Take four: How does the four-day week work?

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At the start of this year, there was a flurry of excitement when media outlets around Europe reported that the Finnish prime minister, Sanna Marin, was planning to introduce a four-day working week policy. The story turned out to be a lesson in how false information can spread – Marin had merely floated the idea during a panel before she even became prime minister.

However, the working population is increasingly drawn to more flexible approaches, and economic arguments for a longer weekend have been gathering steam for a few years.

New Zealand trust management company Perpetual Guardian implemented a four-day week for its 240 employees after successfully trialling it in 2018, and Microsoft trialled it with its 2,500 employees in Japan, finding that productivity increased by 40% after a month.

In Spain’s Valencia, the regional government has commissioned economists to draw up a strategy to move to the model without paying workers less.

The shorter working week is also favoured by the public, as long as it doesn’t negatively impact the economy – 63% of Brits support the idea, according to YouGov’s Eurotrack (March 2019 ).

But what is the reality of implementing a four-day week for businesses? We asked Tash Walker, founder of research agency The Mix London, to reflect on the impact of shortening the working week.

"We were looking for an overhaul in our relationship with work"

I set up The Mix in 2012, as an agency focused on understanding human behaviour. Three years ago, we were encountering the same kind of problem with every person we spoke to in our research projects for clients – a feeling of being stressed and too busy to do all the things you want, or spend time with the people you want. Technology has made this worse. A dizzying array of email, social media and an expectation to always be available mean our brains feel overwhelmed.

At the same time, my business partner and I were having debates about how to work. Our email seemed to be threatening to overwhelm us, and relentless video meetings and travel meant time to think was limited. My husband once jokingly said he had developed a great relationship with my forehead – it was all he could see in the evenings, visible above the luminous glow of my laptop. Behind every joke is an element of truth, however.

The joy of running your own business is that you get to decide how to do things and, in 2016, we embarked on some research into other working practices. How did other people do it? 

Some companies had half days on Fridays, some gave their team Wednesday afternoons for doing sport, and others had a broad ‘flexible’ approach. But none seemed to fundamentally challenge their working practices. What we were looking for was an overhaul in our relationship with work, not just tinkering at the edges.

In Scandinavia, we found multiple companies that had trialled four-day weeks, and most seemed to have had really positive experiences. 

From the minute we read about it, it seemed like the only option – radical enough to force us to change our behaviour. Working in research, you become uniquely accustomed to the challenges of behaviour change, so we knew it would have to be pretty innovative to succeed.

The next step was to trial it. The team’s response was more muted than I had anticipated – I wrongly assumed that people would be whooping from the rooftops. Any change can be difficult. Even if it looks great from the outside, we realised that people were worried, so we had to reassure them that they would still be paid the same, there would still be chances for development and growth, and that we weren’t expecting five days of work in four.

We embarked on a live trial for three months without telling clients because, in all honesty, we didn’t know if it would work. I was worried about workload, being available enough, and maintaining growth.

During the trial, we met once a week as a full team to talk about processes and different ways of working. During these sessions, we leaned heavily on two sources of business-structure innovation:

• Making Toast, a design-thinking exercise developed by Tom Wujec to assess process problems and help you come up with more efficient systems
• Ideo resources, which we used to help us design team structures that worked for four-day weeks.
  

We created a WhatsApp team channel for emergencies – any messaging service would do just as good a job.

Instead of working in silos and handing projects over to other areas, teams from different disciplines now all work on delivering projects as a collective. It means our ideas come from more diverse places within the team and so are more unexpected – and, generally, more creative and valuable.

In hindsight, I don’t know what I thought we would do if it didn’t work out. How could you give that to the team and then say: “Actually guys, back to five days”? But trial it we did.

The result? Not a single client noticed. We weren’t as important as we thought we were. The systems we put in place meant clients had been totally unaware we weren’t around.

The trial became our normal practice and we began to communicate this to our clients, with their fantastic support. Clients hold us to account – they tell us not to reply, and do their very best to make sure we don’t need to be there on Fridays.

In the three-month trial, we worked out a few simple systems to help us:

• We all have the same day off – Fridays
• People check their email once in the morning and in the afternoon to avoid emergencies (it’s research: no-one is usually dying)
• We try to flag early if there is a need for us to deliver on a Friday – this has happened about 10 times in the past two years
• We tell clients upfront when we are pitching, so they know we don’t work on Fridays.

As a growing business, we need to constantly adapt our approach to make sure it is still relevant, but the results are clear. Since 2016, when we started the process, our revenue has increased by 70%, and sick days over the same period have decreased by 75%. Margin has also increased by a significant amount, productivity has improved, and we have been able to attract people to work for us that otherwise may not have done.

Doing a four-day week doesn’t make you money, but it certainly isn’t anti-commercial. It is not purely about the soft benefits, although these are clearly evident. Our client relationships have strengthened. People are curious about it and want to talk to us about how we do things.

My reflections on this process are that, if you are up for a new way of working, you need to recognise the challenge of changing your behaviour. It is hard to do, and the same approach won’t fit every business – but once you make a clear choice, the need for finding new ways of doing things leads to innovation.

For us, this has led to some of the best work we have ever done.

This article was first published in the April 2020 issue of Impact, produced prior to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.