Ep36: 4-Day Work Week: A Crash Course for Business Owners and Leaders

Is the 4-day work week about working hard or hardly working? Is it a passing fad or the future of work? Can it improve well-being or is it a flawed solution for more complex workplace challenges? And perhaps most importantly, how can businesses afford it?!

We answer these questions and more in this week’s episode. Whether you’re a believer or a sceptic, we offer an introduction on the dos, don’ts and hows of transitioning to a 4-day work week.

To help us, we’re joined by three expert guests:

Joe O’Connor

Joe is Director & Co-Founder at Work Time Reduction Centre of Excellence and Former former CEO at 4 Day Week Global, the organisation behind the hugely successful 4-day work week global pilot. A dynamic changemaker and leader, Joe supported over 200 employers and 10,000 employees to make the transition to reduced-hour, productivity-focused working in 2022.

Banks Benitez

Banks is a formidable business leader and expert in the future of work. As CEO of Uncharted, he led the company through a rebrand, and strategic pivot, and rolled out a new strategy of building partnerships with brands like Chipotle, Facebook, and NBC that doubled the size of the organization. In 2020, he moved Uncharted to a 4-day workweek in 2020, and were named by Outside Magazine one of the 50 best places to work in the US.

Fery Kaszoni

Fery is the Founder & Managing Director of Search Intelligence Ltd, a leading digital PR agency that owns and operates dozens of web and SAAS platforms and useful online tools, with a network of websites reaching millions of users every month. In May 2020, Fery transitioned his business and 40+ employees to a 4-day work week, with the announcement on LinkedIn garnering more than 120,000 reactions in just three days.

If you want to avoid being caught up in the latest workplace fad and understand how to profitably shift to a 4-day work week, this episode is a must-listen!

Resources

All the links mentioned in the show.

Connect with Joe O’Connor

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeoconnor990/

Connect with Banks Benitez

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/banksbenitez/

Connect with Fery Kaszoni

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ferenczkaszoni/

Connect with your hosts

• Connect with Al on LinkedIn 
• Connect with Leanne on LinkedIn
• Join the discussion about this episode on LinkedIn
• Email: podcast@TruthLiesandWork.com
• Follow us on Instagram @truthlieswork
• Chat with us on Twitter @truthlieswork
• YouTube channel for the podcast @TruthLiesWork
• Check us out on TikTok (LOL!!!) @truthlieswork

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The Transcript

⚠️ NOTE: This is an automated transcript, so it might not always be 100% accurate!

Joe O’Connor
It’s not that I haven’t yet discovered a business that’s moved. We’re sure the work we’ve that hasn’t seen a very significant benefit when it comes to talent attraction and retention.

Leanne Elliott
Hello, and welcome to the truth lives and workplace culture podcast, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I’m a Business psychologist. My name is Alan, I’m a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of people and create amazing workplace cultures. Yes, we are. So we’ve got a great episode coming up for you in a second. Just quick reminder where the water cooler if you’re listening to this, and it is before the 24th or the 25th of April, or even the 25th and 26th of April is that.

Al Elliott
Technically, it still works. Absolutely. But the watercolours, the 25th and 26th of April, Tuesday and Wednesday is in London Excel 2003 Just a 2003 2023 Just in case you’re listening to this in the future. And yeah, come down and see us because we are the official podcast partners. So we are going to be prancing around in very important with packed with microphones. We’re gonna look like one of those cool YouTube things like Daniel, Matt go, Hey, what do you want? Well, how’d you get a car like that? What do you do for a living? You haven’t seen that I have I like that. I do. I do like that. I like how some people to town MoGraph and others like, Oh, hey, man, I miss

Unknown Speaker
the ones where they go, I cannot talk to you about that. I’m like, Oh, I see.

Unknown Speaker
Yes, we should also mention, if you don’t know what the word cooler is, it is like the biggest best event for anything to do with workplace culture and well being in the UK. So yeah, two days of lots of conferences and not lots of conferences. It’s one conference with lots of talks, workshops, a whole exhibition. Yeah, it’s gonna it’s gonna be cool. So if you can make it, come on down. If you can’t, don’t worry, because we will be bringing you an entire episode dedicated to everything we get up to at the watercooler. Additionally, if you are not following us on LinkedIn, then go and search for truth that lies and work on LinkedIn. And you’ll find our page. That’s where we kind of comment, we post our posts and post our posts. We post our episodes and we also comment about what goes on and we can just connect with people there and we connect it to guests the other day, which was quite cool. Also just want to give a shout out to three people who have recently commented so if you have recently commented, then I could be saying your name, Angie Redman, Sharon, Summerfield and Beverly. I’m going to say lagier Luggie. Yeah, how does that low gear? Maybe it is Olivia. Maybe you could maybe you could write to us, Beverly, and tell us how you actually sell you how you actually say your name. But those three those three lovely women were commenting on our very positively on our posts. And the reason I picked them out was because they said they were gonna go and listen.

Unknown Speaker
If you are an Shas bath, welcome. Sounds like a really great 80s band. It does, doesn’t it? Yeah. And Shazam. Bev,

Unknown Speaker
I tell you what, if you don’t then get in touch with us and tell us you’ve heard this than we know, you won’t have listened to what you said you’re going to do. And we’ll call you out in a week’s time and say, Yeah, I’m still a little harsh, but maybe give him a couple of weeks though.

Unknown Speaker
He won’t do that. Anyway, they won’t know because they’ve not listened. So.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, so we are part of our regular regular scheduling. I don’t know that I want to say that regular scheduling is that we have a little place called a news roundup, where the and we sit back and then tell just three or four stories is happening around about the world of people and psychology and workplace culture. So cue the jingle. Okay, so what did you got? Firstly? Well, normally, I would start with kind of a new word alert. I haven’t come across one this week, my thought is just starting to feel a bit forced. You know, we have a new word, we’ll talk about the new word if we don’t, we weren’t. And so I was thinking to myself, what else could we do is a fun little part of the section. So I came up with truth or lie, bang on brand. Thank you. So my thought was, you can maybe give me a question about some that you’ve heard related to the workplace or workplace culture, the psychology of it all, and ask me is, is this true? Or is this a lie?

Unknown Speaker
What I have always wanted to ask is based on an episode with stellar perks, stellar perks, Stella Smith from perks a couple of weeks ago, that’s true. It’s gonna be a nightmare. Isn’t it stuff, sell a book sell stellar books. So based on our conversation at the beginning of that episode, you said that healthy normal people healthy people should go not have have 90 minutes without their phone and then have a coffee for the first hour or something. There was something about it, which led to all this but again, no, I think

Unknown Speaker
there wasn’t there was healthy there was a suggestion that a low dopamine morning can contribute to our well being throughout the day.

Unknown Speaker
And as part of that suggestion is not to have caffeine within the first 90 minutes of being awake. Right? Okay, so that’s the bit I really wanted to ask you about. So I can’t imagine not having a coffee within the first 30 minutes of waking up. I don’t know. But is it like, is this psychological? What’s the word when you when there’s something effect, where placebo placebo is a procedure that I believe coffee wakes me up. And I believe, therefore that if I’m flagging, I have a cup of coffee that will wake me up to actually do that?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, good question. So coffee, caffeine, it stimulates our, our central nervous system, it’s absorbed pretty quickly, into a body into our brain. And yeah, caffeine is a chemical actually blocks cover our sleep promoting receptors in our brain, which is why we feel more awake and alert. So yeah, it’s true.

Unknown Speaker
But there are actually a few more work related benefits to caffeine.

Unknown Speaker
So there is cuz I guess my mindset when you’re when people go things like I actually can’t function before having a cup of coffee. Like, is it that you can’t function? Or is it you say that that habit that perceiver? Well, it’s been lots of lots of different studies into this to see what the, the impact of caffeine has. And yeah, really interesting results. So once we found that caffeine led to what they call a striking improvement, or memory test taken early in the morning, which is typically a low, low point of memory, we also know that caffeine can help with visual processing. So a team of researchers found that people have improved in their abilities to detect moving targets, which was quite interesting. Because that could be from you know, somebody a pedestrian stepping in and for the road to footfall come in, come into your head.

