It’s more complex than it looks, and many organisations are grappling with how to get it right. Here’s what they’re asking.
By Claire Campbell, Consultancy Director
There’s no question that the four-day week is a hot topic right now. Every time we host a webinar, or meet a client, it’s one of the first things we’re asked about – and apparently, many employees are asking about it too. And as an organisation focused on how flexibility can help people thrive in their work and home lives, we’re very much on board with the concept.
But it’s becoming clearer with every conversation that there is a lot of uncertainty around the four-day week; firstly, about what it actually looks like in practice, and secondly, about the best way to implement it. So we thought it would be helpful to share some of the questions that we’re being asked, and our suggestions for how to answer them.
One of the most common questions people have about the four-day week is what it actually is – and this is important, because it’s not what many people think. Specifically, it doesn’t mean employees just get a free day off each week with no impact on the other four days. The leaders of the 4 Day Week Global campaign have worked hard to clarify this, but the misconception remains.
So if it isn’t that, what is it?
At a basic level, it’s a pattern that expects employees to do 100% of their job, in 80% of the time, for 100% of their pay. How? Essentially, by being more efficient; by improving productivity in a way that allows them to achieve the same in less time. So it’s about reducing your hours, but not your outputs.
This is another big question – and the answer is, it depends on the organisation. If you are considering implementing the four-day week, you will need to work with your teams to explore how they can deliver the same levels of service or productivity more efficiently.
Examples that are often cited include reducing unnecessary meetings, automating certain processes and redesigning others to involve fewer people. There was also a suggestion from the UK pilot programme that some people picked up their working pace – 62% of employees who took part said it increased, with 36% saying it stayed the same. And a couple of the participant companies took strategic decisions to reduce overall workload – such as letting go of minor clients or cancelling a couple of non-core projects.
The key point is that there isn’t a one-size-fits all solution for this. Your teams will need to work collaboratively to identify where efficiencies can be made, and then design working arrangements that work within the new parameters.
That might mean everyone gets a full day off each week, or it might mean people working five shorter days, or even an annualised arrangement. The ideal scenario would be to offer your employees options on how they spread their 80% of hours across the week, so they can find a pattern that fits with the rest of their lives.
It’s much harder to see how the four-day week can be made to work through efficiencies within roles in which there is a really strong correlation between the hours worked and the service provided, such as patient-facing, customer-facing and contact centre roles. So organisations with these roles, who believe in the concept, may have to invest in making it happen, on the basis that this will have a positive impact over time.
That’s certainly the approach taken by Citizens Advice in Gateshead, who took part in the UK pilot. Their solution was to hire extra staff to cover the extra hours, in the hope that the investment will be offset by a reduction in recruitment, retention and sickness costs; at the time of writing, this is a work in progress.
There is also an argument that, for industries that rely on agency staff, hiring more permanent staff to allow everyone to work fewer hours for the same pay could be offset by the savings on both agency costs and sickness absence. One to watch is South Cambridgeshire District Council, who took part in the initial UK pilot, and is now trialling a four-day week for refuse loaders and drivers. This will cost £339,000 extra over two years in increased staff and new lorries, but the council believe savings will be made through using fewer agency workers, as well as rationalising bin routes to reduce wasted time.
Right now, the ‘payback’ data on frontline four-day weeks is limited, although our own research has highlighted a more general correlation between flexible working and people taking fewer sick days. But companies with some frontline staff will need to give some thought to how they make it work for their roles, to avoid exacerbating the gap between flex haves and have-nots.
This is another real challenge thrown up by the four-day week, and one which organisations with part-time employees are working to tackle. During a discussion about the pilot, South Cambridgeshire District Council’s Liz Watts noted that “In terms of part-time hours, this was the trickiest bit.”
One solution is to reduce the part-timers’ hours in line with the reduction for full-time staff, but it’s arguably a stretch for someone who is working less than a full week to compress their hours even further without affecting outputs. This is particularly true if their part-time job was never properly designed to match the decreased hours – we know anecdotally that many part-timers are already squeezing a full-time job into fewer days.
As with turning a five-day job into a four-day one, the answer lies in collaborative discussion and job design; exploring what efficiencies can be made and looking at how to make the role and its outputs achievable within the available time. It’s certainly not a good idea to expect the part-time or compressed hours employee to continue on the same hours for the same pay while everyone else around them is seeing their hours reduced.
The short answer to this is yes – and if it’s implemented well, it’s likely to help you keep the staff you have, too. Why wouldn’t it? But there are a couple of things to be aware of here.
Firstly, if you think that offering a four-day week will help you recruit great people, you’ll need to tell candidates about it; there’s anecdotal evidence of companies not wanting to promote this working pattern in case it attracts ‘the wrong kind of candidates’. This is based on an (outdated, in our view) assumption that only slackers want to work fewer hours, and it doesn’t really make sense; you certainly won’t be able to attract candidates through the four-day week if you keep it quiet.
And secondly, if you’re recruiting at a time when you’re piloting the four-day week, you’ll need to make that clear – otherwise, if you decide to revert to a more traditional working week, you’re highly likely to lose your new recruits.
This is a great question – and one we don’t feel qualified to answer, yet. The recency of the four-day week pilots, and the lack of large organisations taking part, mean that the data is in its infancy, and it’s just too early to call.
It’s certainly fair to say that there’s a risk of increases in individual productivity and retention reversing if people start to slip back into old habits. But it’s equally possible that the long-term health and wellbeing impact of working fewer days could lead to sustainable and quantifiable benefits for companies.
So we hope that the organisations which are piloting and implementing the four-day week have robust tracking in place, and are willing to share the outcomes, so we can all learn what the real impact of this new working pattern is.
Published June 2023
