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On Wednesdays, while most of her friends are at work, Tiffany Schrauwen is on the tennis court and practices her setback. The Melbourne project manager has a lesson for her at 9:00 am and that can not be bad for her game.
Schrauwen does not relax. For nearly a year, the digital marketing agency Versa – where she works – closed on Wednesday, giving staff a four-day, five-day pay week.
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Company employees organize a standard day on Mondays and Tuesdays, then return for two more days on Thursdays and Fridays. No meetings are scheduled for Wednesday. However, if a customer has an urgent job to do, the workers pick up the phone.
When Schrauwen was informed of the plan, she was excited, then suspicious – she was worried about how it would work; As a project manager, she was the main contact for staff and clients. It had to bear the burden of missed deadlines, stress or broken lines of communication.
But the Versa staff has reorganized its working methods to improve its efficiency. It will organize itself so that some tasks are completed at the break of the week, the meetings are more targeted and useless chatter less attractive. Every two weeks, the company also reviews what did not work and what worked. "Everyone wants it to work because we like to have flexibility," said Schrauwen. "If I want to keep this Wednesday, I better prepare my week."
Make it work
The policy was implemented last July. Since then, the Australian company's revenues have increased 46% and profits have nearly tripled, said its CEO and founder, Kath Blackham. Blackham is reluctant to credit the entire performance of the four days of the week. "We are winning work because we are known for doing great work," she said, but adds that the turnover rate of agency staff is very low and that consistent teams working on files can be extremely attractive for potential business partners.
This is a justification for Blackham who, after a decade of "incredible and fantastic flexibility" – had to convince his management team to test the week without Wednesday and promise to return to five days if she failed . She founded the company with a baby and a baby, determined to run a high-performance business that respects the need for flexibility.
"What I wanted to show is that in one of the most unlikely industries – a service industry known for young people who work very long hours – it can work if you bring something innovative Says Blackham.
A midweek break allows staff to go to the gym, take care of the house, take care of young children, make appointments, get started or any to just watch Netflix. Sometimes they catch up on their work. Sick days are down, staff satisfaction is up, says Blackham. "This Monday, you feel several times a week."
Why Wednesdays?
On Monday, the feeling of productivity was crucial to Blackham's decision to divide the week into two "mini-weeks", rather than creating a long weekend, which she feared could encourage her staff, mostly young, to "spend an even bigger weekend". She also found that allowing staff to choose their own days off often meant that other employees or clients did not know when the staff member was available, which affected productivity.
Professor Jarrod Haar is not surprised that Wednesday's fall was so successful for Versa. As a professor of human resource management at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, as part of his own research, Haar interviewed employees every four weeks, which allowed them to to note that they enjoyed a lot on Wednesdays.
Wednesday break means you return to Thursday fresh and people feel more productive
For employers, the mid-week closure gives "more for your money". he says. "The Wednesday break means that you come back to Thursday fresh and that people feel more productive."
Haar followed the New Zealand property management company Perpetual Guardian, who had made headlines last year when she had tested a four-day week without productivity loss. The sick days were down, staff welfare was on the rise, but the company had lost some of the staff who were inconsistent with flexible and condensed work.
"A cause whose time has come"
For Andrew Barnes, CEO and owner of Perpetual Guardian, the four-day week is "a cause whose time has come". While Blackham de Versa wanted to make workplaces more flexible and more balanced, a study revealed to Barnes that workers were only productive for about two and a half hours a day. There had to be a better way to organize working time, he thought.
The five-day week is not an old phenomenon. The automaker Henry Ford was one of the first to offer workers this weekend in 1926, thinking that it would make them more productive. Witnessing the march of technology, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that the workweek would eventually be reduced to 15 hours.
Nearly 100 years later, organizations around the world are revisiting the structure of work weeks. Great Britain and Ireland have shown particular interest in the four-day week, with the United Trade Union Congress, Forsa Ireland, the Scottish National Party and the British Labor Party, all considering the concept , at different levels. The Swedish regions also played by offering shorter days or weeks, with mixed results. Even in North America, the long-established Shake Shack fast food chain has announced that it is testing a four-day week in response to the contraction in the job market.
However, not all the reduced hours tests have been successful. An experience of six hours a day in state-run retirement homes in Gothenburg, Sweden, revealed that even though the number of sick days and the productivity rate improved, staff costs increased significantly as more people needed to be hired to fill the gaps.
Some startups who tested the four-day week in the United States had to go back to five days of work after finding the day off made the company less competitive and the staff more stressed
Some startups who tested the four-day week in the US had to return to five work days after finding the day off made the company less competitive and staff more stressed. Flexibility is important. When they spoke to BBC Capital, Blackham and Schrauwen of Versa had both worked during the long Easter weekend on urgent client projects.
Blackham and Barnes both said other business leaders had backed their four-day weeks, but had insisted that it would not work in their own companies. According to Barnes, it is critical to the company's success to enable employees to come up with their own solutions and maintain them for productivity goals.
It's not just work
Barnes says his organization now advises about fifty companies on implementing a four – day week.
The New Zealand-based CEO said that changes in the way we structure full-time work can address many social challenges. "One in five employees suffer from mental stress at any time. You are addressing this problem, what is it doing for health budgets? If parents have the opportunity to spend more time with their children, what are the consequences on the school results? If you do not have cars backing up in rush hour, what about the environment? "
Professor Rae Cooper, a specialist gender and labor relations scholar at the University of Sydney, said the four-day week would address another key issue: the loss of highly skilled women in the labor market. "The average age of first birth in Australia is in the early thirties. It was then that we focused on career development, increased income and the creation of highly productive employees. It's really when we lose women [from the workforce] because we do not give them the choice to be both productive mothers and women workers, "she says.
And it's something that Blackham de Versa absolutely wants to change. She wants to make sure her daughter can pursue a career and a family life.
"Nobody should have to fight for flexibility," she says.
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