By Andrew Barnes
Entrepreneur Andrew Barnes, founder of 4 Day Week Global, discusses the transformative potential of a four-day work week and contends that focusing on productivity rather than hours worked can yield enhanced business performance and improved work-life balance.
To many business leaders, the perception of a reduced-hours or four-day week is merely another example of society abandoning the concept of working and saving hard in favour of a better work-life balance. Inevitably, it does not sit well with individuals who have been often singularly focused on climbing the corporate tree, at the expense of family and personal needs. It is viewed as yet another exercise to pander to a younger generation looking to work less at the cost of reduced profitability and output.
It is in this context that 4 Day Week Global, the not-for-profit organisation behind the global four-day-week movement, has to operate. The irony is that the criticism is unfair, as the journey which led to the idea of a four-day week began not as an exercise in improving work-life balance, but as a quest to improve productivity.
In late 2017, my interest was piqued by a series of research reports which indicated that true productivity in United Kingdom and Canadian workplaces was in the region of one and a half to two and a half hours a day. This was complemented by a further study which delivered a loftier, but still low, 2.53 hours per day, giving a true (or productive) work week of fourteen and a half hours. Uncannily, this reflected a prediction by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s that, with the rise of automation, humans would only need to work 15 hours per week.
A significant proportion of working hours are in the form of leisure, non-work communication, and inefficiency, as well as time-wasting, to meet the standard 40 hours expected by employees.
Whilst the current reality for many employees is circa 40 hours of work a week and, through digital connectivity, the increasing intrusion of working hours into private life, I had a hunch that perhaps Keynes was right. His focus was on productive output. Obviously, this was easier to measure and achieve in traditional manufacturing workplaces, rather than in a service industry with an office-based environment typified by a work week packed out with filler: drawn-out meetings, personal calls, social media browsing, and interruptions. In such a context, a significant proportion of working hours are in the form of leisure, non-work communication, and inefficiency, as well as time-wasting, to meet the standard 40 hours expected by employees.
My own business, Perpetual Guardian, is a trust company in New Zealand, which had at the time just over 300 employees. I was grappling with how to improve productivity in the business and how to generate a stronger cohesive culture in the company, which had been created via a series of corporate acquisitions over a comparatively short period of time. Our core business was legal services, which are traditionally billed and accounted for on a time basis. My thesis was that, if we turned our attention to output rather than using time as a surrogate for productivity, we could restructure the workplace and the workday so that the desired output could be achieved in four days, rather than five. Unusually, my approach was then to offer, as an incentive, the additional time off to employees, but without a consequent reduction in salary. The concept of 100:80:100™ was born: 100 per cent five-day pay, 80 per cent time, with 100 per cent five-day productivity.
In contrast to many carefully researched and evaluated experiments, I really had no evidence other than instinct to back up my launch of the four-day week trial at Perpetual Guardian in 2018, but I had the luck or foresight to commission qualitative and quantitative research by two local universities to assess the impact of the trial on the business and its employees. The results were extraordinary.
Staff engagement scores rose between 30 and 40 per cent, to the highest level the researchers had ever seen in New Zealand. Employees reported that their teams had grown and strengthened throughout the trial, again to levels higher than comparative national data. As expected, work-life balance improved markedly, with staff having more time to rest and reconnect, to participate in family life, and to accomplish tasks in their personal lives.
What was not expected was that staff reported that they were better able to complete their work in four days rather than five, and that company revenue and profitability increased, the latter by 12.5 per cent. Sick days actually halved. Also unexpected was the media firestorm which accompanied the announcement of the trial, its results, and the subsequent announcement of the policy being made permanent in November 2018. At each stage, the media articles numbered over 10,000, from over 100 countries, and with a global audience of over five and a half billion.
What was not expected was that staff reported that they were better able to complete their work in four days rather than five.
It became increasingly clear that the key issue for most employees is the need (and desire) to have more time to devote to family responsibilities or personal matters. It was also clear, at least to us, that when employees had more free time, work time was not disrupted by attempts to handle these responsibilities during working hours. Creating an environment with a focus on output paid both business and personal dividends.
