJHeini

The dream of the four-day workweek is alive at Amazon, where the company is testing out a plan that has certain teams of workers on a part-time schedule.

The teams consist of information-technology specialists in Amazon’s human resources department, who will work Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., using the 16 remaining hours as flex work throughout the week, the company noted in a recent post on Eventbrite (h/t Seattle Times).

Amazon decided to try something new because the usual 40-hour work week “may not be a ‘one size fits all’ model.” And although the company has folks in part-time positions elsewhere, this is a change from the norm because entire teams are organized on the same schedule.

The teams of part-timers are known as “two pizza teams” — not because they get to eat two pizzas every work week, which would be amazing, but because they have the right amount of people on them to be fed easily with just two pizzas. That’s about a dozen people, if I’m not there.

The tests are limited so far to three of these “two pizza” teams, with more than 20,000 full-time staff still toiling away on the usual schedule. The part-timers still get the same benefits as their colleagues, however.

“While the part-time employees’ projects will be carefully managed to align with schedules, they will share the same objective of all of our teams: to build great things on behalf of our customers,” the company wrote.

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