Unknown Speaker
So yeah, there are some interesting, interesting cognitive

Unknown Speaker
benefits of caffeine. But you might want to be careful if you have a creative role. So other studies have shown that while it does improve a range of cognitive abilities, creativity is not one of them. So for example, some researchers did a test with some participants asking them to use divergent thinking, gave one group caffeine one group none found no difference. Also some controversial research in the US that physical heat can affect our perceptions of social warmth. So by giving our boss or colleague a hot cup of coffee, they might think better of us, and connect better this if you’re trying to get something out your boss might be a tactic. I say controversial, though, because those findings were found once and have never since been replicated. So be careful.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, and another interesting one, if you’re in a buying role, or perhaps looking to reduce costs, maybe don’t indulge in that second cup of coffee. Some researchers found that people who drank just one cup of coffee before they went shopping spend 50% More than those that had decaf coffee, or water. And apparently the the caffeine drink is reported to be more excited, and we’re more excited. We’re more impulsive. So does caffeine makers more awake and alert? Yes, this is true. Does it help us function particularly in work? Classic answer it depends. It depends on your own and depends on the task that you do your ability psychology why or

Unknown Speaker
so but but on the flip side, if you are going to be selling something to someone, go get a shot of espresso. Perhaps a frickin loot that yeah, you got a sales meeting give all your clients

Unknown Speaker
Okay, what else you got them? I am sorry, another story that popped into my into my newsfeed this week that I thought was interesting. A few episodes ago we did our women’s health episode we talked a lot about gender gaps in terms of pay in terms of health in terms of safety, drama, the the crash test dummies that we talked about. We’ve had similar stories from the health sector in the pandemic about face masks not being not fitting female health workers. This week, another example has been published in relation to protective bodywork of the UK Police. So April 2023, is a first month in our very long history of having women in our police force, where police Armour has been designed to be lighter and more flexible to the female body.

Unknown Speaker
So until now they have our female officers have been putting up with unisex armour, which is been repurposed to become comfortable and flexible, or even even painful. I think this is mainly around the curves of the body and the button area. And lots of pushing down. And you know, ladies, we know that that is not comfortable position literally holding my breath as I explained this to you, sir. So yeah, so they’ve redesigned it, which is which is kind of cool. There’s an amazing, amazing woman called Belinda Goodwin, she was a wellbeing lead for the Police Federation has really been the driving force in this project. And yeah, she said it is you know, it’s a game changer. It’s not much more comfortable and you feel more protected. It means that that officers will continue to wear their armour. So they will they will be protected. I think that’s a danger, isn’t it? It’s I mean, it’s uncomfortable. We tend to take it off, and then we’re not protected. So, so yeah, excellent. Excellent is

Unknown Speaker
If overdue me from the UK Police, I just hope that they’re still able to hook their thumbs into the corners of their of their protective vests as they as they look at you, because I see that in all the police chase, but that whenever they stop there was hope their thumbs at the door. I’m doing it now myself.

Unknown Speaker
Anyway. So that’s a very strange thing to add to that an amazing piece of news and I talked about hooking your thumbs and chip into Rama, carry on, we got number three, my number is three. So we are talking about the four day work week this week, everything you need to know about what to do. Is it possible, what impact does it have. And one of the impacts that I came across, which I thought was interesting, taken away slightly from the workplace was the impact of the four day work week on climate change. So yeah, there’s a growing interest in the four day work week because of the impact it could have on employee productivity and well being. Also, there is a lot of interest in the impact it could have on climate change. So as you’re probably aware, there has been a global pilot the moment testing the four day work week, as part of that researchers have been tracking carbon emissions reductions. What they actually found was that the benefits of a four day work week in terms of climate was actually the fall in commuting. So the UK data showed that there was a 10% decrease over the entire pilot period of the four day workweek. So from three and a half hours, to 3.15 hours. And that was actually even bigger in the US. So the kind of estimating it could reach 15 to 20% reduction in commuting time, which of course is a massive drop in fuel emissions. What they also found quite interesting is that those people who save time, not commuting, engaged in low carbon activities such as walking, or stay at home hobbies, or had more time to invest in Pro Environmental behaviours, like volunteering with cycling, buying eco friendly products. So it’s really interesting from both an emissions perspective and behaviour perspective, the four day workweek could have a really big impact on protecting our planet, who knew what I’m pretty sure that guests knew, because they’re clever people talking of which, so we’re gonna introduce our guests now. So first of all, just the background of this, there’s been lots of talk around the four day workweek recently, I’m sure you’ve seen in the news, there’s a few big companies who started doing including Basecamp, formerly 37 signals, Panasonic have started doing it. And I think they might be Latvia and a company called bolt, which recently, if I remember, they bought Mitsubishi Motors or something. It was a, it was a very odd piece of news. I saw that. But congratulation to those guys. But we really want to just get to the bottom of this like so. If you see any kind of post on LinkedIn about a four day work week, you’re gonna see that usually they’ve got hundreds of comments and almost 50% people’s and this is brilliant 50% of people saying it’s never going to work. So we really want to ask you what is the truth here? Where are the lies? Can companies really switch without losing money? Yeah, so we are asking all the questions that business leaders would want to know. First, can you really achieve the same in four days without adding huge pressure on employees? Number two, can any business implemented? What about if you charge by the hour? Number three? Is this just another Gen Zed thing? And number four, do clients approve? What are our customers gonna think about four day work week? So we thought let’s just find the truth behind all of this. Let’s go to the horse’s mouth. So who are we talking to today we are joined today by Joe Connor. He was the CEO of four day week global, which in collaboration with research group autonomy, and researchers at Boston College and the University of Cambridge undertook physical Lobel pilot on the four day work week, there was lots of which came out in February of this year. So nearly 3000 employees took part in the pilot from across the 31 companies. And there was really basically a one on one general role. We’re not just giving people one day a week back, we’re reducing their working days to four days a week, whilst paying them 100% of their pay. So at the end of this experiment, employees reported all so many benefits, it really was a runaway success, I think, much more successful than the research initial researchers initially anticipated. We saw benefits in terms of sleep, stress levels, personalised mental health, and according to results published in February company’s revenue, it stayed broadly the same during the six month trial, but actually rose 35% On average, when compared with a similar period from previous years. Why? Because resignations declined. Wow. Yeah, it really is amazing right to leave a link to the full report because I could go through so many

