SEISMIC SHIFT
Using a day off as a carrot is boosting productivit y at an engineering firm.
ENGINEER MATT BISHOP IS OFTEN TOLD by his direct reports to make a meeting quick because they’ve got work to do. The CEO of Auckland engineering firm Brevity takes it as a good sign that his management model is working.
Bishop, who employs 20 people in his specialist seismic consultancy, has introduced a four-day-week with strings attached, as an incentive to boost productivity.
Designed to improve employee wellbeing, it is also a strong motivator, and he describes it as the best management tool he has seen.
How it works is that a team must focus on their work outputs for a week. If they meet them, the “gift’’ is the following Friday off. Over 18 months, management has refused the Friday off only a few times.
Most use the day to catch up on life admin, leaving them the weekend to relax.
Another slight catch is that employees have to be available to work remotely on the Friday if there’s a pressing need.
Brevity runs the scheme in six-month blocks, with a three-month pause in between. “Otherwise, it very quickly becomes an expectation,” says Bishop. “And once it becomes an expectation, you lose the ability to motivate people with it so much.’’
As well as running the four-day week incentive as a trial, Bishop made another key change in his recruitment practice. About two years ago, he switched to hiring graduate and early-career Māori and Pasifika engineers, and he’s happy about that, too.
“We had a period of employing predominantly white males from one engineering school, and they had a strong entitlement issue. They felt that they’d done the hard work by getting the degree, and that they should just be paid now.
“It’s hard to create a connection between what the company wants and what the employee wants, because most of the time, the employee is not too interested in the hard results as I am.”
Asked if any companies or organisations shouldn’t do the four-day week, he says: “It’s a great motivator for a high-performance team. But you need to be able to plan work in an outcome-based way rather than an input-based way.”