Will 2023 be the year of the four-day work week?

Some of Australia’s biggest companies are exploring one of the biggest changes to office-based work in a generation.

Changing the ways of work also risks creating divisions in companies, particularly those with retail positions that cannot be performed remotely. Picture: Damian Shaw

Some of Australia’s biggest companies are exploring a four-day weeks with no cuts to remuneration – heralding one of the biggest changes to office-based work.

Telstra, Medibank, NIB, Grant Thornton and others have 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.

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.

The shift has been spearheaded by 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.

While it cuts work hours 20 per cent, an employee’s pay remains the same as if they were spending five days a week in the office, with the focus shifting to outcomes rather than presenteeism.

Telstra chief executive Vicki Brady said the “conventional Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 isn’t required in a lot of situations anymore” and the company’s approach aimed at supporting people to work “where, when, and how they are the most engaged and productive”. “For many, this is a combination of working from home, from our major hubs, even from a local office or anywhere,” Ms Brady said. “We know our people are at their best when they have choice. So, there is no talk of returning to previous ways of working at Telstra – we don’t waste time debating who should be in the office and when. We are all-in on hybrid. For us work is a thing you do, not a place you go.”

Ms Brady said adoption of flexible working would create opportunities, particularly in under-represented groups, such as those with a disability, injecting more diversity into workplaces.

“Diversity comes in many forms and it’s untapped potential. Enabling a more diverse workforce is not just the right thing to do for the economy, it’s simply the right thing to do,” she said.

“To get real movement, there’s more industry can do, in collaboration with government, to lift participation. For starters, It’s not just being flexible in where you work, but also the times and days.”

Medibank, Australia’s biggest health insurer, one of the first companies to permanently adopt hybrid working, has signed up to 4 Day Week Global as part of its “work reinvented” program. A Medibank spokeswoman said the program aimed to “challenge the long held traditions of the workplace” and bolster productivity.

“We’re taking an experimental approach to the future of work and exploring a range of ideas to simplify how we work,” the Medibank spokeswoman said. “Our focus is on challenging the long held traditions of the workplace including the traditional working week and what it means for all our people, because we want to make work feel less like work. We’re currently exploring ideas for experiments with our people, and a four-day work week will be part of that.

“We’ve also partnered up with a number of independent experts to help us bring our experiments to life, including an Australian university and 4 Day Week Global.”

Medibank’s rival, NIB, has also permanently introduced hybrid working and began paying its employees $1200 a year from October 2021 in recognition that they were “renting space in people’s homes”.

NIB chief people officer Lauren Daniels said 50 per cent of the company’s staff were working from home four days a week, while 85 per cent said hybrid work promoted better health and wellbeing. Meanwhile, she said the company also benefits, particularly in accessing a greater pool of talent in a tight labour market.

“At one time, it would have been crucial to live in Newcastle to be employed at nib,” Ms Daniels said. “That’s no longer the case. You can work from anywhere, which means we have a bigger pool of potential employees and a greater opportunity to employ a more diverse workforce, which is highly advantageous in a competitive talent market.”

But changing the ways of work also risks creating divisions in companies, particularly those with retail positions that cannot be performed remotely.

This is a conundrum facing Bupa, which has extensive operations across dental and optical clinics and aged care facilities.

Still, Bupa chief executive Hisham El-Ansary said the company was exploring changes to its working model, including potentially a four-day working week.

“We’ve already as an executive started to have these conversations. But also, I’m very conscious of how that might play out for non-office based employees,” he said

“It’s fine when you 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.”

Other companies are slowly changing their ways of working without a jolt. Professional services firm, Grant Thornton, launched a six-month trial of a 9-day fortnight with no cut to remuneration.

Grant Thornton chief executive Greg Keith if the trial was successful and employees still maintained their key performance indicators, the firm would consider adopting the nine-day fortnight permanently or move to a four-day week trial.

“With so many of the professional services’ workforce reporting increased stress and health issues, we remain convinced the current system is broken. We will be bold in trying something different as we want a better outcome for our people and our clients. We see an irresistible opportunity to improve quality, client service and our people’s wellbeing,” Mr Keith said.

“While this trial prioritises our clients and their expectations, our people will also benefit from additional time to recharge. We will be closely engaging with clients throughout the trial to ensure the quality we deliver and their experience improves as expected.”