I’m often asked why I decided to move my company to a four-day week. My answer is why not? Imagine getting your work done productively, effectively and within four days. Who would say no to getting the same payment for doing the job, and having a bank holiday every week, while increasing company productivity, profitability, staff retention and overall employee satisfaction?
That hasn’t been our experience. When we went from a 39- to a 36-hour week, spread over four nine-hour days, we initially saw a 27 per cent increase in productivity. That pretty much continues four years on. For the first 2½ years, we had almost full retention. Since then, and particularly since Covid ended, we’ve seen a reduction in retention, particularly among younger employees who want to travel outside Ireland.
While a four-day week may not suit every situation, there are many organisations where it does work; where it leads to improved working conditions and a greater sense of wellbeing for teams. It’s also better for their families, better for our communities and certainly better for our climate. Some of the biggest challenges can be ramping up for a new project – with a shorter working week, people can find there is temporarily more pressure and intensity in the work day. But that can be alleviated by better planning.
A recent trial of the four-day week by Krystal Holdings in the UK demonstrates the issues in customer service industries. In their experiment involving 18 staff, who took either Monday or Friday off, the results showed that. Other organisations had better outcomes, but it is also the case that all participants were self-selecting into the trial. The majority were from the marketing, advertising and professional services industries where working hours could be better managed.
As evidenced by the experience in Sweden, it is not possible for all roles to be performed across four days. In many circumstances, the employer must recruit new workers to cover for the fifth day – in the case of nursing, no amount of productivity gains over four days can replace a nurse on day five. Currently, we don’t even have the capacity to recruit for the number of nurses we need, which begs the question of where this additional capacity would come from.