Medibank launches four-day work week with no loss of pay for 250 staff including those in customer facing roles

After a torrid year dealing with the fallout of a Russian cyber assault, Australia’s biggest health insurer has launched a four day work week for 250 staff.

Australia’s biggest health insurer, Medibank, will trial a four day working week with no loss of pay for the next six months, igniting one of the biggest changes to office work.

Medibank will partner with Macquarie University to complete the study, which will involve 250 employees – including those working part-time and in customer facing roles.

The trial is part of a world movement, 4 Day Week Global, an organisation founded by New Zealand entrepreneur Andrew Barnes, who made the switch at his financial services company, Perpetual Guardian, after a trial in 2018.

Medibank’s Kylie Bishop said it will involve an 100:80:100 model, whereby employees cut their work hours by 20 per cent but maintain existing productivity and pay levels.

“We’re really wanting to bring the future of work into the now of work,” she said.

“For more than 18 months now, we’ve been exploring how we can work smarter, offer greater flexibility, and create the best health and wellbeing for our people, in support of our customers.

“There are lots of pressures out there right now, whether it’s cost of living or people managing their work and home commitments. We’re constantly thinking about how we can help balance that for our people and invest in their health and wellbeing to help prevent issues like burnout.”

It comes as thousands of workers at 100 companies in the UK have started working a four day week as the workplace revolution gathers pace across the world.

Other Australian companies, including Telstra, NIB and Grant Thornton, have also either drafted plans involving shortened working weeks with no loss of productivity or cementing their shift to hybrid working, sparked during the Covid-19 pandemic.

250 Medibank staff will participate in the trial, including those in customer facing roles. Picture: Christian Gilles/NCA NewsWire

Ms Bishop said the trial – which Medibank has dubbed “The Gift” – was about empowering employees to focus on work that has the greatest impact for customers, reducing red tape and making a real difference in the lives of its people.

“The goal is not to work a compressed work week but to find opportunities in our work to rethink wasted or non-value add work, remove bureaucracy that’s not effective to make space for the gift of time. We will continue to support our customers at the same levels or higher as we’ve always done,” she said.

“Our hypothesis is that by creating the opportunity for even greater flexibility, our people and teams will adjust their way of working to improve the value of their outputs and reduce unproductive time. As a result, our people will be happier and healthier, and absenteeism and employee retention will improve. We think that’s worth trying and learning from.”

Macquarie University’s Health and Wellbeing Research Unit and Macquarie Business School will independently monitor and measure a range of employee and customer metrics including customer advocacy and operational metrics like absenteeism and attrition, productivity and performance effectiveness. “The team will also monitor a range of employee health and wellbeing metrics to understand the impact on rest, sleep, and wellbeing of participants,” Medibank said.

Allowing customer roles to join the four-day working week trial solves attempts to solve one of the biggest problems employers have faced when adopting more flexible work models – which is widely seen more as a perk for those working in corporate offices.

Indeed, earlier this year former Bupa chief executive Hisham El-Ansary said while the company was exploring changes to its working model, including potentially a four-day working week, he was “very conscious of how that might play out for non-office based employees”.

“It’s fine when you're kind of contemplating an office worker and you say ‘well, you can work whenever you want, you know, here are the outcomes you have to deliver and if you can do it in four days, great’. But how do you translate that to the more than two thirds of our people who are on the front line? Until we’ve got a bit of an answer for that, I think we need to just tread with caution,” Mr El-Ansary said.

Medibank chief customer officer Milosh Milisavljevic said the trial was aimed at improving the wellbeing of employees and making the health insurer the “healthiest workplace in Australia”.

“We already know from past experience that when our teams have more flexibility and empowerment, our customers are the big beneficiaries – satisfaction is higher, and our people can more quickly and innovatively meet customer needs,” he said.

It comes after a torrid 12 months for Medibank as it has dealt with the fallout of one of Australia’s biggest cyber attacks, which involved Russian hackers stealing the health records and other personal information of 9.7 million of its customers late last year.