Disruption to working hours during the pandemic has fuelled interest in the four-day week. Photo / Merten Snijders
Employers report positive effects of shorter hours but say productivity must be maintained.
Shortly after digital marketing agency Trio Media made its four-day working week permanent, its chief executive Claire Daniels noticed a dip in “staff effort”.
“It highlighted to me we needed to work at [productivity],” said Daniels, whose business was one of 61 that took part in the UK’s four-day week trial in 2022.
Gary Conroy, chief executive and founder of 5 Squirrels, a skincare producer that also participated in the trial, came to a similar conclusion. “The discipline always needs to be maintained. Every single person slips at some point and the productivity will slip,” he noted.
Their comments highlight some of the challenges facing employers overseeing a four-day week long-term.
The UK trial ran for six months to the end of 2022. In exchange for full pay, employees agreed to deliver 100 per cent of their output in 80 per cent of the time. A report released on Wednesday by think-tank Autonomy, which campaigns for the four-day week, and researchers at Boston College and the universities of Cambridge and Salford, assesses the difficulties and benefits for employers and employees a year after the trial ended. It found that 54 of the 61 organisations that participated are continuing the flexible pattern, while five have reverted to five working days. Two participants did not respond.
Disruption to working hours during the pandemic has fuelled interest in the four-day week. Workers at Lamborghini’s production facility recently adopted the pattern. Polling last year by the Four-Day Week campaign found the majority of the public (58 per cent) expected it to become the normal way of working in Britain by 2030.
Trials have run across the world. In 2022, the Belgian government gave workers the right to condense their hours into four days, while the UAE has also expanded its weekend. Arup, the British engineering company, went in the other direction, allowing employees to spread their hours over a seven-day week.
The issue has resurfaced in recent months as employees and unions have inquired about reducing hours “as a compromise for below-inflation offers in upcoming pay negotiations”, according to Joe Ryle, director of the Four-Day Week campaign.
Campaigners say the traditional five-day week is outdated and inflexible, a sentiment shared by many of the businesses that took part in the shorter week trial.
All the managers and chief executives consulted reported some positive effects. Eighty-two per cent reported improved well-being, according to the report. Just under half — 46 per cent of respondents — proactively described “positive change in terms of ways of working and productivity, leading to maintained or increased overall performance”.
Half said the shorter working week boosted retention and 32 per cent said it improved recruitment. A year after the trial ended, employees continuing on a four-day pattern reported that job satisfaction had fallen, although was still higher than when they worked five days.
Working hours among the trial participants have dropped. Data provided by 28 companies showed their typical working week was 31.6 hours, an average reduction of 6.6 hours per week from the pre-trial period.
Working patterns vary, with some organisations implementing a universal day off, typically a Friday, while others have allowed teams to decide the free time. Seven per cent of the companies in the trial opted for a 4.5-day week.
Some staff have to be ready to accommodate workload demands. Employees at financial services firm Stellar Asset Management, for example, are expected to work part of their days off — named “flexible days” — if needed.
Daryl Hine, chief operating officer, said “the key learning is about the importance of flexibility from staff. It’s how we deal with surges in work, and urgent items that come along. We’re not a large organisation; if we’ve got a man down, or deadlines coming up, staff have stepped forward.” Responding to emails, or attending an hour-long Zoom meeting, he said, was “dipping in” rather than committing to a full day.
Trio Media does the same, calling the fifth day an “on-call day”. “If there is a business requirement, people work five days,” said Daniels, “We need the flexibility both ways.”
Another approach is to vary hours according to the time of the year. Staff at Platten’s fish and chip shop on the Norfolk coast, for example, work up to 40 hours a week during peak times, offset by 24 in quieter times.
Michael Sanders, a professor of public policy at King’s College London, said it was hard to draw broad conclusions from the trial. “The study is a self-selecting group of employers and, within them, a self-selecting group of employees. There’s no effort to identify the counterfactual — what would have happened otherwise.”
Gemma Dale, a consultant and lecturer at Liverpool Business School, is sceptical about how transferable the participants’ experiences are. More than three-quarters of respondents had fewer than 50 employees. Just 7 per cent had more than 200 staff. A 2022 report by the human resources body CIPD found only 1 per cent of employers planned to reduce working hours without cutting pay.
Dale pointed to the difficulty in measuring productivity in white-collar work. “Some professional services firms measure hours. In reality, many organisations can’t measure productivity.”
Moreover, she said, the four-day week was still inflexible. “It hardwires working to days; we are still thinking about work in an old-fashioned way rather than about how we work. It puts that focus on time again. It replicates the status quo.”
Revoking such a benefit can be a blow to employees, so employers embarking on a four-day week trial are predisposed to keeping it. One consultancy returned to a five-day week because it “struggled with managing client and stakeholder expectations”, according to the report. Some of its employees felt “let down”.
Another issue is work intensity — the report found it rose during the trial, falling a year later.
Hine said: “You could argue work is more intense, less time having a coffee, but the trade-off is you’ve got a day extra off. All of a sudden you’ve got three days off.”
But the efficiency drive prompted some staff to leave 5 Squirrels. “They like a more social element to work,” said Conroy, and “would rather be there longer and have longer lunches; they miss the chats”.
He insisted most time saving was through working smarter. “People are challenging the processes, coming up with hacks... using more tech; the sales and marketing people are using AI, meeting minutes are using AI.”
Technology is key. “We couldn’t implement a four-day week if we didn’t invest in tech at the same time,” added Hine.
For Platten’s, the change has meant higher costs as the business has increased headcount by 20 per cent to offset shorter working hours.
“We’ve taken a cut in profit this year but we have a really good team and we want to invest in them,” said Berni Bracken, business manager. “If you have happier staff, they are more productive. It’s wrong to say it doesn’t cost you. Recruitment costs you.”
Moving to the four-day week is not for the faint-hearted. Hutch, a gaming company in east London, likes to joke that it took six-day weeks to prepare for a four-day week. Daniels said: “You want someone to hold your hand and say ‘this is the rule book’, but that doesn’t exist. You have to figure out what’s right for you and all your people.”
Written by: Emma Jacobs
© Financial Times
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