Happy Monday — they had a long weekend (again)
In an age when time is money and cutbacks the order of the day, a Cambridge company is taking a different tack in cutting workdays, but not pay, to give workers a nine-day fortnight.
Te Miro Water Consultants boss Mike Chapman started his company to be happy, and now he reckons the shortened work week has got all his staff there.
“You wake up on Friday, go to Mitre 10 with your trailer to get your plants, soil. Not battling out with the weekend warriors.
“Mitre 10, Friday mornings, me and the tradies. Brilliant. I’m one of the professionals.”
Chapman and fellow director Britta Jensen tried to take every second Friday off out of blatant selfish interest.
But soon they realised they couldn’t enjoy themselves while their staff were still working, so they decided to chop the day off for everyone.
“It was more that we just wanted everyone to be happy and excited. We would have been fine if there was a drop in the revenue,” said Jensen.
But unexpectedly, they saw a boost in revenue and staff productivity.
Chapman said although the numbers don’t make sense, he wanted to reassure directors who are curious to just give it a try. “Less time, do more work, more fun, and more relaxation. It worked out for us.”
Research has proven the puzzling numbers Chapman saw actually makes sense.
Andrew Barnes founded the organisation 4 Day Week Global. He proposes a model of 100% of normal pay, 80% of typical work hours, and 100% productivity.
From global trials, Barnes said most companies not only stayed 100% productive, some even saw a productivity increase as high as 30%.
“You're getting 130% out of people working 80% of the time.”
Different from Te Miro’s wellbeing approach, Barnes said companies must get on board from a productivity perspective.
A misconception that put many organisations off is believing the 20% time cut is 20% productive time. Barnes reassured it’s actually just time wasting activities in practice that are the first to get cut when motivated people want to get out of the office.
“There is a lot of research that suggests that people are actually only truly productive for between two and a half to three hours a day. And the rest of it is busyness and fillers.
“So my thesis was if I could ask people to do things differently, then you eliminate a lot of that filler.”
As a practitioner of his own preach, Barnes’ company Perpetual Guardian started the 4 Day Work Week in 2018.
The name is “a bit click-baity”, he said. In reality the company’s reduced working hours looks more flexible: staff can choose how they take their time off.
For example, while some would prefer taking a whole day off, parents may want to finish early instead.
Dr Ellen Ford recently wrote a book called “#Workschoolhours”.
Like the 4 Day Week, Ford said her book title can also be a little deceiving.
“It's a leadership book. It's a business book about how to get the best out of people.” Having taken on multiple leadership roles herself, Ford was researching how leaders can bring good outcomes out of people, in which she found many organisations were loosing good employees due to rigid work requirements.
Speaking as she unloaded the dishwasher, Ford said the forty-hour-week was an archaic construct set up when there was at least one person looking after the household. The starting point of her research was working parents.
“The mismatch between when school finishes at 3pm and work finishes at 5pm has created a real problem”, she said.
Part of the problem evolved into an inefficient workforce.
“I've got hundreds of parents who are working part time contracts yet they were still delivering the same outputs as the full time colleagues. I've got countless stories of parents who have chosen a job that is significantly below their skill level and significantly below what they could get paid elsewhere.
“But they took it because having flexibility was more important to them.”
Not only important to parents, flexibility is also highly valued among the younger generation. Barnes said from the millennial onwards, generations live in a very different environment to the one their parents grew up and worked in.
For example, the side hustle culture and interest in continued education means the archaic work week definitely needs an update.
“Why is it with all the evolution and revolution that we've seen in our society, here we are in 2024, we've actually seen no material change in our work practices for 100 years? That is just ridiculous.”
A job site dedicated to flexible working shows the change in job expectations.
Back in the Cambridge office, Chapman said it takes a “leap of a faith” to try it out, but he encourages directors to trust the research and their employees.