Why 4-day week trials are failing to get off the ground

Recently, there have been a number of proposed trials popping-up where companies are toying with the idea of a 4-day week to aid workplace wellbeing. This appears to have partly been inspired by organisations such as Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand trust business, who reported a 20% productivity increase after switching its 240 employees to a four-day week. Here's my thoughts as to why...

On reading in the Guardian that The Wellcome Foundation was considering such a trial, and given Diary Detox‘s claim to ‘give a day back in your diary every week’, we contacted Wellcome to see if we could help. They were very kind and acknowledged our interest and said that they may be in touch if the trial “got the go ahead”. This was exciting but I realised I had already made a fatal error in putting my case forward...more on that later.

Unfortunately, some weeks later, another article in the Guardian reported that the plans for the trial had been abandoned as it would be “too complex” and unfair on some staff. This was frustrating but, based on my error, unfortunately not completely surprising.

The article spoke of how there was, “concern that compressing work into a Monday to Thursday window could negatively affect the wellbeing of some workers, reducing productivity.”. Indeed, a prior, and unrelated University of Auckland study found increased stress among some people because of shorter timeframe to complete tasks.

Together, these points suggest that the decision to drop the idea of such a trial might be sound. But before we all pack up and go home, let’s consider why such stress may be perceived by employees who are being asked to compress their work into four days. It’s because those staff haven’t yet been introduced to any alternative method or technique for allowing them to compress that work. Indeed, asking employees to compress five days of work into four days is like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas, of course they won’t want to.

This was my mistake when I first approached Wellcome. I believe that I have created a product that would allow work that is compressible to be compressed. When offering to help Wellcome, it shouldn’t have been on the basis of making such a trial successful (although it would). It should have been sold as a way to make such a trial possible. Had I had the opportunity to work with those same staff who expressed concern at having to compress their work, I am sure there concerns would have been allayed.

Here's why...

We recently visited the head offices of a well-known high street brand and ran a Diary Detox® Discovery. This is a one-hour presentation to the whole company where not only do each of the employees get a surprising insight to how they each use their time, but the managment also get an insight into how much time is wasted every day. The results showed that, across all levels in the company, each employee (by their own admission) got no value from between 10% and 20% of their time. That’s between half a day and one day adding no value due to wasted meetings, emails and interruptions. If they were to address the waste problem alone (and there much more latitude for further improvement) they would already be at least 50% towards implementing a 4-day week.

Therefore, if you or your company is considering a trial of the four-day week, give me a call first. It’s possible that your people are already close to having the workload and bandwidth to achieve it.

A Diary Detox® Discovery will tell you how close.