Changing to a 4 day week

This is the third in a series – part one starts here

For clarity: same salary, same workload. We just don’t work Friday, Saturday or Sunday. A 3-day weekend, every weekend.

It’s been running for 2 months now. What have we learnt, and could it work for you?

I was very clear at the outset with the team; if we work 4 days a week and see a 20% cut in turnover, we’re going back to 5 days. It’s your Friday, if you want to take it off you need to work hard and work efficiently. Keep the turnover at its current level and we’ll keep Fridays off. And to be fair, this has happened. Its not been without incident. Month 1 suffered from a couple of delays to projects, an occupational hazard. We work as lighting consultants on large scale architectural projects like hotels and shopping malls, and we know when to expect a drawing package from the architect to come in so we can start work on it; if it doesn’t come until a week later that’s a week of downtime and a week of salary with no income. This happened on 2 large projects in the first month, so turnover down – but not because of the 4 day week. I held my nerve despite my instincts telling me this was a bad idea and I should panic... i didn't)

In month 2, turnover is 102% of monthly target. (But a note of caution; two month’s data is not a large enough sample set – see the empiricist in me resurfacing?)

So from a work point of view, we’re doing the same as before. We’ve kept a record of problems we have had – any missed deadlines, any meetings missed? No. We do it by Thursday instead.

For the staff, including me, a three-day weekend revolutionises your life. With two days off, you only just recover from the week before starting again. With three, it’s a whole new ball game. I spent last Friday at the Tate Modern looking at art, free from the demands of clients, colleagues or my (adorable time-sucking) children. Entirely free to wander and stare at Kandinsky for as long as I wanted. Free time, entirely free time, is a rarity. But this time is not dead time, we’re a team of creative lighting consultants. We work on restaurants and hotels and retail projects, so we cannot live in isolation. We need to be inspired, to breathe, and to notice the interesting detail in the stonework that we never noticed before because we had to rush and hurry. As the poet WH Davies said:

“What life is this if, full of care,

We have no time to stop and stare?”

Do we do the same amount of work? Seem to. Are we more mindful and more conscious of every moment, trying not to waste time? Yes. Are we really? Yes.

These two things by themselves entirely justify the change.  We’re all a lot happier and we’re making the same money.

Would this model work for everyone? I don’t know. It works for lighting consultancies like us, working in the construction industry. It helps that the pace is often slower in construction – a hotel takes 2 years to design and build so we can plan, and we know when we need to do things. Would it work for you? I don’t know. If you run a 7-days a week operation like a shop, probably not.

But if you try it, and it does work, what freedom this gives us all. The 5-day week is a recent construction and the history of the industrial revolution is a history of slowly but steadily reducing hours. Historically, from 6.5 days a week (Sunday mornings off for church) to 6, to 5 – it’s the logical next step.

If you want to support us in this next step in of workplace forward practice, next time you want a lighting consultant for a project, think of Elektra! Full contact details on the website – www.elektralighting.co.uk