The United Arab Emirates has slashed its official working week to four and a half days and moved its weekend to Saturday and Sunday in a major shift to improve competitiveness, officials said on Tuesday.
The national working week is mandatory for government bodies from January 1 and is a change from the regional norm of a full day off Friday for Muslim prayers.
The resource-rich and ambitious UAE now comes into line with the non-Arab world, despite the fact that it is the only Gulf country not to have a Friday-Saturday weekend.
The public-sector weekend starts at noon on Fridays and ends on Sunday. All year round, prayers at mosques will be held after 1.15 pm.
The move is intended to better align the UAE with global markets and the new working week is called the shortest in the world, according to the state news agency WAM.
WAM said that the UAE is the first nation in the world to introduce a national working week shorter than the five-day week.
The Western-style weekend, originally rumoured for years, was announced less than a week after the former British protectorate celebrated the 50th anniversary of its formation.
The UAE stayed on a Thursday-Friday weekend until 2006 when it moved to Fridays and Saturdays with the private sector following suit.
The extended weekend comes as a part of the UAE government's efforts to boost work-life balance and improve social wellbeing while increasing performance to improve the UAE's economic competitiveness, the WAM report said.
The new working week will better align the UAE with global markets, reflecting the country's strategic status on the global economic map, it added.
It will ensure smooth financial, trade and economic transactions with countries that follow a Saturday Sunday weekend, facilitating stronger international business links and opportunities for thousands of UAE-based and multinational companies. The new arrangement is a bold step for the UAE, which broke with decades of Arab consensus by normalising relations with Israel, unlocking hundreds of millions of dollars in trade.
It was generally welcomed on social media, where the subject was trending and the official WAM tweets were widely retweeted.
One Twitter user said I'm happy to see this change, even though I've gotten used to the Friday-Saturday weekend after all these years.
Great decision by the UAE. It serves more than one goal. The weekend now matches the rest of the world, tweeted another.
Scott Livermore, chief economist at Oxford Economics Middle East, said businesses could choose their working week but were likely to align with the public sector.
He said that aligning with Europe and Asia will help internationally orientated business that are an important pillar of the economy and could attract investment.
A shorter working week can boost the productivity of the workforce, although there is some challenges with it in terms of managing output costs.