Is the four-day week too good to be true?
Guy Kelly talks to the couple trying to convince employers to adopt a shorter working model – with no cut in salary ‘I want my people to be the best they can be at work – and the best they can be at home’
Of all the things Henry Ford gave to the world, it is surely the most lasting – and quite possibly the reason you have time to read your Telegraph today. In the 1920s, Ford decided to change the work model in his factories from a six-day, 48-hour week to a 40-hour, five-day model.
He reasoned that it would let his workers properly rest, reduce injuries and errors, and give them more time to spend cash on consumer goods during the Great Depression. It did. And as you can tell by the number of Transit vans you pass every day, it wasn’t exactly a disaster for Ford’s productivity, either.
A similar thing happened a decade later at John Boot’s Nottingham factory. To cut surplus and increase efficiency, he switched to a five-day model with no reduction in pay. Workers turned up refreshed, and the production line ran like a dream.
On either side of the Atlantic, and soon all over the world, a new working week became established: the Monday-to-friday 9-to-5. What a way to make a living.
Now, after a century of going relatively unchallenged, there is a bubbling movement to update five days to four – with no attendant salary cut because, so the theory goes, productivity should be just as high, if not higher.
This week, a six-month trial of the four-day week was announced in the UK, with 40 companies – from Morrisons and Unilever to charities and software developers – taking part from June to December and reporting findings to the universities of Cambridge and Oxford.
It aims to take a serious look at whether we could all work better (and cut emissions, reduce stress and sick days, and save jobs) by working less. Time will tell whether it will be revealed as flawed, pie-in-the-sky nonsense that wouldn’t suit half the working population, or so blindingly convincing that we’ll all wonder why we didn’t bin the five-day model years ago.
Watching closely (and bullishly confident it will be the latter) is a couple some 11,000 miles away, in a penthouse apartment in Auckland, New Zealand. Together, Andrew Barnes and Charlotte Lockhart run 4 Day Week Global, a not-for-profit campaign to encourage the world to move to the shorter working model – and they won’t rest until we’re all resting three days a week.
It is 5.30am in Auckland when I speak to them, but they’re used to early starts. “This is the problem with living in paradise…” Lockhart, 53, says over Zoom.
The pair organise pilot programmes all over the globe, including the one that started here this week, and are in such demand they have no hope of working a four-day week themselves, says Barnes, 61. “But there we are…”
He is confident the UK trial will go well, especially since polls suggest three-quarters of British people back a four-day week. We’re far from the first to give it a go, however. Last summer, results from a pair of trials in Iceland prompted gushing headlines about what an “overwhelming success” it was.
And for some, it really was – 86 per cent of Icelandic workers now either work shorter weeks or have the right to ask to do so. But as is often the way with headlines about Nordic utopias, read a little closer and a few notable caveats emerge.
Firstly, only 1 per cent of Iceland’s working population took part. Secondly, it was more about managing hours, rather than specifically a four-day week, and reportedly resulted in a reduction of just 35 minutes a week in the private sector and 65 in the public sector. And thirdly, the Icelandic government now has to hire more healthcare workers, at an annual cost of £24.2million, in order to keep hospitals running 24/7.
Mixed results, then. But Lancashire-born Barnes’s confidence is undimmed.
He worked as a banker in London, where the working culture was such that he saw several people have nervous breakdowns in front of him. At one firm, new employees were forced to sign a pre-typed resignation letter on their first day, and told they’d see it again when they displeased the boss.
When he moved to New Zealand, where he set up Perpetual Guardian, the country’s largest corporate trustee company, he decided to do things differently, inspired by research that found the average British worker was only engaged with their job for fewer than three hours a day.
He announced that for a trial period, his 240-odd employees were going to be paid the same wage, but only asked to work four days instead of five – it was up to them to find ways to get their tasks done more efficiently, and which day to take off.
It was a success: a 20 per cent rise in productivity, and an independent study found stress levels among his workforce decreased seven per cent, while overall life satisfaction increased by five per cent. “At the end of the day, what I want is my people to be the best they can be at work, and the best they can be at home, and if I can achieve that, I get a better outcome, but also the whole of society gets a better outcome.”
Barnes and Lockhart, who met at a party nine years ago and went on to work together at Perpetual Guardian, are evangelical about their mission – Lockhart drinks from a mug with “ALWAYS RIGHT” daubed across it – and prepared to put the hours in so we don’t have to. Given Lockhart has Stage 4 breast cancer, with a prognosis of five years, they also have a deadline “to make this happen within that time.”
The key, they say, is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach: managers must study their company and talk to their workers about how they could manage a four-day week without a decline in productivity. It might mean shutting up shop for one day – or, if that’s impossible, trimming hours and rota-ing staff across the week. Barnes and Lockhart’s organisation can offer companies data and research, and show how others have done it, but not advise: what works for a building firm won’t work for a tech start-up.
Sceptics point to how unskilled workers were disproportionately badly affected when France introduced a 35-hour week in 2000, and that some sectors such as construction or hospitality would find it far harder than, say, digital marketing to switch.
Barnes counters that they have seen it work everywhere from car plants to hospitals. There are currently schools in the US operating on four-day weeks in order to cut costs, he says, maintaining that education levels have not suffered. More dubiously, he reckons the extra day at home allows children to “complete more chores”. Hospitals, meanwhile, may need to hire, but he believes it would reduce burnout, stop bed-blocking and increase employee retention rates.
“Trust me,” Barnes says of Perpetual Guardian, where staff sort rotas themselves, “there’s no better team-building exercise than asking a workforce how they could do this.”
Lockhart puts down her mug and holds up a finger. “I’ll leave you with a quotation,” she says. “‘Whether you think you can, or whether you think you can’t, you are right.’”
It was Henry Ford who first said it.