Unknown Speaker
Statistics, in terms of of kind of all the benefits that that came through by going down to this kind of 32 hour model for the same pay and benefits, there are increases in productivity, reductions in stress. There was there was there are so many it really is a compelling piece of research. So we have Joe with us today to talk us through some of those findings, some of the process and how he helps organisations adjust to a four day work week. But of course, we can’t just take the researchers word for it, we also have to bring in to business owners who have done it them selves. So I’ve got three guests today, we’ve got one person who is an expert, that’s Joe, you’ll meet him in a second, then we’ve got the second person who’s actually done it and then is now helping other companies transition across to a four day workweek. And that is banks. And then finally, we’ve got fairy who’s actually just done it. And he’s done it quite recently last year, and he will wow, you should have seen the LinkedIn post that he put about it. That was I think it’s something like 5 million impressions he got on that. I now so it’s a hot topic. So let’s go and meet our first guest. Joe akana is the co founder of the worktime reduction Centre of Excellence. If you Google the four day workweek, I guarantee most of the results that are on page one will speak to Joe. He tends to work with larger organisations to transition to the four day work week and is currently working about 170 leaders to implement these trials. So let’s go meet Joe and find out why he’s so passionate about this. I am originally from Ireland, and I first got interested in the four day week, a shorter working weeks more generally all the way back in 2018. Backwards, really the four day week, if we’re being honest, was more of a philosophical discussion than the practical one that was reading some research on trials that had been taking place in Ireland and Denmark and in New Zealand. And really got interested in this initially, based on some research we had done in Ireland of public sector workers, which suggests that there was a huge amount of working parents that had moved to shorter work weeks or to reduced our schedules for less pay. But often their experience was that their responsibilities and the job, their expectations, and the output that they were producing was actually the same as it was when they were working five days. So it’s really inspired me to get involved with this more. And I designed and developed the first ever pilot project to the four day week in my home country in Ireland in early 2021. And then later the CEO for the next guest is banks Benitez, excellent name, banks runs smart work week, which helps leaders of small organisations successfully transition to a four day work week he did this himself with his previous company Uncharted, and that later got acquired. So we asked banks why he’s double down on the four day workweek. Yeah, so I was leading Uncharted and entrepreneurial incubator accelerator based in the United States. For the last five or six years in early 2020, we decided to consider piloting a four day workweek. We launched a pilot in 2020. Over the summer, June, July and August, hired a third party evaluator to measure the results of that pilot. The results came back when we’re sort of unemployed, obviously, statistically positive, so we decided to keep it and we rolled out the four day workweek over the last three years. And our final guest is a fairy Cassone very grew up in Romania. And when he came to the UK, he founded a company called Search intelligence was a digital PR link building agency. It’s quite niche, but he’s really interesting to go look at his website to see what he does. Now, last year, he transitioned to the four day workweek, and he’s seen some really quite incredible results. And what’s interesting about fairy is because he has grown up in a different country and come to the UK, he’s got quite a different way of looking at the world, and reasons why he wanted to move to the four day workweek, were perhaps a little different to others. So let’s go meet fairy and hear his story. I run a company called Search intelligence, we have 57 team members now. And we have built this company from two employees in 2020 to 57 employees now, like two years and something because we have started this crazy PR service that we help other SEO agencies and other you know, SEO companies and departments of SEO, I guess your departments of companies. So I was as a child, I grew up as a and even as a teenager as a very poor person who had you know, in theory had no chances of doing anything in life. We had no food to eat when I was a child and are like completely at the bottom of the society right? I grew up without a father and we didn’t have you know, food to eat. And I think the fact that I was like that kind of pushes me to just never wanting to be you know, back at that place again, or nobody in my family ever been there. Therefore I committed to excellence and and just doing you know, going all in with everything I do

Unknown Speaker
So I want to be, you know,

Unknown Speaker
the entity that builds you know, the builds something great, and I’m just aiming for greatness everyday. So over the next hour, we are going to hear more from Joe banks and fairy and hopefully answer all your questions about the four day workweek for let’s start with the biggest and most obvious question, why even consider a four day workweek his job, for the most part, for the overwhelming majority of participants, employees that took part in these trials were happier and they were healthier. Employers that took part in the trials found that they were better positioned to attract and retain talent. But also the companies that took part found that they were actually more productive and more efficient. And that’s the piece that often for people almost seems counterintuitive. How can you reduce the length of time that people are spending at work, but actually produce better business outcomes. And really, what’s fundamentally at the heart of that is that when we talk about the four day week, we’re not just talking about reducing the number of hours that people spend at work, we’re also talking about fundamentally changing the way that people work. I think if you look really hard at the businesses that took part in these trials, and how they were able to make this a success, it was about using the force a week as a forcing function to streamline their operation is to make their processes more efficient, and to change their work practices in a way that enabled them to deliver better outcomes. And I was curious about why Joe was quite so passionate about this, because you can see that over the last five years, he’s done so much to kind of be he’s the main proponent, if you google anything, as I said, about the four day workweek. So I kind of said, How did you get into this? What was your, what was your motivation for really telling the world about a four day workweek? I think that server that I mentioned, back in Ireland, where, you know, this idea that Parkinson’s Law, a task will expand to fill the time that’s available for its completion, I think is something that fundamentally is true in most modern organisations. And I think that that’s laid out in the sense that, you know, some of the most, I think lots of people listening to this podcast, probably point to someone in their organisation where that holds true. And often, it’s working parents, and often it’s women where, you know, they’re moved to reduce our work weeks, they’re efficient, they’re productive, they get their work done in the same way as they would do if they were there five days. But right now, they’re not compensated for that, a that has a huge impact on gender equality in the workplace, and actually is a huge driver of the gender pay gap. So when we talk about the shorter workweek, I think that this is potentially transformative for businesses, it can give, you know, forward thinking leaders and companies are real, you know, headstart on the competition, it can be so transformative and life changing for individuals in a whole host of different ways. More time with kids, family, caring for elderly relatives, learning new skills, hobbies, pursuits and endeavours theories, reason for moving to a four day workweek is slightly different, I think different, I think, you know, I think completely different than, than somebody who just all the time, you know, work in an office, and they’ve never had any other, you know, adventure outside the office, I think I’ve got this, like Wheeler Dealer, you know, mentality, you know, where, you know, you have to think way too late, you have to

Unknown Speaker
think outside the box. And I’m using that, you know, knowledge from painting cars for 16 years, to now running this agency, and you notice, hopefully disrupting the some of the markets that we kind of tried to penetrate. And I think we’re very you can just see, the entrepreneur in him just wants to do things differently. He looks at it looks at things and goes why why is it not like this? Can we make it like this? And it’s, I think, you know, those classic early adopters sort of mentality of someone who is excited about new things. Therefore, he started his agency, therefore, he started a new life in a different country. He’s excited about new things. And therefore he looked at this and went, Yeah, why not? Let’s give it a go. Yeah. And I think as well, it’s, it’s amazing that there aren’t more entrepreneurs jumping on to this, especially when we think about kind of where the 40 hour workweek comes from this five day workweek comes from, you know, it’s from it was set in the, you know, after the Industrial Revolution when factory workers didn’t have any limits to their hours. So yeah, it was labour union rights in America that fought to instil the 40 hour workweek. And that came into place in 1938. Wow, yeah. The world has changed. So we need people like Fairey who are gonna go guys a wee bit behind on this. Absolutely. So I asked banks, you know, what, what has kicked off this four day work revolution because it’s something which we’ve only started what I’ve only started seeing about in the last sort of 18 months, you as a psychologist might have seen studies on it earlier than that. i Not really I read about it. I heard about it as an idea. Back in I think it was 2018 2019. And I knew that this pilot was happening but the results for this pilot only came out on February.

