How to make a 4-day week actually work for your staff
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When implementing four-day working weeks, employers and their HR teams need to ensure rollout doesn’t fall short of expectations and workplace needs, one expert has said.
The four-day work week was promoted as a way to boost productivity, wellbeing, and retention. However, this promise will fall short, Roxanne Calder said, if it is introduced as “signalling”, or following a workplace trend and not thinking through it properly.
In conversation with HR Leader, Calder – an author, career strategist, and founder and managing director of EST10 – said that when this occurs, the exact opposite of what is intended will happen: reduced productivity, staff turnover, and increased levels of stress.
“The four-day work week is not an easy implementation. It requires high skill levels, experience, and capability from employees and a well-constructed process and design from employers. Where it’s treated as a strategic redesign, it can deliver remarkable results,” she said.
“Where it’s introduced because everyone else is talking about it, the calendar changes, but the work doesn’t, and that’s where disappointment begins.”
There are significant challenges, Calder said, that emerge when trying to implement a four-day week.
“A four-day work week is not as simple as reducing a day. It’s a work redesign,” she said.
“It’s complicated, requires time, trials, clear communication, change management, and a backup. Some areas to consider; it’s not suited to all industries, jobs and every employee. Employees need to be already working at peak levels of capability, high levels of responsibility, problem solving and working autonomously.”
When asked if jobseekers still see a four-day work week, she said that other forms of flexibility, such as hybrid work, flexible hours or compressed schedules can all be strong drawcards alongside a condensed working week, but for all such options, “their value depends on the person’s life and the nature of the role”.
“For example, I see working mums with young children looking for flexible work hours like micros shifting rather than a compressed four-day work week,” she said.
On the question of how HR teams can continue to meet employee expectations around work/life balance without hurting productivity or engagement, if the business decides that a four-day week isn’t fit for purpose, Calder said that work/life balance cannot be designed entirely by an employer, and instead, responsibility for achieving it also sits with the individual.
“Ever since COVID-19, employers have taken on the responsibility of ‘balance’. It created blurred boundaries and impossible expectations from employees of their employers. It’s a falsehood to think there is such a magical thing as the perfect work/life balance. One person’s balance is not another person’s,” she said.
The focus, Calder said, must be on ensuring that workloads are achievable, and that management is supportive, via an environment and culture where people feel comfortable to ask for help or assistance, opportunities to upskill and learn and one with purpose.
“Purpose drives engagement and productivity,” she said.
Ultimately, Calder’s advice to Australian employers feeling pressure to offer a four-day work week is to consider what best serves the needs of the business.
“Following competitors due to pressure is reactive and not strategic. Any decision of this nature should be based on analysis, risk assessment and ensuring the benefits outweigh the risks and cost. Then it needs a structural redesign,” she said.
The HR function, therefore, needs to ask the following questions of itself and the broader business, Calder said, before deciding whether a four-day week is the right model for the idiosyncrasies of the workplace: “Is your environment reactive, time -critical, seasonal and fluctuating? How is the workload distributed? Are your current top performers carrying the greater majority of the workload? Will compressing work and time to four from five days just increase burnout and stress? At what level of capability is the team? Is everyone capable of working four days (i.e., skills, maturity, resilience, experience, responsibility)? Do you have adequate coverage on the ‘fifth’ day? And what if it doesn’t work? Or external circumstances shift and change again, demand ramps up, and extra days are required. What is the backup plan and the revert to strategy?”
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