Readings en inglés con preguntas tipo examen

When a small software company in Manchester announced that its staff would work four days a week for the same salary, the reaction was predictable. Competitors called it a publicity stunt. Employees at other firms sent envious messages. The company’s own accountant, by his own admission, spent a fortnight quietly preparing for disaster.

Eighteen months later, the disaster has not arrived. Output has remained broadly stable, and staff turnover, which had been the company’s most expensive problem, has fallen sharply. What the managing director had not anticipated was the reason. She had assumed that rested employees would simply work faster. In practice, they did not work noticeably faster at all. They worked on fewer things.

With one day less, meetings that had been held out of habit disappeared within a month. Reports that nobody read were quietly abandoned. The engineers, who had previously complained of constant interruption, found that the working week reorganised itself around the tasks that actually mattered. «We did not become more productive,» one of them said. «We stopped doing work that was never productive in the first place.»

Not every organisation would find the transition so painless. Firms whose income depends directly on hours billed to clients face an obvious difficulty, and shift-based industries cannot simply remove a day. Critics also point out that the trial companies reported so far tend to be small, well-managed and already profitable, which makes them poor evidence for the economy as a whole. Enthusiasts reply that this is how most workplace changes begin: at the edges, among those who can afford to experiment.