Unknown Speaker
it this year, so it’s still very new. So you’re gonna hear Banks was quite an early adopter with this, as the CEO of it was something that I had just been looking into the team did not come to me with. At the time, it was just very little pressed to be honest, back in 2019, at the four day workweek, there were a couple of examples and case studies, but it was not it was under the radar as a as an idea. We’ve always been sort of a high trust organisation, a very flexible organisation for our employees. And our team decided, yeah, let’s, let’s give our executive team this bed. Yes, let’s give it a shot. And then of course, COVID happened. I think our rest of our team was surprised that we were rolling out a four day work week when we decided to, and then they got bought into it. And we spent a lot of time as a collective larger team, exploring ways to optimise our work week, it really was a team effort to make it happen. I know there are so many people that are probably sick of hearing about the pandemic, but it really was such a force in terms of accelerating all of these trends that were kind of well not even trends, I guess, ideas and they’re accelerating them into into more of a trend, I think, as well just you know, that that whole fragility of life and, and how we want to reimagine why our kids, it makes sense to me that this is you know, the pandemic is really turbocharged this, as Joe explained, the pandemic really turbocharged, the shorter workweek movement, leaders were more interested because of the great resignation and the impact on the labour market. Managers were more open to this for the reasons that I just described. And then employees, I think, have demanded this much more, because their experience during the pandemic really caused a lot of people to realign their priorities. And it caused a lot of people to kind of realign what is a reasonable balance between life and work, we already had the productive capacity and the technological tools at our disposal to work shorter and to work smarter. But it took something like the pandemic to really dislodged the very deeply embedded, cultural and societal norms we have around the workweek, which is understandable, because it’s been around now for more than a century. So like, the second part of all of this is, if you’re going to be spending 20%, less time at work, it means you’ve got obviously got 20% less time to do the work. So what do you do? Do you just not do some of it? How do you free up this time? Well, the majority of research shows that if you eliminate low value activities, then this can work. And Joe totally agrees with this was in you know, improving processes, and eliminating low value activities, or at least minimising low value activities and making better more mindful use of technology. So this is some of the things that we saw organisations really attack in order to be able to, you know, so what we’re talking about here is not about doing the same work in the same way. Because often that’s a fear of employees, you know, if we’re expected to deliver the same results and less time than surely, you know, will it mean that our work is harder, it’s faster, it’s more intense. But when you look at the research, actually, it found that these organisations were able to achieve this not through organisational speed up, but through organisational redesign, which to factory meant that we’re delivering the same output, but with fewer or more efficient inputs. Thanks agrees with this, and also mentions that it all comes down to prioritising one in my experience is the teams that are best able to move to a four day work week, are ones that are getting better at the muscle, like sort of truly a muscle of prioritising and D prioritising. So it’s not about necessarily getting faster and more productive. It’s about really getting clear about what’s a priority for your company and what’s not. I think all of us agree that not all hours in the workweek are created equal, some are less of a productive use of time, some of them are just not essential whatsoever. Maybe we’re in meetings that we think are a waste of time. That could mean cancelling standing meetings, it could be recognising that a project is actually not worth continuing. And the four day workweek, for me personally was was really helpful because it helped me ask this question of what’s truly essential, what really drives the key business outcomes that we’re after. And then other things that we can do prioritise. The teams that really thrive and succeed are actually reframing what’s important, what’s not, and that allows them to actually cut out things that they were currently in their workweek. I think that the first step is absolutely around operations isn’t in streamlining things and making things easier and less sticky. And I think, you know, it was there that said that it kind of puts the pressure on organisations to actually prioritise the streamlining of operations and making things more efficient. And, you know, as banks was there as well, you know, not all hours in the working week are made equal. And I think that’s a case of Yeah, how we how we structure work, what we expect or how our workers spend their time. But also, I think, understanding a bit the psychology around it, so there’s, there’s a there’s a state called flow and that’s when we’re in full immersion of an activity that’s when, you know, when you kind of you’re doing something and you look up and you’re like, how is it four o’clock? You’d like time loses all meaning that’s being in a state of flow.

Unknown Speaker
and getting into that state, it requires a few things. But the main thing that it absolutely requires is no interruptions. And I think this is as well, where, you know, we we talk about remote work. And actually, if we went that deep thinking work needs that more more solitary time. And the reason it’s important is when we get into that state of flow research has shown that people are 500% more productive. Like it’s an insane amount, how much more productive people are when they can enter this state. So when you look about kind of, you know, what organisations how they, you know, the things they have now, what long, long meetings or meetings, how many meetings a day, hundreds, you know, unplanned interruptions, just somebody in the office, or even on Slack, dinging you and asking you if you know, you can do so asking you a question. I think there’s also this kind of thing around email, I think it’s something ridiculous, like, like, up to six hours a day can be spent on email, something like on average, people check their phones, like 2000 times a day. There’s so many of these distractions, that actually we think about streamlining our operations around us, streamlining the tasks that we’re doing, and streamlining the demand and our attention, then actually, it’s going to be pretty easy to free up 20% of our working week, I think, Well, the answer is absolutely right. There’s such easy ways to reduce the amount of let’s face it bullshit you deal with in an average day or week. However, there’s other stuff as well. And this is going to be listening if you sell because your battery’s about to tell us an example of when someone came in, and basically was about to waste their time very told not to yesterday, I had a meeting here with you know, an IT service provider, we are, you know, enhancing our security and everything. And they came to my office and they said I’m going to put together like a PowerPoint presentation, like 48 hours.

Unknown Speaker
I don’t need that. Just tell me how much it is, you know, and then there is three bullet points.

Unknown Speaker
I just wrote it down when they done this, okay, well, you know, send me like an email with these, you know, three bullet points. And Happy Days, don’t spend like 48 hours on, you know, when a PowerPoint presentation showing your you know, logo and everything because nobody cares. And they probably saved, you know, probably a few 100 pounds by just me saying this to them. I love this. There’s a lot there’s a great guy called Mike Killen, who always says don’t send proposals just by getting to agree what you want them to look what you want the project to look like, while you’re on the sales call with them. And just go so I just send a quick email with these what we’ve agreed, yeah, okay, yeah, fine. Send me a check done. Yeah, absolutely. And even if you know, even if you’re like, No, it’s a big part of our brand doing this. It’s like, what is the right person doing it? Like, I used to drive me nuts. When I when I was

Unknown Speaker
in welfare to work as a coach that I’d have so much paperwork to do. And admin, that I’d have to do I do it after work, because I didn’t want to lose time during the day that I could be spending and should be spending with my customers and the people I’m trying to support, filling out paperwork, you know, it’s more if you want to do that activity, great. But even just looking at who Who am I paying right now, to develop this PowerPoint presentation, if you’re paying a marketing consultant, who you bill out it, you know, 250 pounds an hour, when you could be bringing in an intern or a great administrator, you know, you divert that value at a time back. So then you’re going to be generating more revenue. So you could go down to a four day work week that what’s interesting is that we always use this term four day work week. But jokes seem to think that doesn’t have to be for like 20% reduction, it can basically be whatever you want it to be time reduction doesn’t necessarily need to be a full 20% reduction. Although that’s kind of the gold standard that lots of companies have gone for. It can be you know, more more staggered or incremental, saying, hey, but a commitment to delivering the same output and often this materialises in businesses whereby we’re not talking about necessarily changing contracts, some companies will kind of do this as a just an opt in policy for the trial. They might then later regularise contracts, if they make it permanent. And it’s that positive tension within the organisation that really can create some some quite extraordinary result. I think there is a danger that we’re just going to anchor to this idea as business leaders and go Well, if that’s what we need to strive for. That’s what we need to do. And that’s wrong after bend my business into into being. And I think again, it’s the point in and this is where I get a bit nuts as a psychologist is that people are quick to grab onto the intervention. And what we need to do to improve wellbeing is implement a four day work week, what we need to do to have more fun and work is put a ping pong table in the break room, where the point is, it’s about reducing our amount of time at work. So we increase our recovery time off of work, which then means that psychologically, mentally, we’re stronger, more engaged the work and have that and more energy to focus. The reason we have ping pong tables or break room is because we know that by encouraging people to take breaks, they’re more productive because they don’t run out of steam. They get chance to recharge

Unknown Speaker
So we’re not saying that implementing a four day work week is going to be the, you know, the silver bullet that that solves all workplace culture challenges and all mental health challenges for our employees. It doesn’t The point is, is about reducing our time at work, increasing our focus time at work and increasing our recovery time at work. There’s loads of different ways of doing this. There is a an

Unknown Speaker
experiment I was reading about this happened in Australia recently, and they are trialling the six hour work day, so five days a week, but only six hours at work. So the business leader behind this said that the shorter work day forced his team to prioritise effectively, which is what we’ve heard from our experts as well. Limit interruptions, which we know is important, because it then gives people the time to invest in in more deep thinking, working getting to this state of flow. But he also said that he found that people operated in much more deliberate levels the first few hours of the day. And I think it’s coming back to what banks are saying about prioritising and what they found is that their team maintained, and in some cases increased its quantity and quality of work, with some people also reporting and improve mental state, more, less time, more family time, more time for friends, and other endeavours as well. So I think it goes to show that it’s not about being as rigid as like, oh, well, the the four day workweek is the thing to aim for. It’s even just thinking about what is it the four day workweek trying to achieve? It’s trying to reduce number of hours at work, increased focus hours at work and increase recovery time. I think if the business leader if you look at your business with those three kind of objectives in mind, then it might not be a four day work week. Another thing I’ve heard is kind of a nine day fortnight. So yeah, I think there’s lots of different ways you can do it. But remember what the reasons behind the four day work week, that’s why we’re seeing such cool results. Not because it’s four days in the office, because of the the intention and what it means for us in terms of our work life and home life. could not agree more. That is yes, absolutely. And you know, what’s funny is one of the biggest push backs for the vault why you couldn’t do or why this person couldn’t do the four day work week is they go my business is different. It wouldn’t work like that. And business was different now. What? Blockbuster?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I’m not sure anyone younger, younger than 30 will know who we’re talking about. But I think the point, the point is that it’s a different goal of mine, but my business is different. And also business owners. We’re very protective about things we go, oh, no, my business is very different businesses isn’t different. Really, if you’ve got people working for you, then Leanne’s the kind of person you speak to, because she knows exactly how they work. Like literally how they tick and how they work. So one of the biggest things, oh, there’s some marketing thing that well, how are you? How are you work? Some double? Is it a double entendre lower? It’s called? I don’t know, I think double entendres when you make a bit rude. Oh, maybe it’s sir. But we’ll we will do some research. What am I planning meeting, put a pin in that we’ll circle back to it later, or whiteboard it tomorrow?

