Will The Four-Day Week Have Its Day Post-Pandemic?
For many, Covid-19 has put life-work balance into perspective, with wellbeing now high on the ... [+] priority list when it comes to work. getty  In the last year, the way we think about productivity has had to radically change. With an 8.8% loss of working hours globally (equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs), productivity gains already at a 250-year low before Covid, and remote work still looking like the new normal, the working world is less busy than it has been in living memory. As employers have had to cut hours and rely on government job retention schemes to keep businesses afloat, there has been an increased focus on maintaining employee wellbeing throughout the pandemic. To preserve this focus on mental health and work-life balance, the four-day working week has seen renewed interest, with some firms seeing it as a way of giving back to employees after their sacrifices this year. A reduced stress-test  The concept of the four-day working week is fairly simple: by concentrating the working week into four days (or 32 hours in different models), people tend to spend more time being productive instead of watching the clock (some research suggests UK workers are productive for only two hours and 23 minutes each day), and also have more time to spend on themselves. This in turn fosters a healthier work-life balance, reduces burnout, and helps people be more engaged when they are at work. In 2018 a New Zealand company, Perpetual Guardian, became one of the first private companies to trial a four-day week with all 240 of its staff. The trial was a success, with employees reporting a 24% improvement in work-life balance (from 54% to 78%), a 7% reduction in stress, and the company seeing around a 20% increase in productivity. This change was then made permanent, and Barnes and his partner Charlotte Lockhart started a non-profit foundation to further promote the concept. Since then many other companies have toyed with the idea of a four-day week (notably Microsoft Japan, whose 2019 trial program saw productivity gains of 40%), and several countries have raised the issue either in response to the pandemic or to promote wellbeing - with Spain this year going as far as announcing a three-year trial of a 32-hour week for around 200 companies. Time to step back  CreativeX is a technology company that develops software to help global brands such as Unilever, Heineken, and Renault to measure the quality, consistency, compliance, and representation of their content worldwide.The company has around fifty employees with offices in New York, London, and Portland, Oregon. Like many other teams, CreativeX shifted their model to working from home in 2020, but while we were getting more things done, says founder and CEO Anastasia Leng, I was concerned that the deeper, bigger projects that required more mind space were getting pushed to the backburner. Asking employees about this, Leng found that the pandemic had blurred the boundaries between work and personal life and that employees had no chance to step back from work, says Leng. With this in mind, Leng came up with her own version of a four-day working week called Elevate Fridays that put a focus on regaining this higher-level strategic thinking.  Under this variant of the four-day week, people can spend Fridays doing anything that helps them create mind space to accomplish really impactful work, explains Leng. During these non-traditional workdays, as Leng calls them, activities can involve anything from training for a marathon, talking to someone more advanced in their career, or simply sitting and thinking - the only two rules are that you cant do day-to-day work and you must be intentional about how you use your time. Aside from allowing employees to step back and think of new ways to approach work-related challenges, says Leng, this structure was also intended to improve overall wellbeing and self-esteem, with this time set aside for development having significant positive effects on overall career growth, job satisfaction, and mental health. Lengs theory behind Elevate Fridays is also that having a day to focus on personal or professional development can also help people become better at prioritizing what is important in life, which carries over into better prioritization at work, although perhaps the four-day week structure itself leads to better prioritization as a direct result of having to concentrate ones time. After a twelve-week trial (which will now be extended to the end of August), Leng reports that there have been some very positive results across four core areas: balancing work/home commitments, general wellbeing, productivity, and job fulfillment. Taking data from employee pulse surveys and discussions at regular meetings, CreativeX has seen an average 30% improvement in these areas with particular wins around productivity and wellbeing - employees are 50% more likely to feel productive on week 12 (than week 1) and 54% less likely to struggle with work-life balance, says Leng. While these improvements to productivity and work-life balance are similar to other trials, CreativeXs trial also suggested that people in different job roles reacted differently to the change. People doing project-based work such as marketing and engineering had a particularly high sense of productivity and balance after twelve weeks, says Leng. However, engineers were more likely to use Fridays as a dedicated time slot for training, suggesting that this extra day off was used to reduce the workload of the rest of the week rather than to step back from work entirely. Those in more client-facing roles such as product operations and sales teams found the Elevate Fridays structure more challenging, Leng reports, as losing a day of emails can significantly increase response times for users who need technical support - which could easily lead to employees feeling more stressed out by falling behind on work. Leng notes that this is one of the issues to be ironed out, stating that our customer-facing teams need better support and resources to ensure they can take a break without being pulled back into their inbox. While these results may suggest that a four-day week does not suit those with a more or less fixed or continuous workload (compared to those whose workload will ease with more available mind space), a happy medium between this four-day model and a variable 32-hour model could help to spread the load more evenly. Indeed, the productivity improvements seen in this trial and others could not only make room for more staff to support technical or client-based roles (Leng points out that their hiring process now focuses on outcomes not hours) but would arguably decrease churn and improve overall output, while maintaining a stable work-life balance for all staff. Back to life, back to productivity  The four-day model, as with any working structure, is not without its issues, but with wellbeing now at the top of peoples priority list it is clear that attitudes to work are changing, says Leng, and people are now more interested in becoming a better-rounded individual, who is not solely defined by what they do for a living.  A four-day week could allow people to keep their wellbeing and work/life balance front and center as things move back to normal. If the results of trials by CreativeX, Perpetual Guardian, and even Microsoft can be applied across the board, less time at work might actually make us more productive after all.