Work-life balance: 'An issue that's time has come'

Saturday, 23 February 2019

Could the four-day week be coming to your workplace soon?

A tool kit for employers interested in implementing the four-day week was released this week, building on the trial and eventual adoption of the work style by Perpetual Guardian.

For eight weeks the financial services firm trialled a four-day working week with 240 staff, without reduced pay, to see what effect it would have on the productivity and motivation of workers.

Perpetual Guardian founder and managing director Andrew Barnes teamed up with the University of Auckland and Auckland University of Technology to measure the success of the initiative. The results were win-win, finding productivity is maintained, stress levels are lowered, and work-life balance is improved.

Now, the white paper has turned those results into recommendations for businesses looking to do the same.

Founder and managing director Andrew Barnes said there was no downside to introducing the four-day week.

* Perpetual Guardian makes four-day week permanent

* The four-day working week: Build it and they will hum**

Key recommendations include creating policies that can flex depending on workloads and requirements, ensuring staff understand there will be times they won't get their rest day and ensuring productivity measures are individualised for different people and parts of the business.

Professor of human resource management at AUT Business School Dr Jarrod Haar conducted the quantitative analysis said trust in management went up among employees and also across teams because people have to rely upon each other to get the work done. This contributes to greater engagement, performance and retention.

However, Barnes' experience led him to establish an opt-in process because not everyone wants to work a four day week. But even more, the opt-in allows Barnes to gift his employees a day off. It's an important part of how it works, he said.

'People are acknowledging that this is quite a special thing, and that means that we get the productivity we need, and in turn, our employees get the work-life balance that they need', Barnes said.

Barnes has found the level of interest huge both in New Zealand and abroad.

'We continue to get people from all countries contacting us about how they do the four day week. We've had over a thousand requests for the white paper now. Big multi-national companies that you've heard of, all the way down to very small companies,' Barnes said.

OECD data shows kiwis work an average of 43.3 hours each week, but that our productivity is poor. The four-day week is a way of addressing this.

Andrew Barnes, managing director of Perpetual, Guardian says the four-day week is about productivity.

Barnes said its also a way to stop the potential leak of employees into freelance gigging, usually in search of greater flexibility.

'The danger is that in a gig environment the employer has no incentive whatsoever to invest in you, no incentive to upskill you because they're asking you to deal with a particular task for which they pay you. That's the job; that's what you get.'

On top of that, gig workers have no holiday pay, sick pay, superannuation and other hard-won rights that employees have.

'If we can find a way to deliver flexibility to people but preserve access to all of those protections, that's a better thing. And that basically means the country isn't going to pick up an enormous tab in 30 years time,' Barnes said.

Richard Wagstaff, president of the Council of Trade Unions, said that unions had been pushing for shorter working weeks for decades before it went backwards in the 1970s. He said it's important to give workers control over when they work rather than being endlessly available.

'We would support all of those things, and we really welcome this initiative and we would urge other firms and workers to see what had been learned from it and can we extend a reduction in working time, whilst maintaining good business,' he said.

According to the white paper, the four-day week has already engaged 4 billion people, generating 9500 social media posts and 2700 new articles.

A stumbling block Barnes encountered is the clearly defined normal hours of work in the Employment Relations Act, in particular, a five-day working week.

'If I have one appeal to the government it is to start to look at your legislation and recognise that we're having to do workarounds to get around this problem,' Barnes said.

but building on the success of Perpetual Guardian and making a wider impact is what it's all about now, Barnes said.

'This is something that New Zealand inc., the world inc. should be thinking about how to do it.'