David Stone is half way through a six-month trial of the four-day working week and he's never been happier. “As a boss, you can get a quick win by letting your staff leave a bit early one day,” he says. “So imagine telling your staff they can get paid their full salary to only work four days. People will want to join, and they will never leave.”
Stone gets excited about staff retention. He established MRL, a niche recruitment company for the high technology market, in Brighton in 1997 and led it through the choppy waters of the dot-com crash at the beginning of the millennium, a period of rapid growth in 2007 and then another recession when Lehman Brothers went bust in 2008. It was 2015 when he saw the LinkedIn post by a former colleague called John Nash, detailing Nash’s decision to switch his own recruitment company to four-day weeks. Then he pretty much forgot about it for four years.
At the moment the four-day week is possible only in the most progressive companies, implemented by bosses like Stone who return to it when business is smooth. But imagine – as the Labour Party has recently – that it becomes mandatory across all industries. The Labour-backed study, written by the economist Robert Skidelsky warned against increasing exhaustion as contracted employees crammed their work into four days, plus negative impacts on unskilled and zero-hours workers who need the hours to get paid. Yet pressure for such a shift is mounting. In France, a law was introduced in 2016 giving workers the right to disconnect from emails at the weekends.
In China, anonymous activists have been campaigning to apply labour laws to the country’s programmers, who work 12 hours a day, six days a week, some ending up in hospital with exhaustion. In the UK, proponents say policy is essential to stop the emergence of a “new-dualism” where some service-economy workers like Stone’s can afford free-time and others cannot. They worry that if it is left to the market, some companies will opt for a four-day week while Uber drivers and Amazon factory workers will continue to work longer and more unpredictable hours without contracts or benefits, just to stay afloat. With the labour market so fragmented, it becomes harder to judge whether the four-day week is a promised utopia, or a suppression of the right to work.
For Paul Sellers, pay policy officer at the Trades Union Congress, the debate has echoes of battles for workers rights across the decades. Sellers left school in the 60s, when people had just stopped doing five-and-a-half-day weeks in the factories. “Strangely enough it’s often on the agenda when the economy is doing well,” he says of reductions in working hours. “Right now the labour market is tight, we have a record low in terms of the number of people unemployed and the number of vacancies, what’s missing is the quality of jobs.”
When the Trades Union Congress held its first meeting in 1868, the average worker laboured 62 hours a week. Today, including part time workers, the average number of hours is 32. The story of the shortening working weeks is one that spans trades union history, from the labour groups that fought for an eight-hour day in the nineteenth century and the two-day weekend in the twentieth century.
Those gains weren’t made by accident. Employers have throughout history argued that they could make more money if people worked longer. Adults were expected to work unlimited hours and six days a week in 1800, with no paid holidays. It took experimental bosses, like Stone and Nash, to try different ways of working. During 1800 and 1815, the industrialist Robert Owen reduced the working day to ten and a half hours in his New Lanark Mills, once the largest cotton manufacturing establishment in Scotland employing some 2,500 people. But it would take 50 years for the ten-hour day to be enshrined in law, with the Factory Act of 1847. The eight-hour day did not follow for another 50 years, after it became the subject of the first May Day event in UK history, bringing 200,000 workers out to campaign for it in Hyde Park.
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Today, 63 per cent of Britons support a four-day full-time working week, according to YouGov data. People in the UK have the most enthusiasm for a four-day week out of seven nations surveyed, including France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden. But the UK also works longer hours than anywhere else in the EU, according to the TUC, and productivity has slumped since the financial crisis, with workers producing 16 per cent less on average than counterparts in other members of the Group of Seven leading economies in 2016, according to data from the ONS.
“Business needs to understand that the way we are working now is getting in the way of their ability to be productive,” says Charlotte Lockhart, chief executive of 4 Day Week Global, a company established in September 2019 to push for more businesses to adopt the four-day week. Lockhart started the company after being inundated with questions after another company she owned, Perpetual Guardian, made the switch in 2018.
Perpetual Guardian trialled a four-day week during March and April 2018 in which staff worked four eight-hour days but were paid for five. In an independent study, researchers at the Auckland University of Technology found workers at the firm, which employs 240 staff, found that stress levels decreased seven percentage points across the board, while overall life satisfaction increased by five percentage points.
The trial had an impact. Tris Williams first read about it while browsing the news in the summer of 2018. Williams started a board games company called Big Potato with two co-founders in Shoreditch in 2014. It has since expanded to 20 people. Williams had always prided himself on running a progressive company. Big Potato offered its workers flexible working hours and cake and sandwiches on Friday lunchtimes, when everyone got together to play games. When he saw Perpetual Guardian’s story he said to his co-founders Ben Drummond and Dean Tempest: “We own a company, we can do what we want, let’s try it out.”
They called in Autonomy, a think tank, in February 2019 to discuss how to prepare. Autonomy had just published a research paper in January making the case that the shorter working week was a powerful and practical response to a whole host of trends in the labour market, including job polarisation, the explosion of precarious forms of work, gendered inequalities, stagnating productivity, automation and inequality.
“It’s really important from the get go that we get buy-in from workers,” says Will Stronge, director of Autonomy. “So we start with workers and how they would change their work. We say, ‘If you can make this work, you can have Friday off.’ People are motivated by the idea of having more free time.”