Unknown Speaker
Anyway, so the biggest pushback easy what work from my business. But Joe points out that that might be right. Because for some business models, it can be hard to do this kind of thing. So I would never argue that every role or every profession today, that doesn’t work a five day nine to five, that all of a sudden we’re going to find a way that they’re going to start working and forward a nine to five, this idea that, you know, it’s not a one size fits all model, really at the heart of that is is the understanding that what we’re really talking about here is moving from the five day nine to five to the four day being the new normal, effectively being the new standard arrangement across the economy. Of course, underneath that, there will need to be different kinds of flexible arrangements to accommodate different kinds of work, people that have already worked abnormal and shift patterns, people that don’t want to work and kind of have a regular structured five day work week. But I would argue that there aren’t very many job roles, or businesses or industries that currently work five day nine to five, that couldn’t find a way and with the right imagination with the right culture and with the right processes to move to a four day working week. But if you’ve got a customer facing role, or a team where you know, a big part of their value is about being available, being responsive to customers across five days, sometimes even six or seven days, then this is a different thing. The other thing that banks points out is that is not going to work. If the leaders aren’t 100% on board, the biggest thing I see and say you’re not ready for is if the senior leadership team is not fully bought in. And maybe you have an HR manager who’s interested but the CEO is not fully bought in. Then I say hey, that really is critical because you need to have the leadership walk the talk early on. It definitely is not for everybody. And there are certain business models that lend themselves better to four day workweeks and others, right? So if you’re billing by the hour as a lawyer or something, it’s harder

Unknown Speaker
Because the unit of time is connected to the economic value that you generate for your company, I think banks makes his excellent point. He says, if you’re billing hourly, then if you just go to a four day work week, you’re knocking 20% of your revenue. Yeah, I think it is a really good point. And I think it is thinking about your, your business model. But again, I think it’s thinking about, does mind can my bit business model change, to accommodate this, and I mean, you know, law is a difficult thing, because anything, you know, building by the hour at that level, we’re talking a significant amount of money. But I think it’s even as simple as you know, a charge for an outcome, you charge a price for a product is and you do the same in terms of a of a project. Similarly, you know, you performance, manage people, not by number of hours, they work, but the work, they’re producing the quality of it, you know, the objectives, their delivery, their performance targets, I think we think more a bit more about outcome, rather than process than I think it, it might help us reimagine our business models in a way that will facilitate a four day work week.

Unknown Speaker
Joe totally agrees. So it is a challenge. And it does mean that if you’re a law firm or a marketing agency, or accounting practice that bills by the hour, that is an additional complication that you need to deal with in order to make this work. But you can make it work and businesses in those sectors who, you know, bill by the hour have made it work. And the way that they’ve done it,

Unknown Speaker
for the most part is either number one, they have found enough efficiencies in their non billable time, or in their non billable overheads that they’ve been able to maintain the level of billable hours and the level of client time that they have in and around the same level, or they have changed the way they build. So they’ve either partly or wholly moved to fix the value based or project based billing, and which is obviously meant that they’re effectively decoupling the direct relationship between time and and revenue. And often the solution might lie somewhere in between, we’ve seen law firms and we’ve seen marketing agencies who have achieved this through some combination of those two things. Now fairy is in an industry. Like, I’m just going to say marketing agents, because I know it’s not exactly what fairy does. But marketing agencies were traditionally do tend to kind of pay per hour or there’s a there’s a bundle of hours that you sold. So his business model is not selling by the hour deliberately. But he’s also still found that by eliminating certain things, you can easily find that extra 20% of time, but you would have to revolutionise your operations. So maybe, maybe if you sell less time,

Unknown Speaker
with a four day work week that you might have to eliminate some other processes where the time is being spent as not paid as unpaid. So if you’re selling time, then you can still do it. But you have to reduce the the amount of work that people are doing on tasks that are unpaid, like, you know, having a process where you create a PowerPoint presentation for this client, you know, that takes one day every week, so that you can provide a report,

Unknown Speaker
you probably don’t need that. You just send them a list of you know, things that you’ve done in like a few bullet points and Happy Days, instead of spending five hours on paid time, right? That’s not they’re not paying you for the PowerPoint, they’re paying for the results. Just scrap that PowerPoint, nobody cares about your dogs and your cats in the office. You know, they care about, you know, these five bullet points, and nothing else. One of the things that doesn’t seem to be talked about is how this improves the employer brand. We asked Joe what other knock on effects this four day workweek could have one business that I worked with in the US health wise, they’re nonprofit that do health care information services, about 250 people based in Boise, Idaho, came to us in October 2021 had a huge issue with employee turnover. And you know, we’re losing a lot of a lot of key staff, they introduced the four day week effectively in response to that, and late summer that year, and their employee attrition has reduced will effectively zero. On the other hand, when you look at recruitment, you take companies like atom bank and Tyler Grange in the United Kingdom, both of those businesses have reported an increase in applications for open job postings of more than 60%. So what I would say is when it comes to productivity, that’s the piece that it’s not guaranteed. It’s not like you reduce your employees hours, and all of a sudden, magically, you have a 20% improvement in efficiency and productivity. It’s all about the process. And it’s all about the way that you implement this. But the one area that at least right now is almost a guarantee is that I haven’t yet discovered a business that’s moved. We’re sure the work we’ve that hasn’t seen a very significant benefit when it comes to talent attraction and retention in a tight labour market where things like flexible work offering remote hybrid working, these are things

Unknown Speaker
Many businesses relied upon to give themselves a competitive edge three, four or five years ago. Now those things are often the standard expectation within industries, they’re turning to the shorter workweek, as the new thing that can really give them an edge. Thanks has also seen a huge improvement in retention and recruitment. The biggest driver I see for teams that are thinking about the four day workweek, beyond just sort of organisational optimizations, and getting smarter as a team around how you do your work, is around recruiting and retention. How do you recruit top talent? And how do you retain that talent, especially for small businesses, I say, you know, you might not be in the top 1% of compensation against big tech companies and high pain competitors. But you can be in the top 1% of work weeks. And that’s a tool and advantage around recruiting and retention of talent seems to make sense to me what we know about what people want from from work nowadays. I am not surprised that that companies that have a four day work week are holding on to their people and attracting talent.

