Lyric Dixon grew up in a household where her father worked long hours, often in two jobs. Her grandmother stopped working only recently, retiring aged 72. In her first postgraduate role, Dixon, now 25, worked a 45-hour week as a customer manager for Wellington-based online food retailer Delivereasy. But for the past two years, she has been part of a cohort that is revolutionising workplaces: the four-day-week workers.
Dixon is a human resources adviser at Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, the government’s audiovisual archive. Since early 2022, Ngā Taonga has allowed its 80-plus staff to work a four-day (32 hour) week on full pay, as part of its “Future of Work’' strategy, which puts a big focus on staff wellbeing. It is flexible enough for staff to work from home for two of those days, a deal which Dixon’s friends wish they had.
Dixon (Ngāti Porou, Te Arawa) reflects the thinking of her generation when she talks enthusiastically about how she wants to feel valued as an employee and that a career should be only one part of someone’s life, not all-consuming. Working shorter hours and being respected for the job they do rate highly for a generation of recent graduates and younger employees who regard paid employment as just one facet of their lives.
Local and international studies have found that Dixon’s generation – Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012 – are lost and dissatisfied at work. They’re the country’s future workforce and everyone from recruiters to academics and office revolutionaries, such as four-day-week champion Andrew Barnes, say we need to redesign our workplaces to meet their needs.
“My generation perceive burnout as something that should not be put on a podium,” says Dixon. “We respect people who work hard and really drive themselves but pushing yourself too much for an employer isn’t perceived as the goal.’’
Dixon is ambitious, but only if she can enjoy a balanced, rounded life. “I want to be a good person first and then everything else kind of follows that. I’m very grateful for where I’m at and for being trusted to work as I do. I would like to keep developing in the HR profession, but balance [that] with having quite a rounded life.’’
While her friends are working on Fridays, Dixon spends her paid day off doing personal admin – buying groceries, attending to appointments, sorting out bills. “I’ve got amazing work-life balance. You can’t pour from an empty cup, which is a nice little tagline that I always manage to throw into conversation.”
Values first
As an employee cohort, Gen Z is perceived to have a list of wants: the flexibility to work remotely, more time off, better perks and higher pay. The generation before them – the millennials or Gen Y, digital natives hatched from the early-80s to mid-90s – are considered ambitious: a 2011 PwC survey found millennial workers’ top priority was career progression. Now, research points to workers coming through wanting two key things: pay and work-life balance.
A global study of Gen Z and millennials by Deloitte last year found they had specific priorities in the workplace: higher pay (half lived from payday to payday), work-life balance (they would leave an organisation rather than sacrifice that), 80% looked for mental health support and policies when considering a job, and half wanted their employers to have more policies around social responsibility and sustainability. The overriding message from the 22,000 young employees polled in 44 countries was that they would choose a job and a lifestyle based on their values.
They may be ready to flex their values, but is the workplace ready for them? Actor-director Jodie Foster recently took a light swipe at working with Gen Z. “They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10.30am”, Foster grumbled in an interview with the Guardian. “Or in emails, I’ll tell them, ‘This is all grammatically incorrect – did you not check your spelling?’ And they’re like, ‘Why would I do that? Isn’t that kind of limiting?’”
In another international poll, in 2022, Gallup found that Gen Z and younger millennials are more likely than their more senior co-workers to be ambivalent about their workplace – 54% reported feeling “not engaged” at work. Most reported not feeling a close connection to their co-workers, manager or employer.
The finding has been replicated here. Jarrod Haar of Massey University’s School of Management surveys 1000 employees each year as part of his ongoing Wellbeing@Work study. In his December survey, which included 294 people aged 30 or under, he found younger workers are less happy at work compared with those aged 31 and over and reported higher job anxiety, depression, sleeping problems and psychosocial issues. Only 63% were happy at work, compared with 71% aged 31-plus. They showed signs of job burnout – 31% vs 23%. Work was also less meaningful for the 20-somethings, who were less engaged in the workplace.
“The findings are pretty stark on mental health,” says Haar. “Everything is worse. Young workers report higher job stress and lower happiness.’’
But, he adds, “They don’t hate on every-thing. They don’t report higher work demands; they don’t complain about every-thing. They don’t report higher bullying or loneliness than other age groups. Their turnover is the same.
“On wellbeing, they’re way worse. But work outcomes and work experiences don’t differ across the age groups. It’s not as though younger workers just moan about everything.
“They want more meaning and more work-life balance, because they are generally lacking at work, and those things will explain why they’ve done so poorly with their mental health.’’
Dixon agrees. “We have a different perception of what a workplace should look like. I think we’re the product of seeing what hard work looks like over lots of hours. We respect that, but I also think we believe that you can work to live, not live to work.’’
