Cracking the commute
Could a four-day week ease Auckland’s traffic woes?
The boss behind the four-day week scheme at a Kiwi trust management firm believes wider use of the model could help to ease congestion in New Zealand’s most populated city.
Perpetual Guardian chief executive Andrew Barnes says while most of the attention has been focused on his firm, rethinking the way Kiwis work could have an impact well beyond one office.
“If you can take 20 per cent of people off the roads every day, what does that mean?” Barnes asks before moving on to other potential infrastructural benefits.
“If you have fewer people in the office at any one time, can we make smaller offices? If people work more efficiently or remotely, coming to the office less frequently, what does that mean for urban design?”
He says part of the reason why the roads are so congested is the standard working week we’ve inherited dictates that the working day should run from Monday to Friday between nine to five.
Barnes says that the key insight underpinning his experiment is that flexible working hours don’t hinder productivity and that staff should be given greater freedom to select the times they feel are best suited to achieve their employment objectives. If businesses can offer some staff members the chance to work to different schedules, then this would, in turn, have the knock-on effect of fewer vehicles on the road.
“If you’re allowing them to work flexi-hours spread over five days, you’re spreading the traffic and that has implications for infrastructure,” Barnes says.
While the four-day week has been envisaged as Monday to Thursday, Barnes says this should be up for debate as some people might prefer to work on Saturday and Sunday.