Czech bank owner Radomír Lapčík expands four-day work week

Czech entrepreneur Radomír Lapčík from Zlín has spent several years testing, in practice, whether a four-day work week not only avoids hurting a business but actually helps it grow. Now he is preparing to extend the experiment to his banking arm, Trinity Bank, which employs around 300 people.

Within Lapčík’s financial group, SAB Finance — the largest player on the Czech currency-exchange market and the most profitable part of his business empire — has already been operating on this schedule since 2020. The shortened week applies to all of its roughly 80 employees, with no exceptions.

According to the group’s HR director, Daniel Galandr, the idea came from Lapčík himself and was tied to his philosophy of “being exceptional,” as well as a practical wish to retain loyal staff with an unconventional perk that neither competitors in Czechia nor most companies worldwide offer.

The switch to the new arrangement was not a snap decision — the company had set economic targets in advance, and missing them would have meant reverting to a five-day week. Instead of a downturn, growth followed: in 2020, when SAB Finance made the switch, it had fewer than 70 employees, net profit of 116 million crowns and revenue of 296 million. Last year, with the headcount essentially unchanged, net profit rose to 291 million crowns and total revenue to 538 million.

The mechanics are simple: employees are required to work 32 hours a week but are paid as if for 40 — the remaining eight hours are paid as a day off. In other words, their rate doesn’t shrink and their pay doesn’t fall. Galandr also notes that salaries at SAB Finance are already well above the market average, thanks to a substantial performance-based component.

Each employee agrees with their manager on which day to take off — some skip Mondays, others Tuesdays, while parents of young children often prefer shortened shifts. The one firm rule is that clients must never notice a difference in service quality. Interestingly, the company does not encourage remote work: management believes employees are more effective in the office, and that is also where corporate culture is built.

Lapčík now plans to apply the same logic at Trinity Bank — a bank with a balance sheet of more than 160 billion crowns and almost a quarter of a million clients. Despite strict regulation of the banking sector, the move to a four-day week there is planned for the turn of 2027–2028.