Gaining traction
The rise of the four-day week is a global phenomenon that is getting traction here. Andrew Barnes founded corporate trustees Perpetual Guardian. His was a lone voice when he launched the concept back in 2018 and told his staff to stay home for one day a week. Auckland engineers Brevity have come around to the idea (see “Seismic shift”, below), and more recently, accounting firm Grant Thornton introduced a nine-day fortnight, hoping this will help staff wellbeing and attract and retain talent. At Ngā Taonga, parents with young children often choose to spread their 32 hours over five days.
The four-day week is here to stay at Perpetual Guardian. Barnes remains on the board but has launched a legal tech start-up in London that also offers a four-day week. The big problem with the world of work, he says, is that we don’t measure output – we measure time.
“Unless it is actually demonstrably linked to better output, working long hours is absolute macho-ism,” he says. “Often, we talk about these long hours as being something great, but we weren’t any more productive. We were just spending more time at work.
“We are trying to break that and say, ‘Let’s just focus on what it is we need to produce and let’s think about a better way of doing it.’ And if we can do that, people can go home.”
Barnes – at 63, he’s at the tail-end of the baby boomer generation – talks about his own career in the City of London in the 1990s and early 2000s. He was on the train at 5am and often didn’t get home until 9pm. “That was my life. Was I better for it? Did I do better work as a consequence of that? At times, I was so tired that my output and my productivity were absolute rubbish.’’
Law changes have shaken up the old workplace order, too: the decline in unionism since the 1991 Employment Contracts Act; the ability of employers to put staff on short-term contracts and to easily shed staff when profits dip; the 90-day trial period (brought in by National in 2009, restricted under Labour and reinstated by the new coalition government).
But Barnes is concerned that young workers have been happy to take flexibility over job security, which has bolstered the gig economy. “That means no sick pay, no holiday pay, no superannuation, no base protection – and that’s a very dangerous place to go.
“You can’t have the sort of culture that we’ve now created – the 24-7, always-on, technology-based culture – without a rethink. The victims of that new world are the people who are now signalling there has to be a rethink.”
The horse that bolted
The global pandemic forced workplaces to send staff home and some are now struggling to get them back to the office. A new requirement by One NZ (formerly Vodafone) for call centre staff to work from headquarters at least three days a week, rather than two, has drawn protests.
Hybrid working between home office and the boss’s office appeals to some working parents and to digital natives like Dixon, who does two of her four days from her Wellington flat.
Gen Z are the cohort most likely to want hybrid working and flexibility around their workday, says Amanda Wallis, head of research and development at workplace wellness consultancy Umbrella Wellbeing. With the skyrocketing cost of living and transport bills, Gen Zers accustomed to doing tertiary classes online are comfortable with working remotely and logging into work meetings – in fact, many are demanding it.
“We’re in an interesting situation post-pandemic where people were forced to work flexibly, so to pull back on that is causing trouble,” says Wallis. “If we’ve got Gen Zers who did their entire degrees online, having to then shift to in-person is going to have a much bigger impact than someone who was in the office all through their career and only had a one- or two-year blip working from home.
“Those age-related effects seem to be more prevalent in Gen Z.’’
ANZ New Zealand requires corporate office staff to come in for half their working week. A year ago, Joan Withers, chair of the bank board’s HR committee, described working from home as “one of the greatest labour relations and productivity experiments in decades”. Its general manager of talent and culture, Michelle Russell, says a mix of office- and home-based work seems to work best.
“If you want to learn and grow, you need to surround yourself with people,” says Russell. “The whole point of being in the office is that people can collaborate, solve problems and learn from each other. It’s quite a key part of our culture.’’
Russell believes the ANZ workforce is evenly split about being asked to return for half a week. “You’ve got a bunch of people who have built their lifestyle around the fact they can work from home most of the time. They’ve got childcare or caring responsibilities, and that’s where we’re getting real tension. But I explain, ‘Just because we’re asking you to come in for half your time doesn’t mean you can’t still leave at 2.30 and go and pick up your kids.’”
Massey’s Jarrod Haar is a big fan of hybrid working – employees who divide their time between home and office are the most innovative and productive, he says. But he doesn’t think employers should mandate a return to the office. “There is a big return-to-the-office mandate in the United States, but we’re not having the same productivity pressures here.’’
He can see the appeal of the four-day week for workers but is not sure it’s going to take off here. “It would appeal to a lot of workers. It’s trying to remove the waste of worktime and long meetings and just getting everyone to be a bit more efficient, and the reward is a day off. But I don’t think New Zealand employers have the appetite for it. That’s my gut feeling.”
