Australian business leaders urged to “dip the toes in” as another four-day work week trial confirms the benefits

The UK results of a large-scale trial of the four-day work week are in, and the results look very promising. Closer to home, Amantha Imber, founder and CEO at Inventium, and Garry Williams of Tractor Ventures, have experienced similar success.

A six-month trial in the UK undertaken by 61 businesses who had either already been working a four-day work week, or were undergoing and testing the switch, was conducted by 4 Day Week Global and Autonomy Research.

This week, Phil McParlane, founder of 4 Day Week, an online job board for jobs with shorter working weeks, posted the results of the UK trial on LinkedIn. They included:

• 92% of companies will continue with the 32-hour week
• 35% increase of revenue (over previous year)
• A 57% decrease in staff leaving jobs
• 37% increase in mental health
• Burnout reduced by 71%
• Stress reduced by 39%

Other benefits included a decrease in absenteeism and easier hiring.

“Wow,” he said in the post. “These results are even better than I had hoped for. A shorter work week is just around the corner.”

So the movement is gaining traction in the UK, and plenty of McParlane’s followers were interested to learn more — in a subsequent LinkedIn comment, McParlane said “this post crashed my site”, though it’s back up now.

SmartCompany spoke with two leaders in Australian business who’ve had success with the four day work week.

The first was Inventium founder Amantha Imber. Inventium began a trial of the four-day work week in the middle of 2020. “The whole world was in a pretty bad place then”, she recalled, and said that while engagement and morale at Inventium was quite good, the company was “looking at ways that we could do a bit of a reset on culture.”

A trial began to see if it would improve things like stress levels, engagement and job satisfaction. After six months Imber said it was “an outright success.” It has been a permanent fixture at Inventium for two and a half years now, and Imber “couldn’t imagine going back to a normal five day week, to be honest.”

At Inventium, the arrangement is pretty flexible, “with the theory that if you can get your work done, between Monday and Thursday, in ideally four normal-length, 7-8 hour days, then you get the gift of time by Friday.”

Staffers are paid the same full time salary but are trusted to drop Friday if they’ve completed their work for the week. Imber said in practice, people take Friday off about 75 percent of the time.

At Tractor Ventures, a month-long trial began in June 2021. “The reasoning was a mixture of an intense weekly workload, with knowing that Fridays were a typically low production day on the external front,” explained engagement director Garry Williams.

“The experiment validated the idea,” he said,  “and the Fridays have been taken off ever since.”

To manage the new format, Tractor has a “massive emphasis” on asynchronous communications and intentional meetings. “Each meeting has a significant cost,” Williams said, “even more so if there are more than two people in the room.”

“So we think pretty carefully about the time we are taking up in the other days rather than the time we are losing on a Friday.”

Try the four-day work week trial

There’s understandably a bit of reluctance or nerves from many others in business considering the four-day work week. Imber and Williams both recommend just giving it a try.

“Run it as an experiment”, Imber said. “If you’re feeling nervous, don’t launch into a massive policy change ride, just run it as an experiment.”

“Set some hypotheses, what are you hoping will happen if you shift to a four day week?

“Is it about improving productivity, is it about reducing staff turnover, is it about job satisfaction and engagement?”

If the hypotheses are supported, she said, “then you’ve got some data to go ‘hmm, maybe we should roll this out further’.”

“Dip the toes in,” said Williams, who also understands dropping a day won’t work for everyone. “Try it for a month; see what the results are. See what the results for you are.

“Then remember that post-2pm Friday is usually some of the lowest productivity going around, and the morning is not much better. You’d be amazed at the energy and intention people bring to their role when you provide some extra space to prioritise and focus.”

The large scale UK trial was part of an even larger ongoing movement by 4 Day Week Global. It looked at administrative data from companies and survey data from employees. Companies provided monthly data on metrics like revenue, absenteeism, resignations and new hires.

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