Four day week
We are now a certified gold standard four-day week employer. We’re one of only five architecture firms in the UK and the only one in London (as far as we can see) making this radical change to working hours. To achieve the gold standard you must offer “A permanent 32 hour (or less) four-day week, with a reduction of hours and no loss of pay”.
It’s working really well for us and we’re happier, more productive and more efficient. There are some really useful resources for employers and employees available and plenty of research showing the benefits of this approach. We actively encourage others to explore it too!
We recently posted about this on LinkedIn and there was an interesting discussion around the topic in the various comments and replies. We’re open to chatting more about so please get in touch if you want to discuss it.
More recently a friend sent us a link to this LinkedIn piece from someone noting their perceived issues with the idea and suggesting we comment. After seeing the below comment how could we not?
So, people who are established in their careers & enjoyed lockdown have decided that an extra day to make banana bread is a good option. Should I be shocked!
Our response to this is below and is a work in progress for explaining the benefits of the four day week to others. We hope to hold an event for employers soon to discuss this and answer questions from people.
Your post is somewhat provocative and I can of course understand why it might seem alien to want to change course after doing things like this for so long. I hope that our response might help explain our reasoning for it.
We have set our business up on a four day/32 hour week since employing our first member of staff last April ‘22'. We now have four employees + two directors.
Our view is that we should be making things better in all that we do. That includes our work and output along with working conditions and how we manage our team. We (the directors) have both worked crazy hours in previous roles to the detriment of our own physical and mental well-being and don’t see why that should continue for others, or ourselves. It’s time to break that chain of long work hours, stress and presenteeism. It’s also about setting up a studio that we would want to work in.
There are so many benefits to reducing the work week but perhaps the most important to me is that we are designers and expect people to be creative. It’s not easy being creative when one is exhausted and hasn’t left the studio for six days straight. I use my Friday off for cycling or getting to The Tate to see some art whilst the masses are at work. I’ll admit that my work does creep into Friday sometimes as a director, but that’s part of running your own business and it’s sometimes easier to have a few hours of emails and catch up when everyone else is away.
Reducing hours also requires ruthless efficiency. Do we need that meeting? Do all of us need to be there? What are our actual targets this week? We’re constantly reviewing our priorities to align with our goal of spending less time at our desks.
The other aspect of this is management. If you have poor management and culture in your workplace then changing to four days isn’t going to solve it. Resourcing, planning and all other areas of running the business need to catch up. The other comment we often see is the idea of staff slacking and this then exacerbating the issue. If you have a poor performing staff then that comes down to the culture and boundaries set as well as HR and again is not going to be solved by the four day week.
One thing it does help with though is hiring and staff retention. Perhaps I’ll also note a quote from one of our more senior team here.
“…I absolutely love it. Sometimes the four days are quite intense, but I like that, and every weekend is a long weekend. I don’t ever resent going further and working late occasionally as it’s not the norm”
Essentially we think it’s a good thing to do and hope that more people follow.
In some senses, it’s much easier to start a business with four days build in. We know just how hard it is to change an established business with several employees or more and we think it’s even more impressive that any organisation changes their setup during their lifetime.