Four-day working week a life-changer for young mother

Tuesday, 1 November 2022

Annabel Harris says working a four-day week is a gift that allows her to spend more time with her son, Hugo.

Annabel Harris says a four-day working week has not just changed the way she works, but the way she lives her life.

Harris is a customer director at Unilever, a global consumer goods company that trialled a four-day week for its New Zealand workforce over the past 18 months, in conjunction with the Sydney University of Technology (UTS).

The trial, which has been extended, allows Unilever staff in New Zealand and Australia to work four days a week, at 100% of their salary, and tracks the impact on worker productivity.

For Harris the trial was not just a corporate exercise, but the gift of more time with her 1-year-old son, Hugo.

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“It is honestly a gift that has enabled me to have a more harmonious work-life balance,” she said.

“I love what I do for a job, but I am conscious as a mum that you never get this time back. So to be able to not compromise my career and have more time with my child has been amazing.”

The four-day week meant Harris had to “significantly rethink the way she worked”.

It meant daily tasks had to prioritised, and completed one by one, not through multitasking. It also meant fewer meetings, and more face-to-face chats with her team while in the office, she said.

But the result was that by the end of the first month of the project, she found she was getting more work done in a week despite working one less day, she said.

Unilever staff who had a four-day week during the study said their stress dropped by a third, their feelings of strength and vigour at work increased by 15%, and conflict resulting from work/life balance fell 67%.

“Everyone can see merit in rethinking the way we work. It could be argued this is a radical measure, but it has forced us to rethink [working] and I will forever benefit from that,” she said.

Harris was not alone, as the results of the four-day week study by UTS showed overwhelmingly positive results in both the productivity and the wellbeing of staff involved.

Workers involved in the study said their stress dropped by a third. And feelings of strength and vigour at work increased by 15%. Unhappiness with work-life balance conflict fell 67%.

Perpetual Guardian has been a champion of the four day week (video first published in 2020).

Professor Bronwen Dalton, head of the department of management at UTS business school, which conducted the trial, said the research was the most comprehensive study into flexible work to date.

“The four-day week exceeded every parameter we set. Performance and productivity were way up, [absences] and stress were down,” Dalton said. “It was just a phenomenal success in nearly every dimension.”

Field-based Unilever workers such as sales staff, who needed to be at a particular site to do their job, found a four-day week disruptive to their usual work arrangements, she said.

Overwhelmingly, businesses that trialled four-day weeks experienced a lift in productivity and found workers were less burdened by meetings, emails and other distractions, she said.

But many businesses in Australia and New Zealand were not willing to try a four-day week because of the persistence of an outdated “command culture”, she said.

“We now know there is no productivity benefit to a five-day week, but it is part of traditional hierarchy structures. Some bosses still want employees to turn up at a certain time, to monitor where they are and what they are doing. It is not about productivity, it is about culture,” Dalton said.

4-Day Week Global co-founder Charlotte Lockhart said the four-day working week was on the precipice of taking off in New Zealand.

As well as Unilever’s high-profile trial, in March the results of another four-day week trial across 70 businesses in Britain and Ireland would bring more data about the benefits of the practice, Lockhart said.

Already in New Zealand, there was strong interest from the government, the private sector and union groups, so it was only a matter of time before more businesses in New Zealand came on board, Lockhart said.

“We all know the future of work is going to look a lot different to the way work looks now. Companies are all grappling with this; the sensible ones are doing their best to redefine work so it is fit for purpose moving forward.

“We believe that it is possible to have a fully productive place of work with reduced working hours,” Lockhart said.

She expected by March another 20 New Zealand businesses would have signed up to trial a four-day week.