Unknown Speaker
So I guess my question is what what were the surprises? That one seems seems, you know, fairly straightforward. But were there any surprises when implementing the four day work week, we asked banks, there were so many things that we were we were surprised about the number one fear I had was, What would our external partners, investors and clients think? And we were really thoughtful about how we communicate with them. And when I advise teams, that’s the number one concern I get is, what are people going to think on the outside? How will they respond to this? I think viscerally all of us recognise that we don’t necessarily, we’re not at our peak performance for 40 continuous hours over the course of a work week. Again, ours are created equal. And so I think there’s a visceral sense of Yeah, I probably could get my job done in less time. And so the big surprise, I think, is that people recognise Wow, it’s the external reception was more welcome than I had originally feared. And the other thing that has been a surprise for me is that the four day moving from a five day to a four day workweek, is in some ways easier than moving from a full in person team to a fully remote team, going from fully in person to fully remote, which of course many teams had to do during COVID is actually in some ways, a much harder transition, that actually, I think, has bigger implications on business outcomes than moving from five days to four days, we also had a couple of surprises around productivity and communication, problems of productivity in the first, you know, probably first one or two weeks, we didn’t know how to measure what people were doing. We have just quit

Unknown Speaker
tracking time, so we don’t track any time of our employees. So we have just quit doing that. And now we didn’t know how to quantify the work that people do. Also communication, what happens if a client messages on Fridays and and then sometimes we had, we had a message on Thursday afternoon by a client, and they also messaged us on Friday afternoon being like, frustrated, like, I messaged you yesterday. And this is quite urgent, why on replying. And then that was one of the problems. Our process for that is, every time a client joins, we make them aware of the fact after 4pm On Thursday, you will not hear from us until Monday, and then you have to deal with it, then that was one of the you know, big leaps that we have done by just having the courage to, you know, talk to clients and tell them, you know, this is how it is Joe also found that it had an impact on wellbeing. So one of the things that was actually observed within the trials was the the amount of sleep that everyone in participating was getting each night. And it turned out that sleep deprivation reduced. So sleep deprivation as defined by getting seven hours or less. And that went from 50% to 17% amongst trial participants, so people were sleeping, on average about an hour extra per night, which is an interesting finding in and of itself. But I would also suggest that it’s quite possible that you know, the improvements in that indicator might also have given rise to other improvements elsewhere around general well being people being better refreshed and more energised at work, and that in turn having a positive impact on their productivity. So talking of productivity, we asked banks about what the actual what do you actually need to do to in to ensure that you maintain the productivity but then squeeze your week down to four days, he’s under think there’s actually easier to do this than moving from sort of fully office to hybrid, but from a cultural organisational perspective, moving from fully in person to fully remote. That’s a major shift. And I think that’s something that many of us have done, certainly imperfectly, and in my case, and I think in others cases as well. But the five year to four day shift is in some ways, less transformational from a sort of how your business operates how your team organises how your team collaborates.

Unknown Speaker
all those pieces, of course, are mediated through screens through fully remote, a lot of dynamics to that. And so I think this in some ways was was easier than that. I wonder as well, how many business leaders actually measure productivity, or what metrics they use to measure productivity beyond how long people are, are in the office, or how much they’re billing, you know, maybe a four day work week will prompt us to measure productivity properly for the first time. So people are trialling a shorter work week, effectively, because they’re being watched, is that the reason for the kind of efficiency and productivity gains, and therefore, once the trial period is over, you start to see some drop off, and you’re not able to stay in that. And you know, my answer to that would be twofold. First of all, if your business is only properly starting to measure productivity, when you’re running a four day week trial, then that’s a problem that you need to look at and address, that will be the first thing. The second thing is, that’s why the shorter work week, when we implemented what organisations This is not like, you know, your entitlement to statutory sick leave, or statutory holidays. This is something which is conditional. This is conditional on meeting certain objectives, targets, business objectives and goals. And therefore, it needs to feel to people like this is not a kind of a one off change. This is not a policy, this is an ongoing commitment to continuous improvement. Number one, having in place a really quality strong and framework for measuring performance. And you know, because for lots of managers, when, you know, they didn’t have the day to day monitoring of presenteeism, which often for a lot of, you know, more managers or more traditional mindsets, was kind of the go to, you know, COVID kind of forced a step change on that. And I think for that reason, often companies who have already done that, and who then move to shorter work weeks, find, to some extent, they’ve already done the hard part, you know, and then it doesn’t feel like a radical step, it actually feels like a logical and transition, because they’ve already figured out you know, how to measure output in a really quality consistent way, a couple of things there, I think, are experts putting out beautifully. One, we’ve already gone through one of the most disruptive transformations and changes and shifts in how we work in how we operate our business by going to fully remote and then hybrid. And yet, we haven’t all done that perfectly. But equally, you know, there’s there has been steps that have been made and businesses have made it work or invested to make it work or resort how they work to make it work. And I think it’s the same with the four day work week. And the other things well, I think that Joe said is you know, you could trial this on the on the condition as long as you know how to measure performance and productivity, that if we don’t hit these targets, guys, we’re going to have to go back to a five days, I know that I’d be freaking motivated to, you know, to figure out how to prioritise and make myself more more productive and hit my performance targets. If if that was the the incentive that I had. I think that was the biggest surprise to me was the after speaking to banks and Joe, they were saying that this, this isn’t like we’re now going to be four days with most companies try late. And so banks explained why this is really important. You know, there’s always this tension in workplaces that once you provide a benefit, it’s always hard to roll it back at the end of it. When we announced the pilot, we were very clear that the burden of proof was on the pilot to prove us wrong and that we were going to return to a five day work week unless the data was so convincing and clear. And so I think that the messaging from leadership is really important, as they think about trying a time bound experiment of a shorter work week, so that the team recognises that the default will be to return to five day workweeks. I love that what a brilliant approach in terms of messaging and again, that transparency, proving again, for his banks that transparency behind leadership decisions is so important. Jarrell also points out that yeah, of course, it can be reversed. If it doesn’t work. I’ve seen organisations reverse it temporarily. I’ve seen organisations fireless, and it hasn’t worked. I’ve seen organisations committed to us and even unanswered and then get cold feet and not go ahead with the trial, the first number of weeks, and in some cases, the person number of months, it felt almost like moving to a different country. I think a lot of that came down to you know, not having that kind of planning and preparation phase. Done. Right. And I think that that’s a really important thing that companies need to need to think about. You know, nobody is saying that this is easy. You know, like I am not arguing that moving to a four day week is really straightforward. It’s a very significant change that requires a very significant commitment to operational excellence. But if you can find

Unknown Speaker
Anyway, to pull it off like many others, before you have done that the benefits of this for your business and your people are real, and they’re significant. By now, you’ve probably heard fairy and you’ve probably guessed what fairy did, he just did it. So everything we do the company we want to be not just like the average, you know, and just being part of the of the likes of the sheep, right? We want to do we want to stand out, and we want not just to stand up or stand out in a good way.

Unknown Speaker
And I’ve committed to paying our employees the best for their skills in the industry. And also providing them like by far the best workplaces they can ever have. Therefore, the four day work week was one of the things that seemed extreme, and back in May 2022. And we said, we’re not even going to test, test it and see if it works or not, we will just do it. And then if it doesn’t work, we’ll adapt. And we’ll find ways to make it work. Therefore, we invest in into new systems, new processes, we have to revamp how we work.

Unknown Speaker
And it worked, it just worked. And if it didn’t work, then we found a way to, you know, resolve the problems that have come up, as you know, as we were progressing with this initiative.

Unknown Speaker
So I just wanted to be the best employer in this industry and

Unknown Speaker
introducing the 40 working is part of this. So two different perspectives that Joe was saying, you know, he can put it as a pilot and the pilot is really there to prove as a writer for day work week won’t work, very is taking a very different approach than going we’ll just do it, we’ll just do it, we’ll make it work. Two very different extremes. And of course, now, however you choose to roll it out, there is a there is a concern, will it work? Or will it not how much pain that we’re going to have to go through in rolling this out? And banks also had concerns when he did it back in 2019? So many concerns, like a hundreds of concerns about it, you know, and I think that it was not one of those things that you go into it saying, Oh, we’re not worried about it at all. I mean, as a CEO, I was worried about going at our major funders and investors think what would our clients and partners and think how would it affect revenue? Would we get less work done will be considered less seriously? Do we actually as a team, can we prioritise more important work? And deprioritize work? That’s not essential? How do we get this distributed across the entire organ? I mean, there were so many questions that we had. And now when I’m coaching teams, it is not like this is a panacea. And you suddenly move to a four day work week and all of your problems are solved. When I when I’m advising leaders about this, I say if you think of it that way, then you should not be piloting a four day workweek whatsoever. The best way to think about it is that the 40 hour workweek is a diagnostic tool that will surface the challenges problems in efficiencies in your business. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better. It’s going to tell you, Oh, these things are not working, or your team is spread too thin, or whatever those whatever those things that are holding your organisation back. And so in some ways is a good way to surface and reveal things that are not working so that you can address them. And for me, as a CEO, I think a lot of CEOs are like this, they would rather know what’s not working. So they actually have visibility into it and can begin to address it as opposed to

