The Front Page: Four-day week pioneer Andrew Barnes on changing the way we work

Businessman Andrew Barnes has promoted the four-day week around the world. Photo / Supplied

This week, The Front Page is showcasing several high-profile New Zealanders who stood out in their field in 2022.

At the beginning of this year, Dr Luke Wee, a fellow of the NZ College of GPs, suggested workers adopt a four-day week to ease the miserable feeling of returning to work.

What’s staggering about this recommendation is that it would have sparked widespread derision if suggested as recently as five years ago. Yet, over the past few years, we’ve seen the four-day week rapidly rise as a viable approach to managing the work-life balance.

It bears repeating that the worldwide discussion about this has its genesis in a bold experiment conducted by New Zealand-based businessman Andrew Barnes, who took the plunge in 2018 by introducing a four-day week at Perpetual Guardian.

Reflecting on his contribution to moving this discussion forward, Barnes says it’s quite humbling to consider how far things have come.

“If we look back four years ago, we were the mad hobbits at the bottom of the world trying an experiment that most people thought was stupid,” says Barnes.

“But it’s now turned from being fringe to a mainstream idea. It’s now being debated at the World Economic Forum and the European Economic Forum. You’re now seeing countries start to shift.

‘‘The UAE has gone to a four-day week and there are countries in Europe, like Belgium, Lithuania and Romania that have brought in four-day week legislation. There have also been trials sponsored in Spain and Portugal.”

Barnes has also continued contributing to the discussion by running a major global trial over the last year, which has again provided strong evidence of the four-day week improving productivity in the workplace.

“You don’t get many chances to change the world. And for better or for worse, this is an opportunity to change the world,” says Barnes.

“The fact that this has now got an audience of about 6 billion people and that there are companies all over the world trying do this is a very humbling thing. That’s why we keep going. We want to leave the world a better place.”

The recent global trial conducted by Barnes showed a 32 per cent increase in productivity among participating companies over the previous year.

“It’s about focusing on output and getting rid of the unproductive activity that occurs in almost any type of company – be it long, unstructured meetings, interruptions, poorly designed workplaces or even attitude issues.”

Barnes says that one of the most common questions he gets from companies is about how you go about measuring productivity in the first place.

“Right there you see the problem,” says Barnes.

“If you don’t know how to measure productivity, then you are simply using time as a surrogate for productivity. Part of the process is to understand what output you are looking for. How many widgets are you manufacturing?

“How are you servicing your customers? How many calls are you taking and what outcomes are people getting? The core of this is understanding what it is that drives customer service.”

As with any big idea, there will always be those critics and those who argue that it would never work in their specific organisation.

“History will be on the side of people working smarter. I’m pretty sure when Henry Ford introduced the five-day week, there were a bunch of whiskered old guys sitting there saying it will never work and that the world would fall apart if we stopped working six days a week. You just have to accept that there always going to be people with archaic views.”

Listen to the full episode of The Front Page to hear where Barnes thinks the four-day week movement could be headed next.