So many business leaders (and employees!) made contact with us asking about the trial that I was prompted to write a book, The 4 Day Week, and also to create a not-for-profit organisation, 4 Day Week Global, which works alongside governments, governmental bodies, companies, and organisations, either individually or through a country or regional group pilot. These pilot programmes last for six months, and we assist participants with developing their own 4-day / reduced-hours work week (not all companies can close for a day, so the model changes from company to company), and each trial is monitored by independent academic research co-ordinated by our research partners at Boston College in Massachusetts and Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Each of our country pilots also involves a local research partner. We also work alongside larger organisations wanting to introduce a four-day-week policy, but for whom a bespoke programme is necessary or desired, rather than the group programmes, which are mainly targeted at smaller to medium-sized entities.
To date, we have run nine pilots involving 350 companies and 9,000 employees across 25 countries, with a further 11 pilots underway or announced across diverse countries, including India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and France. This is not an issue only relevant to Western developed economies, but resonates worldwide. Interestingly, the research results from our South African pilot, the first in a developing economy, demonstrated similar outcomes and benefits to those from developed economies such as the UK, USA, EU, and Australia.
Participants are from all sectors – health, manufacturing, logistics, public services, retail, and education – and are factory- as well as office-based. I mention this simply because critics of the four-day week inevitably assume that the four-day week is not applicable to all businesses and sectors. To be clear, we are advocating reduced-hours working with no pay reduction, and this can come in different forms: closing for a day (usually only applicable to small businesses), staff taking different or rotating days off to maintain five- or seven-day operations, half days or five-day, compressed-hour weeks (the latter especially beneficial for working parents). My own company uses all of these, as we have retail branches across New Zealand and we cannot close during the conventional working week.
Research indicates that employees value the time off at a far higher price than business is prepared to pay for it. It is this incentive which drives the effectiveness of a four-day week. After the US trial, 15 per cent of employees said that their employer couldn’t pay them enough to induce them to go back to a five-day week, and a further 15 per cent would have required a 75 per cent pay increase.
The data from our trials is almost boringly consistent now. Almost without exception, 95 per cent of employees and 90 per cent of participating companies want to keep a four-day week on the conclusion of the trial. From an employee perspective, the benefits are reduced stress, better sleep patterns, more family or personal time, and an enhanced ability to focus.
From a business perspective, they see enhanced business performance. The US and UK trials saw revenue increase by over 33 per cent, a reduction in sick days by 60 per cent, and improved recruitment and staff retention dynamics, as well as higher levels of engagement. Their employees reported being healthier and happier. Research by Oxford University on the relationship between staff happiness and the share price performance of companies on the S&P 500 shows that there is an apparent direct correlation between happier staff and share price performance. Who would have thought that healthier, happier staff would perform better?
As the benefits appear to be significant and demonstrable, it is of considerable interest that business and governmental leaders continue to rail against the concept. After all, if the reduction in sick days demonstrated in the pilot programmes were reflected across the wider business community, the economic impact would be considerable. The UK alone loses 19 million days annually to sickness, with an adverse impact to GDP of £45 billion. There is also research, notably out of Henley Business School and others, which demonstrates the potential for significant environmental, infrastructure, and societal benefits with, if the evidence from our pilots and other experiments is to be believed, no adverse impact on output or profitability.
Why is it that, when we experiment and disrupt almost every aspect of our lives, we are not prepared to question the traditional five-day week?
Why is it deemed so threatening to at least question whether traditional methods of working are applicable or even relevant to the working environment and society in the 21st century? Why is it that, when we experiment and disrupt almost every aspect of our lives, we are not prepared to question the traditional five-day, 40-hour work week? The introduction of the five-day week was partially prompted to create new opportunities and certainly can be credited with the expansion of leisure and tourism markets in recent years.
There is no reason to believe that this would not address current issues facing society, such as gender pay equality, child care, the burgeoning cost of healthcare and care of the aged, as well as facilitating entrepreneurship, upskilling in the face of AI, or even – God forbid – time to train a citizen army, an issue now apparently faced by several European countries.
The four-day week is, at heart, a method of engaging employees to reimagine an enterprise. It is about removing blockages to productivity which are often not identified by traditional process-improvement strategies. It is about rethinking workplace design, about environmental changes to minimise interruptions by phones, emails, or social media, and to eliminate unproductive activity such as overlong or unstructured meetings. The key to a successful implementation is often not to overthink it as a leader, but to empower your employees with the not-inconsiderable incentive of the ultimate prize of reduced hours on full pay.
Spoiler alert. There is somewhere in the world a company or organisation in your sector and your business successfully applying and getting the benefits of a four-day week and they are attracting and retaining the best employees. The biggest risk to an organisation going forward may well not be introducing a four-day week, but dealing with the implications if their biggest competitor does it first.
