My team works a four-day week on full pay and it’s the best gift a boss can give

A year ago a Melbourne boss made a radical decision to overhaul her team’s work-life balance and the change has been immense.

OPINION

You wake up bleary eyed at 6am on a Friday morning. “One more day until the weekend,” you think to yourself. But then you suddenly remember – you don’t work on Fridays!

Every weekend is a three-day weekend. And here’s the kicker: you still get paid a full-time salary for working just four normal length, eight-hour days.

This has been the life of my team for the last year at Inventium, the behavioural science consultancy I founded nearly 15 years ago. What started as an experiment in the last half of 2020, the Four-Day Week (FDW) has turned into a permanent fixture. This is what I have learnt after one year of taking almost every Friday off.

It’s easy to waste time but now I can’t afford to

It’s so easy to faff around at work and waste a whole lot of time. There are social media sites to check, news to read, and online shopping to do. But putting a big constraint in the way – having to do five days’ worth of work in four – makes you acutely aware of the choices you make in how you use your time at work.

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Dr Amantha Imber implemented at four-day week at Inventium a year ago.

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Knowing I had to boost my own productivity by around 25 per cent to fit my work into four normal-length days, I became much more conscious and protective of my time. I started to say ‘no’ more often. I said ‘no’ frequently to meetings and opportunities where I didn’t think I could add value or that I didn’t think would add value to what I was working on.

Other people on the team tried to apply Parkinson’s law to their work – the notion that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. One consultant ran experiments on herself where she would set significantly less time to do a task than what she would normally allocate. As a result, she realised she could power though more work in less time.

Urgent things don’t actually happen all that often

A fear my team and I had prior to implementing the FDW was around the problem of urgent issues arising on Friday. What if lots of urgent problems arose on Friday and none of us were working?

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Staff at Inventium were initially worried that emergencies would occur while they weren’t there.

To overcome this fear, most of us would check our inbox a couple of times on Fridays. We also put our mobile number in an Out of Office auto-responder email. After tracking how many urgent issues arose during those initial six months, we realised our fear was unfounded.

Less than five “urgent” things happened. And really, those five things all could have probably waited until Monday.

Unless you’re a heart surgeon, most things are not life or death matters.

Being more productive can make us feel happier

We often think about being more productive as something that our bosses will appreciate because we will be able to get more work done for them. But actually, being more productive can actually make us happier and healthier.

One of our consultants, who has struggled with an auto-immune disease for the last few years, had a particularly busy start to 2021.

In past workplaces, she told me she would’ve become sick by now and had to take a fair amount of time off work. But having Friday as a recovery day has meant she has only had to take one sick day all year – the least amount of time she has had to take off in over a decade.

And on Sundays, she finds herself really excited for the week to start, rather than dreading it, because she feels geared up, energetic, and ready to go.

It’s easy to take a four day week for granted

Over a decade ago, I lived in an apartment in Sydney’s Glebe. It had a stunning view of the harbour. But after a few months in this apartment, I barely even noticed said view unless I had friends come around who would gush over its beauty.

When you’ve had Fridays off for a year, a benefit such as the FDW becomes easy to take for granted. This is why we decided to call the initiative Gift of the Fifth. The name reminds people, including me, that it is indeed a gift – the gift of time.

And in the age of peak-busyness, I truly believe that time is one of the most meaningful gifts that businesses can give their people.

Dr Amantha Imber is the founder of Inventium, Australia’s leading behavioural science consultancy and the host of How I Work, a podcast about the habits and rituals of the world’s most successful people.