The four-day week – should we or shouldn’t we?

Option 1

What a great option to create flexibility for those who want it. The employer gets to keep a valued worker who is seeking a better home/work balance, and the employee keeps their valued job whilst getting more time for themselves. There are numerous reasons why this can work to benefit both parties. It’s a win/win. If you implement this, we recommend employees get the choice to increase or decrease their hours once every 12 months (bear in mind though that new legislation in 2024 gave employees the option to make two flexible working requests in any 12 month period).

Option 2

I’m confused about this one as for several years now – and even reports out this week – the message has been that employees are working too hard and need shorter working hours/more down time. We have seen massive increases in sickness absence too, plus enough wellbeing issues to keep us all in HR going for a few years and we hear about a widespread general employee malaise about working too hard, too much stress and burnout. I’m not even going to mention all those social media campaigns urging employees to do the bare minimum. But now some want to work a longer day and, when challenged on this, shrug nonchalantly and say they can easily work a longer day?

Something just doesn’t add up. Either they’ve been swinging the lead for the last few years or right now they are trying to persuade us that this will work as it’s a massive benefit for them. I’m inclined to the latter as I do genuinely see a lot of worn out, anxious or stressed people although sometimes I think that if some of our employees spent less time on stress inducing social media, they might not feel so worn out and exhausted by work and life.

So, if people get a four-day week, meaning they work effectively across four longer days and then have three days to relax each week, I can see the benefit. Everybody wins, which is what we all want.

But I don’t think it should be approved for everyone. Anyone who has been struggling with stress, anxiety, depression or burnout should not be given permission to work longer days. HR should be very wary of not thinking through whether they might be held responsible if in a few years’ time an employee hits the wall and decides to sue the company over it. It’s irresponsible to agree to longer working days for someone who has told us they are struggling.

Also, its not going to be a win if your employee is zinging along on a four-day week, earning money for a five-day week but then decides to take on an extra job in their ‘spare’ day, to temporarily increase their earnings as they want to get a mortgage, buy a car, or have children etc. Filling that extra day will be so tempting for many.

Now you have an employee who you think has better work/life balance but whose manager notices is more tired than ever before, due to now working a 45 hour week – or more in some cases. And the longer they work doing a second job on the extra day that you kindly freed up for them, the more they will get used to thinking of their salary as being the total of what you and their other employer pays them. A new ‘normal’ has been created.

The consequences of this might be:

• Even if they get bored or fed up, they probably won’t be able to leave your employment as it will be hard to find another employer offering the same money for 28/30 hours. The law of life dictates that the more we earn, the more we spend and therefore, the more we need! You are left with an employee who doesn’t want to be with you but who can’t afford to resign. You are left dealing with disengagement and reduced productivity.
• Increased sickness absence and/or poor mental wellbeing resulting from the pressures of holding two jobs down over 40+ hours.
• Reduced flexibility and frustration for managers as you can never now ask your employee to work the additional day, even in an emergency
• Reduced productivity which always happens when someone is feeling disengaged
• Increased admin as employers have a responsibility to manage working hours in line with the 48-hour week. This becomes particularly relevant once you know your employee has a second job. The 2^ndemployer has an equal responsibility to ensure both jobs do not exceed the threshold without agreement.
• Increased pressure on you for promotions and/or pay increases as this is the only way for your employee to extract themselves from this finance trap without having to accept reduced earnings.
• Just for information about the impact of extended hours, productivity expert Chris Bailey identified that the ideal work week is 35 hours and working more than 35 hours a week can have long-term damaging effects such as stress and fatigue, despite an initial (4 week) spike in employee productivity.

So, there is high potential with this option that your win/win option just became a lose/lose option, simply because no-one understood the potential long-term consequences.

By the way, it would be illegal for you to include in any new contract that your employee is not able to take up secondary employment when not working for you if you wanted to pre-empt this situation.

Option 3

This is about maintaining salaries AND hours but asking your employees to up their productivity to ensure revenue/outputs across the organisation don’t drop.

If you have employees who say they can maintain their productivity while working 20% fewer hours either:

1. they already have insufficient work to do, or
2. they already know they are under performing/under delivering so have spare capacity, or
3. they know you are introducing a new process or technology that will enable them to up their productivity, or
4. they don’t care about productivity so it’s a meaningless statement/promise

If they’re not performing at the correct level currently, giving them a four-day week will not solve your problem of productivity or engagement. In fact, if you have any deliberately not performing at the correct level this is an act of misconduct, meaning that if you pander to it and agree a four-day week, you are effectively colluding to defraud your own organisation – or the investors/customers who fund it. Wow that sounds harsh when I write it like that, but I can’t find a better way to explain it … if you allow or choose not to manage under performance then you are turning a blind eye to it, which will in the long term reduce the overall success of your own organisation.

I’m trying to think of a positive spin on this option. There must be a way to get it to work so it’s a win/win. As a suggestion … how about if it’s just temporary e.g. for one month in the summer or after a particularly busy period at work when productivity has been high? A great reward and thank you to staff without any contractual obligations for the future.

If you push ahead though and reduce to a permanent four-day week whilst maintaining salary on the understanding of improved productivity, here’s a few of the potential long term unintended consequences that you would need to mitigate in advance:

• Those in the early career stage will now get 20% less time at work and therefore 20% less time to learn the skills they need to succeed in the long term.
• Will anyone be able to afford to leave you if they can’t find a job that matches the salary they are getting for 4 days? My experience across the last 25 years has shown me that employees paid above market rates can become a liability if they stop enjoying working for you (or you stop wanting to employ them) but they can’t afford to get a different job.
• Will investors looking to invest in you or acquire your organisation, challenge your productivity and/or head count and could this become a deal breaker given they would have to take on the liability/contractual benefits you have agreed to.
• How are you going to work this with part-time staff so they are not disadvantaged compared to full-time staff (as required by law). Is this where it has the potential to get very admin heavy and messy?
• If you ever have to make redundancies or dismiss for other reasons, your ex-employees earning full time salaries over four days may be more inclined to claim against you when they find they can’t find a new job on an equivalent salary elsewhere.
• How long will it be before the four-day salary is ‘normalised’ as a normal rate for the job meaning no one expects to have to achieve the higher level of productivity? Employees will continue to have a ‘win’ whilst the organisation now ‘loses’.
• If your service or product provision is being harmed and a few years from now you decide you need to move back to a five day week, will that result in the most enormous loss of engagement and good will and could your organisation survive that?

And finally…

Again, just to be clear I have nothing against flexibility and finding ways to organise work so individuals and their employees feel they have struck a good balance.

However, all managers and directors (and trustees) have a clear legal duty to organise work in a way that ensures, ahead of responding to employee wishes/wants or media pressures, the longevity, viability/sustainability of the organisation. I believe that ill consideration of long-term consequences, or refusal to consider or mitigate the consequences, when introducing a 4-day week can jeopardize the long-term viability of an organisation. Beware the unintended consequences and please be wise in your decisions!