Perpetual boss optimistic as four-day week picks up pace
A four-day working week experiment at Perpetual Guardian could be extended.
The wills, estates and trusts business began a six-week experiment in March by moving from five-day to four-day weeks.
There are still two weeks to go, and Perpetual Guardian founder Andrew Barnes says the experiment is likely to be extended by a further two weeks.
University of Auckland and AUT University academics are evaluating the trial, but Barnes has seen enough to suggest there’s a real option to tell staff in July that four days is the new norm.
‘‘We are broadly about halfway though the trial, and so far it’s going very well. Like anything else, you will have some teams that are acing it, and some that are still working out the best way to do it.
‘‘If it looks like it’s good, then we will be going full-time with it from July 1, which is the deal I have done with staff,’’ Barnes said.
The idea behind the trial, which has drawn international media attention, is that people fritter away a great deal of time at work and could do their actual work in four concentrated days.
‘‘If you incentivise people to say ‘Gosh, if I can do my work in four days, I get a day off,’ there’s every likelihood that productivity will rise,’’ Barnes said.
"We are broadly about halfway though the trial, and so far it's going very well." Perpetual Guardian founder Andrew Barnes
Perpetual’s four-day week is actually a contracted five-day week, where productive workers get a fifth day off only if they get through their work. That sanction prevents employees from falling into slack ways.
‘‘Our process says your working week is five days, but if you can do your work in four, we will give you the day off,’’ Barnes said.
‘‘If there is no consequence for you, the net result over time is that productivity within a working day will default to type.’’
A four-day working week sounds like a long weekend every weekend, but that’s not how it worked out for some staff.
For some, Wednesday was the quiet day, so they ended up with a mid-week break. Barnes said others split their hours across five days, often because they had children to be home for in the evening.
Kirsten Taylor, a philanthropy services manager at Perpetual, has been getting long weekends, which means three full days with her 21-month-old son, Leo.
It’s taken a bit of getting used to, she said, as she spends her four days at work hard at it and then ploughs on with non-work tasks on the fifth.
Staff members are reporting having more time for family, hobbies, and doing things like car and home maintenance, which they usually had to just put off when working five days a week.
The experiment has resulted in systems reviews and changes all across Perpetual’s business, as well as more collaboration and lots of beneficial time-saving changes, including shorter meetings.
Even if the experiment does not conclude with a permanent shift to four-day weeks, there has been no business downside, Barnes said.