Autonomy worked with each department to help them squash their duties into fewer days. They trialled “blitzing hours” for the sales team, where sales people got into a room and made a certain number of calls all together, all at once, to quickly hit targets. They introduced a quiet room for people to use when they need to focus, and they cut meetings. The logistics and warehouse team put together their own FAQ of what to do if a delivery was necessary when the team was not at work. “All these different practices were tightening up their workload,” Stronge says. “At every single stage they said, ‘This is great, we can make this work, if I need to, I can take some calls on Friday.’ All the energy staff were putting in was based on them getting something out of it.”
Emily Bond has been head of UK sales at Big Potato for two and a half years. She remembers first hearing about the idea of a four-day week from Williams and the directors at a meeting in the summer of 2018. “At first it sounded life-changing,” she remembers. But then she thought about it. Her bonus relies on the productivity of her team. “From a sales perspective, you have one less day a week to be searching out new leads and new customers. You think: ‘This is going to mess up the numbers.’”
When the trial started in May, some of the younger members of staff needed to be reminded that flexible working was over and the rules had changed. Bond says the transition was helped by the introduction of hard rules to encourage people to get into the office at 9.30am and leave at 6pm. The company switched from 25 days holiday plus their birthday, to 20 days and no leave on birthdays, to counterbalance the fact that they had every Friday off. “The idea is that you have Friday off, so you get things done on that day,” Williams says. “You can’t go to the dentist at 11am on a Monday, or have a fridge delivered at 4pm on a Tuesday afternoon. Well – it’s not that you can’t. But the idea is that you get it done on a Friday.”
Bond says the atmosphere has changed. “We are definitely more focussed,” she says. “The mood in the office is different.” She hasn’t put on an out-of-office for Fridays and still checks her emails for anything urgent: “From a sales point of view, if a client wanted something urgently and they knew I wasn’t in on a Friday, they might go to another company. I want to make sure we make the sale.”
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Throughout history, productivity has repeatedly been shown to increase when labour works fewer hours. In 1926, Henry Ford found that productivity and profits increased when he became one of the first employers to introduce a five-day, 40-hour week. In 1930, Kellogg reduced factory accidents by 41 per cent with the introduction of the six-hour day. Many office workers will agree with Bond when she says: “Not a lot of productive things go on on a Friday.” Bond was surprised to notice how few emails she got on her new day off. “If I need to get out my laptop and answer a couple of emails on a Friday, I’m not going to moan. I can do it at home in my pyjamas.”
By contrast, the extra day has revitalised her leisure time. She spends Fridays exploring other cities, doing up her holiday flat in Wales or simple doing the housework – a common thread among those who spoke to WIRED, who said their four-day week created time for housework and the emotional labour of caring for children and the elderly without suffering a pay cut. This disproportionately affects women, who still do an average of 26 hours a week of unpaid domestic labour, including cooking and cleaning, according to the ONS, alongside 74 per cent of all childcare.
A four-day week gives people more time for civic activities that are important to the running of a democracy. “Democracy, I mean it in its widest sense, setting up a community land trust, being part of a union or taking part in a protest movement or being on the PTA or helping run the residents association – takes time,” says Lianna Etkind, a campaigns manager with the London Community Land trust, who works four days a week. “Time to be well informed and to learn about the issues in a way that's deeper than a tweet, but also time to deliberate and take action and exchange views.”
Yet today, the historical drivers of shorter working hours – legislation, union pressure and innovative employers – are weak. As the economy has shifted to service industries, it has become less susceptible to sudden technological advancements in manufacturing that preceded shorter hours on Ford’s production lines and in Kellogg’s factories. Employers find it harder to implement blanket policies in modern workplaces. The Wellcome Collective discovered this in April, when it dropped plans to trial a four-day week for its 800 staff saying it was too “operationally complex”. The company had mooted giving staff Fridays off with no reduction in pay, but scrapped the scheme because it would make life harder for employees in back office and support functions.
A four-day week is more complicated in public-facing jobs like medicine and teaching, two professions in which pressure on staff has been building. Some 92 per cent of teachers and 70 per cent of nurses said they were required to work “very hard” in a 2018 study of work intensity in Britain.
But when France introduced a 35-hour working week with two laws in 1998 and 2001, it created a shortage of nurses as not enough qualified medical professionals were available to compensate for the reduced hours, making those in work even more stressed. In his report for the Labour Party, Skidelsky reveals that unskilled workers were disproportionately poorly affected by the changes in France, with many facing increasingly unpredictable working hours and less control over their schedules. “Implementation of working time reduction needs to be considered carefully on a sectoral basis,” Skidelsky says. “A one-size-fits-all approach will inevitably lead to problems in some sectors.”
For bosses like Stone, the decision to switch to a four-day week comes down to that simple competitive advantage: people will want to join, and they will never leave. But it took 50 years for the shorter hours trialled by the Victorian industrialists to become enshrined in legislation. And if, eventually, the four-day week is commonplace, Stone’s advantage is null.
Even now, the longer-term effects of shorter working hours among the early-movers are unclear. “There has been much attention given to recent examples of companies undergoing three- or six-month trials,” John Nash, the recruiter who inspired Stone, says. His company Nicholson Search and Selection has hired 15 people since 2015 and only lost two members of staff who were let go because they were unsuitable. “The reality is that you can only truly measure its success or otherwise after several years,” Nash says. “But for us, it’s been a huge success.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
