A 2019 study of 250 UK businesses operating with a 4-day work week calculated that the participating companies had together already made an estimated annual savings of ninety-two billion pounds.

So going to a 4-day work week sounds like a no-brainer? It is likely that a 4-day work week is the answer to your staff’s prayers, but is it really the answer for your organisation’s?

To answer this question, it is important to understand how motivation and the resulting performance is affected by two key things: the leadership and the environment experienced by staff.

LEADERSHIP

There seems little doubt that staff would much prefer the 4-day work week. However, there is a bigger question for the organisation to consider: why can the staff produce the same output in four days that they were doing in five?

A key factor is presumably they are working better or harder in 4 days than they were in 5 days: if so, why?

• Is turnover/absenteeism down with the shorter week?
• Are staff just burnout from the full 5-day week and does a longer weekend mean they can apply themselves fully when back at work?
• Are staff disengaged by the management but becoming more engaged simply by the offering of the carrot of a 4-day week? If so, then how long will it last?
• Are the productivity measurements inaccurate?
• Is it because the organisation able to attract/ retain better talent (but this factor is unlikely to impact the outcome so quickly)?

ENVIRONMENT

Remember how managers were so pleasantly surprised by how hard their staff were working when the pandemic struck in 2020 when almost everyone moved to remote work? Many managers were understandably fearing the worst. But most organizations found that staff/teams were generally working even harder than before and thought that the benefit of remote work was settled. This missed understanding how context affects motivation and how “contexts” change.

ACTIONS

There are several systems to put in place for the 4-day week to work. Coaching/leadership training will almost certainly be one of them. This can be enhanced by creating a leadership culture. This means improving leadership at all levels of the organisation.

So before asking whether the 4-day work week might be the answer, perhaps a better question is asking have your managers been trained in the advanced leadership skills necessary and have the organisational systems and structure been changed enough?

#leadership #4-dayworkweek #management