Unknown Speaker
not knowing any of these things. Bank has also just perfectly summed up the the argument for doing employee engagement and getting employee insights you need to know about these challenges to address them. And I think again, just showing banks, his commitment to, to workplace culture and what it takes to really invest in creating an environment where people can thrive. I think there might be a danger, as we kind of mentioned before that, you know, we’re gonna get too stuck on this idea of it being a four day work week. And, you know, once we’ve got our four days, that’s it, we’re done. That’s all the flexibility we need. So be it but of course, you know, it’s not going to be the silver bullet. Because we’re still going to have people like parents that need more flexibility. Maybe we have people that enjoy working five days a week, we asked her what his thoughts, you know, I think that this comes to another misconception that we find about the four day week, which is we’re not talking about something that is really rigid, where once you move to a four day week, you will have additional flexibility. Sometimes you need to show a degree of flexibility, the odd weekend, the odd evening, and to be able to accommodate that. The same is true for a four day work week, what we’re talking about is moving the needle on the standard expectation, but acknowledging that there might well be times and that you need to, to be flexible with that. And one business that we’ve worked with in Australia and Pentium have moved to a four day week structure, but they call it effectively the gift of the fit. Three out of every four weeks. People get that day fully off and then maybe one in every four they might have to do an hour they might have to do two hours.

Unknown Speaker
Want to make sure they keep on top of everything? And employees are understandably quite happy with that arrangement? Yeah, well said I think it’s you know, we have a five day work week, but a lot of us will still work couple hours in the evenings or our day at the weekend, if we want to catch up on something or spend more time with the will be the same with a four day work week. I love what Joe said there is creating a new standard, and then building flexibility expectations around that. Another concern that I sometimes get from business leaders when we’re looking into workplace culture and the different interventions that we can do is is it just a fad? Is this just the latest sexy thing that the you know, the younger workers in our workforce, or the Gen Xers or the younger millennials are jumping on to how do I know that this is isn’t just a Gen Zed thing? We asked Joe, I think there’s probably some degree of a generational divide. But I wouldn’t say that that is, you know, the big differentiator actually, it’s much more about openness to innovation. And even if you look, you know, across the different industries, I think those businesses that kind of, were ahead of the game, when it came to, you know, really embracing remote working asynchronous communications, things like that tend to be the same kinds of businesses that are more likely to see themselves as you know, a pioneer within their industry, or someone that’s going to take the lead on testing or something like a shorter working week. So I do see in the comment sections, a lot of these people have got lots of concerns about it. And quite rightly, too, it’s a new thing. So I asked banks, in his experience of helping companies transition to a four day work week, what kind of questions do people have? Many companies have been able to do this without a loss in revenue, without a loss in all the big fears? Like, oh, actually, it’s possible? And then the question that I get all the time was, well, how do we do it here. And that’s really been the focus of, of the course, and of the coaching that I do is saying, you know, we can try to sell you on the four day work week. But if you’re at sort of not convinced about it, we’re probably unlikely to sell you on it. We’re looking for people that are saying, we’ve heard about this, it looks interesting, I have concerns about my business, it’s it’s fundamentally different and unique than all the other ones that have tried it, you know, you don’t understand why why ours might not work and how does it actually roll out? And what are the what’s the sequence of steps? And, you know, how should we think about bank holidays? And what do we think about these HR policies? And, you know, when do you when do you sequence certain things, all those things are sort of the big questions that that come up. And so the a lot of the questions that I get are very tactical, operational questions

Unknown Speaker
around it, then I think we get into a bunch of operational things, which is where I spend most, most of my time is on that stuff. Although those bigger questions, of course, are interesting to me, too. So yeah, I think, you know, most of the questions I get are around sort of operationalizing, one of the biggest fears I think, is what happens if you lose clients? What happens if people don’t like it? What happens if revenue goes down? So I asked very, did you see a reduction in clients? No, none of a factor, we have just been winning more and more more clients, I don’t think that makes it makes any difference. You know, even the fact that we don’t do meetings with clients. So we tell the client, you know, we have four day work week, we’re not gonna spend time in meetings with you. And then it doesn’t put off anyone people understand, you know, but I think if you provide a good service, good results for your clients, in our case, you know, getting them the links that we promised, then, you know, all of these things they understand, and they can deal with the fact that we’re not going to have weekly meetings with five d members. And he told me about the last weeks, you know, five links that we landed, we send them a spreadsheet, here’s the links.

Unknown Speaker
Have a nice weekend, right. And that’s how simple we simplify everything. They don’t want meetings either, but just don’t know it. I remember listening to a podcast with a woman who was a consultant and talking about how she charges for her time. And the thing that she said is that I will never charge anyone for a question over email. I’ll manage expectations around kind of the time scale of my mom, one when I apply, but I never charge anyone for it. The client wants a meeting, like a virtual or conversation, even telephone meeting, I will charge by the 15 minute slot. It’s amazing how many people suddenly realise that that question can be answered in an email, not a telephone call. Now, there’s something called Auto GBT, where you can set up chat GBT instances as like a virtual assistant. So we’ve got all that you got automation, you’ve got all kinds of stuff. So I asked Joe, do you think that AI and automation is going to have a massive impact on this? I think that automation and AI and the impact of that on business is here today. And I think we’re going to see, you know, an increasing impact on job roles, professions, businesses industries over the coming decade. And actually I think

Unknown Speaker
That’s part of the macro argument for a shorter working week, you know, back when John Maynard Keynes was predicting we’d all be working 15 hours a week by the end of last century, even the US Republican President Richard Nixon foresaw the four day week coming down the tracks back in the 60s. But I think that there’s a very strong argument that as we head into this fourth industrial revolution of digitalization, AI automation, robotics, that the 14th week is actually a way that we can tangibly share the benefits of productivity advancement and technological advancement with workers in a way that if we’re being honest, we didn’t really do with the last 20 or 30 years worth of progress. Well, I stay with a how do we tangibly share the benefits of productivity advancement with our workers?

Unknown Speaker
He’s got away with words Joe has me. It’s just so right. There was no we’re not talking about making less money or, or at least just squeezing continue to squeeze people until the point of that they break. Yeah, Jeremy, you’re, you’re my new favourite person you’d like. But you know, of course, this isn’t. I think the other misconception as well with a four day workweek, and maybe why leaders panic is going Oh, my God, we need to do everything we do now fit it into four days, like the fully work that isn’t just a compression of your week, as our experts have explained this as a fundamental transformation of how you work your business model, how you engage with clients. It’s a huge change. And ferry agrees that it is absolutely vital, you understand what this actually is. And for what I suggest others do as well. If they wanted to, for the work week, it means we actually cut

Unknown Speaker
one day from the work. And it doesn’t mean we just took those hours and compress them into the other four, four days, right? It means it’s really for a workweek. It’s not like, by day’s work week, compress into four days, right. And it’s also about being a decent leader. I think the most important thing is just to be kind with people because as a manager, or even as a CEO, you might think that now people are gonna take advantage blah, blah, blah.

Unknown Speaker
And yes, some, some might take advantage, but most of the people will actually, you know, love the initiative, and you know, they will be they will be good humans when when you provide this to them, like it’s always, you know, starting from kindness, just be kind and understanding with people. And, and just, yeah, just don’t micromanage them either. You need less micromanagement, because if you give them an extra Friday, every week where they can go and take yoga classes, or they can go and spend more time, you know, with their kids,

Unknown Speaker
or they can, you know, go to the gym and have a better, better life, outside work. Everyone, everyone will be very grateful.

