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You Can Get More Done in a 4-Day Workweek. Really.
I wouldn’t have believed it before we tried it at my company
Near the end of 2017, on a long-haul flight from Auckland to London for a Christmas break with my children, I was catching up on work-related reading when a magazine article caught my eye. The article detailed the results of a study of UK office workers which found that on average they were productive for fewer than three hours a day. My mind turned to my own business, a trust company called Perpetual Guardian that employed about 240 people, and to whether we had real measures of productivity across all aspects of our business.
I realized we did not. In response, I decided to run an experiment at Perpetual Guardian for an eight-week period in early 2018, based on the following agreement with my employees: 100% of the agreed output in 80% of the time, for 100% compensation.
In other words, we would try the four-day week to see if it was a way of working better suited for the 21st century, measuring worker value not by hours at a desk or on the shop floor but by productivity. In experimenting with this new way of working, we sought to understand what effect a four-day week might have on individual, team, and company output; profitability, and employee engagement; job satisfaction and well-being.
