At one large company in New Zealand, some employees no longer work on Fridays. Others don’t work Wednesdays. But everyone is paid a full-time salary.
Perpetual Guardian, a statutory trust company with 240 employees, first tested a four-day workweek in early 2018, collaborating with academic researchers from two Auckland universities to study the impact on its business. After the eight-week-long trial, employees reported lower levels of stress, higher levels of job satisfaction, and a much greater sense of work-life balance. Just as significantly, despite the reduced hours, productivity didn’t decline. In November, the company decided to make the changes permanent. Andrew Barnes, the company’s founder, has thus far seen no downside. “In fact, the company is performing better than it did last year.”
Barnes had noticed employees struggling to maintain work-life balance when he happened upon research about average levels of productivity: One U.K. survey suggests that British workers are productive for only two hours and 53 minutes each day. By giving people an extra day off, he theorized, they might be better able to manage the other demands in their lives, which could be distracting them in the office.
He tasked employees with creating their own plans to maintain and measure productivity. “The teams themselves sat down and said, ‘How do we make lots of little changes that will enable us to deliver the outcome?'” Barnes says. Meetings were shortened or cut. People spent less time browsing the internet. Employees experimented with small flags on their desks to signal to coworkers that they were busy and shouldn’t be disturbed. “At the end of the trial, most people said they were better able to deliver their workload over four days than the five,” he says. Employees also reported feeling significantly more empowered than they had before the trial, more stimulated and satisfied by their jobs, more confident in the company leadership, and more committed. Work-life balance scores increased from 54% to 78%. Job stress dropped seven percentage points.
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