Unknown Speaker
I find that objection in general, quite frustrating from leaders that some people will take advantage. There’d be a four day work week, whether it would be working from home being fully remote, whether it be people working remotely, but in a different country for a couple of weeks, I’ll be able to get Vantage, I’ll be on the beach on the beach with a pina colada. Well, you’re not just trust you do not trust your people. And if you don’t trust your people, how do you effectively manage them and lead them and create this sense of camaraderie and vision and passion that as needed if you don’t trust people?

Unknown Speaker
What relationship do you possibly have with them that is productive, and, and long term? You know, there’s no mistake that when trusts a loss for a marriage or relationship, it deteriorates and breaks. Like if you don’t have trust, that relationship is going to deteriorate and break. And that’s what we see it with all the research around wellbeing and engagement. If people don’t feel trusted in their work to do their job, well, then they disengage. And that’s the real problem that you want to be worrying about. Because when people disengage, they’re much less productive. When people disengage actively, there’ll be actually trying to sabotage what’s what’s happening in your organisation and what you’re trying to do. And then they’re going to leave, which costs you 1000s of 1000 pounds in recruitment and training again. And secondly, if you don’t trust people, why the hell are you bringing them into your business? What is our input? Our experts, I think was last week actually, I can’t maybe it was. Maybe it was Barney, who made a really beautiful point was like at some point you had this person has been chosen. This is the chosen one that I bring into my business. If you don’t trust me at that point recruitment, or you’ve not even got something within your recruitment process to understand help you understand if this person is trustworthy, thank you.

Unknown Speaker
Sorry, but it’s just it’s just the stupidest excuse. Oh, people will take advantage

Unknown Speaker
You’ve just told me everything you need to tell me about your workplace culture. Interesting. Interesting. You obviously make some really, really good points there. And and I think this whole idea of trust, it’s just underpins anything you want to do at work, whether it’s work from home, or whether it is that you’ve said, whether it’s a four day work week, whether it’s giving people I know that I know, people who don’t have full access to client lists, because they’re worried that someone’s gonna go and steal them, or certain systems. Yeah, it makes the kind of workflows really clunky. Yeah, yeah. It’s just, it’s just stupid, because like Leon said, You got to trust them, and you’re just gonna, and some people will knock you over at some point, because that’s just life. It’s just life, isn’t it? But that’s what’s gonna break your heart. Do you know what, that’s exactly the analogy I was gonna go with? Okay, so if you are convinced at this point that for that four day work week is for you, or at least you just want to find a bit more about it, then Joe and banks are basically the experts. Now, if you are a larger organisation, then you probably gravitate towards Joe, if you’re a smaller organisation, then banks is probably your man. So I asked banks a little bit more about his programme. Yeah, so my programme is targeted at small businesses, small teams of under, say, 20 to 25 people. And then the programme really walks through four steps. The first is, how do you design a four day work week pilot? And then really again, so the whole entire focus is on before you before you buy it for the forever? Why don’t you try it out over the course of a pilot, you design it, then you began as a team to plan it, then you actually run a pilot, then you measure it, and evaluate if you want to keep it for the long term? How do you begin to facilitate a process internally where your team can consider ways to prioritise and deep prioritise? How do you look at priorities in the company and figure out if those are the most essential? How do you what are the HR dimensions to it thinking about local municipal issues of HR issues, so going going through everything from the operationalizing it

Unknown Speaker
and the course is an online resource that’s manifested through a series of modules, lessons, videos, PDFs, and this is the course that I wanted for myself, when we went through the four day workweek pilot, and gives creates an evergreen resource. Once you get into the programme, you have these modules, lessons, PDFs forever, and you can kind of refer back to them. Yeah, smart workweek.io is the best place to go and the programmes there,

Unknown Speaker
you can access the course and also provide some specific coaching with me. So people have access to an online set of resources and guides and videos. They also have access to specific additional questions via phone calls in coaching with me, well, I brilliant service, I think if you have any concerns or need is helping him through this a tried and tested method, then I think it’s brilliant. Could you imagine if he would have had that the shift to remote work to at the start of the pandemic? I know, I know. But I’m glad. I’m glad it’s around. Now. Now Joe also does something similar, but again, for slightly larger organisations. And he has a very specific process he goes through is this right for you? Are you ready for it? What will it look like? One of the things that will need to be addressed, because it’s not one size fits all, that our model to kind of help companies implement. This is also not one size fits all. So it’s very customised based on on the needs of the company. And what’s the kind of, you know, what’s the baseline based on that diagnostic that we do? The first thing that we would tend to do with with companies is a diagnostic process which looks at your processes, their culture, it takes a holistic view of this in order to kind of answer three key questions. Number one, how ready are you for a shorter working week? Second question is, what are the pain points? What are the potential issues and challenges that you might need to overcome in implementing this? And then the third thing is, what’s the right model? So what’s the pros and cons of different whether it’s four day week, nine day fortnight half day, Friday thought or workdays, universal day off rosters, whoever I love, Joe, the first step, a diagnostic whatever that intervention, whether it’s a four day work week, whether it’s a wellbeing programme, whether it’s a mentoring programme, it’s a team building day, how does this fit into the changes that you’re trying to make within your culture? How are we going to measure that? How are we going to know exactly what solution is right? It’s not. It’s not always very sexy. But the first step should always be understanding exactly where you are now, Joe, you’re my new favourite.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, so we’ve covered an awful lot here. We’ve talked about the problems with doing it. We’ve talked about the concerns around it. We’ve talked about what business models it doesn’t doesn’t work for. We’ve talked all about whether it’s a trend and whether it’s just fatty or not. And we’ve also shown you giving you two great experts, you can go and talk to a little bit more. All of the links will be in the show notes.

Unknown Speaker
Lea, anything that you want to add to this? The only thing that I would add? Is that given the state of the workplace now this the rising cases of burnout, the continuing low levels of engagement, and didn’t we see some statistics come out? Last year, around 20% of productivity being lost per employee per week? Malachi four day work week right there. I think it’s kind of the thing of, we haven’t got it right. In fact, right now, we’re getting it horribly, horribly wrong. So if we’re looking at any change, whether it’s a four day work week or not, let’s not pretend that we’ve got it right. And this is going to disrupt things for, you know, for the worse the chances are, if it’s done well, it’s going to make significant improvements, not only in terms of our business’s performance, but our employees wellbeing as well. Bravo, bravo. And that stands to reason Listen, this podcast because we get experts in but then Leanne is just brilliant. Coming in with a little summary that just makes you go.

Unknown Speaker
She’s right, you know.

Unknown Speaker
So next week, we have got a generational panel, I think, you Leon put that together, you’ve done you’ve actually done a video on this one. Yeah, this is exciting. So it’s our first full video podcast that is going to be coming out next week. So you’ll be able to see the full video on the YouTube.

Unknown Speaker
If you don’t watch go on and stay selling.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, you’re gonna see

Unknown Speaker
is although our generational panel isn’t, it’s very, very clever and sensible and insightful. So yeah, that’s exciting. And yeah, we’ll also be at the water cooler, as we mentioned at the top there next week, as well. So yeah, well, we’ll hopefully see some of our lovely listeners that come and see us.

Unknown Speaker
And for those of you who can’t make it.

Unknown Speaker
Thank you for listening.

Unknown Speaker
Yes, we really appreciate it. We’ll send you a check in the post.

Unknown Speaker
fine if you don’t want to make sure your website is ranking on Google that go and look at various company the link is in the shownotes really charges love how simple it is. I mean, if nothing else, just go and get him to pitch you on what what his company does and how much it costs. And you’re just so go. He’s just simplified the lot. Just brilliant. Really like the guy and also go and check out on LinkedIn because he’s fuckin He’s hilarious on LinkedIn. You’ll see he’s sitting there on a sofa with I think it was Brad Pitt. I can’t number am I being Leonardo DiCaprio?

Unknown Speaker
Yep, shoulders. Yeah, we will leave all the links to all of our guests in the show notes, along with some more length. Tomorrow’s how you can join the conversation around truth and lies on LinkedIn, and some previous episodes, we’ll dive into our back catalogue. See you next week.