Slaves no more
Nell Fitzjohn was managing the HR department at Ngā Taonga when she co-designed its four-day week. It worked well but she doesn’t think it’s for everyone or every organisation. Productivity can be difficult to measure, for example. She says she took three months to adjust to cramming her workload into a four-day week. “But people loved it in terms of their wellbeing. It gave them the time and space to be able to focus more on other parts of their life.’’
The working-from-home part can result in tension between Gen Z/millennials and older workers and managers, she says, especially from those “who often don’t enjoy working from home because they’re using what I think is a terrible management strategy, which is, ‘If I can’t see you, I don’t know you’re working.’”
Now working in HR at another Wellington business, the 34-year-old (a millennial) has set up Cheerleader, an online platform that aims to make workplaces more human-centred and encourage co-operation rather than competition. Fitzjohn argues we are not focused on making workplaces fit for the future. We need to move away from the idea that hours worked equals productivity – a metric born out of slavery. Young workers “are less patient about getting pay increases because they need them now. They’re not likely to work for three years without a pay increase. They’re likely to move on rather than just stick that out.’’
They also want work to be more motivating, says Fitzjohn, who points to a generation used to 24/7 information and entertainment via a screen. “A lot of Gen Z are questioning: ‘You want me to be motivated? Why do you want me to work here? Like, what’s motivating for me about coming to work here?’’'
She thinks millennials were the last generation to believe their hard work might be noticed by an employer. Gen Z – all twentysomethings – “have quite a strong sense of hopelessness. The idea that their employer is going to treat them really fairly and everything’s going to be okay and you’re going to get a promotion if you work hard enough – they don’t seem to share that mindset.”
They’re a generation used to hectic change – Covid, Ukraine and the Middle East war, climate change. With those pressures, why do they go to work? And they’re more adaptable to change and not so worried about job security, says Fitzjohn, who argues they don’t expect it.
Lecturer Zoë Port studied under-35 workers with Haar at Massey and found they scored the worst across all work and well-being outcomes except job mobility – the perception there are always other jobs out there.
Port says Gen Z workers are – rightly – demanding change. They don’t feel as loyal to a company if it won’t meet their needs and they’re less worried about “job hopping’' or staying in a job for a certain length of time. “We’re seeing a rejection of entrenched views such as ‘put up or shut up; you’re lucky to have a job at all’ that many workers have been conditioned to accept in the past.
“My Gen Z colleagues challenge my thinking and are more willing to question things than I am. The younger workers in our study seem to be rejecting this idea to prioritise their own wellbeing – which I don’t see as a bad thing.’’
Meanwhile, the four-day week and job satisfaction aren’t enough to keep Lyric Dixon in New Zealand. She is about to finish up at Ngā Taonga and move to Melbourne for a change of scene.
She knows a four-day week may be a pipedream in her new city, but part of her job search will be to join an organisation whose values align with hers and that includes a work-life balance.
“I don’t think anyone of my generation has ever said they don’t want to work hard. They just want to be valued for their hard work. And if that can be done efficiently in a shorter period of time, then why wouldn’t you?’’
Seismic shift
Using a day off as a carrot is boosting productivity at an engineering firm.
Engineer Matt Bishop is often told by his direct reports to make a meeting quick because they’ve got work to do. The CEO of Auckland engineering firm Brevity takes it as a good sign that his management model is working.
Bishop, who employs 20 people in his specialist seismic consultancy, has introduced a four-day-week with strings attached, as an incentive to boost productivity.
Designed to improve employee wellbeing, it is also a strong motivator, and he describes it as the best management tool he has seen.
How it works is that a team must focus on their work outputs for a week. If they meet them, the “gift’' is the following Friday off. Over 18 months, management has refused the Friday off only a few times.
Most use the day to catch up on life admin, leaving them the weekend to relax.
Another slight catch is that employees have to be available to work remotely on the Friday if there’s a pressing need.
Brevity runs the scheme in six-month blocks, with a three-month pause in between. “Otherwise, it very quickly becomes an expectation,” says Bishop. “And once it becomes an expectation, you lose the ability to motivate people with it so much.’’
As well as running the four-day week incentive as a trial, Bishop made another key change in his recruitment practice. About two years ago, he switched to hiring graduate and early-career Māori and Pasifika engineers, and he’s happy about that, too.
“We had a period of employing predominantly white males from one engineering school, and they had a strong entitlement issue. They felt that they’d done the hard work by getting the degree, and that they should just be paid now.
“It’s hard to create a connection between what the company wants and what the employee wants, because most of the time, the employee is not too interested in the hard results as I am.”
Asked if any companies or organisations shouldn’t do the four-day week, he says: “It’s a great motivator for a high-performance team. But you need to be able to plan work in an outcome-based way rather than an input-based way.”