Fitting 40 hours into 4 days - is it the best option?
Not for us…
Over a year ago we introduced our fully flexible working policy which has been a great success with the team and has massively helped with that much sought after “work life balance”. Our team could work a four-day week, work from home, work the weekends, work the evenings, whatever suited their own personal lives and also of course the business needs. When we first introduced the policy, we assumed that there would be a huge uptake in the 4-day working week and that this would be used by all employees regularly, but unfortunately this has not been the case. I was interested to understand why such a great perk was not being used and had a chat with the team to get some feedback.
The biggest factor was that it’s pretty hard to condense 40 hours a week into 4 days every week. Monday – Thursday felt like really long days and the team explained it was not leaving much time in the day to do life admin and spend time with their families. The majority of the team prefer to finish work at a more reasonable time Monday -Thursday then finish a few hours earlier on a Friday. Some of our team live an hour away from the office so with a 4-day week they would be leaving work at 6.30pm, getting home at 7.30 and by the time they get tea and see kids before bed it leaves little time in the evening for some much needed downtime.
After considering this feedback and really wanting to give something back to our team we are stepping outside of our comfort zone and introducing a two-month trial for a reduced hours 4-day week. So what does this mean? We will work 32 hours a week, Monday – Thursday and of course the same salary package. So as a really busy consultancy how on earth are we going to reduce everyone’s hours, pay everyone the same salary, get our projects completed on time and provide the same level of service and fees to our clients?
That’s what we are hopefully going to find out! Research conducted by other companies has shown that by reducing the hours that employees have to complete tasks makes them look for ways of being more efficient and that productivity increases. You know yourself if you have a Friday booked off as annual leave you are typically much more productive on the days leading up to your day off and get much more done - less procrastination time. We as company are starting to look at how we can be more productive and are starting to monitor and understand employee efficiencies. We need to better understand how we can do what we do but better. Alongside becoming more efficient we need to maintain and keep improving our level of quality and service to our valued clients.
We see this as a massive benefit to our team and will continue to monitor the success of the trial to see if we really can produce the same amount of quality work in less time. There is no if, buts or maybes – the office will be closed on Fridays and employees will have to take the day off (unless they have a meeting to attend that can’t be rescheduled). We hope that our employees will be less stressed, have more quality time outside of work and have a true work life balance. The trial starts in July and will finish at the end of August, so keep your eyes peeled for an update on how the trial went, how we are monitoring efficiencies and if the reduced hour 4-day week will become a permanent perk.