A four day working week, that'll never work .... or will it?

Over the coming weeks I will be posting a series of thoughts and observations as my charity pilots a 4 Day Week. We’ll look at the challenges we face along the way, the highs and the lows, and we’ll assess just how successful a 4-day week can be.

I hope that this series of blogs can contribute to the conversation, especially for those who may be unsure as to whether their business or organisation has the ability to embrace the 4-day week. But don’t just take my word for it, take a look at this TedTalk, it’s all it took to make me sit up and take notice. You never know you may be inspired to join us on the journey!

Today’s blog focuses on the effects on people.

Tasked with running a high demand service during a national pandemic, Citizens Advice Gateshead and Society Matters had to adapt massively to ensure we continued to meet the needs of our clients. We’d never delivered critical services from our homes before but two years on we continue to do so and we’ve learnt so very much its totally transformed how we work, showing us our clients have very different expectations today, and the 9 to 5 model of delivering services is broken, it simply can't deliver the exceptional service we're known for.

As people step forward into a post-pandemic world, as they’ve gone back to their jobs, as children have returned to school, and public services have opened up again we find our hospitals are overflowing with unprecedented levels of demand and backlog, social care despite their valiant stand during Covid continues to be under-staffed and under-valued straining beyond reasonableness, critical services are overloaded to include mental health crisis support which appears broken beyond repair.

This means the advice, information and guidance provided by the Citizens Advice network and the social action for businesses supported and encouraged by Society Matters is needed more than ever. People’s problems are more complex, more urgent, more intense, and the stakes are higher. More than ever before people face utility disconnection, food insecurity on an unprecedented scale, eviction, extreme and prolonged social isolation, family upheaval and relationship breakdown. We’re storing up huge social and health problems as a result.

This rests heavy with our staff and volunteers who are dealing with increasingly complex, challenging and distressing enquiries where threats of suicide, self-harm, violence and mental anguish are not just a once a day conversation which would be stressful enough, but recurrent many, many times in a single shift.

The level of emotional resilience required to be a Citizens Advice adviser in the turmoil within which we currently live requires extraordinary levels of courage, knowledge and fortitude. Let’s not forget for the last decade we’ve responded to welfare reform, austerity, a pandemic and now a cost-of-living crisis like none we’ve seen before and our service has been at the heart of it all. To do this work day after day takes a toll. Our teams are at risk of burn-out and if we stand true to our charity’s vision of demanding a fair society for all, with lives well lived we must recognise this applies equally to our people. When you view the 4-day week from this perspective, when you appreciate just how much energy and emotional resilience it takes to do our work, the 4-day week makes perfect sense for us, and we’re not alone.

The 4 Day Week is fast becoming a hot topic. North-East businesses and charities are looking at the model and considering the benefits, not just to themselves but to their clients, customers and stakeholders. For my own charity I hope the 4-day week will offer my staff and volunteers the opportunity to recharge their batteries each week, to spend more time with their friends and family, to do the things that are important to them, the things that bring them joy. In doing so, I hope their health improves, I hope they feel strong, happy, and motivated. I hope they are more productive in the workplace, feel more valued, more able to support each other and our clients, that we will have less absence, and improved staff and volunteer retention.

If we pull all of that off, I expect our customer experience will be so much better, that our productivity will increase, we’ll be open for longer, we’ll be listening better, helping more and digging deeper, increasing channels of access and deepening our impact. I hope we never look back! Only time will tell.