How do you feel about work­ing four days a week, for the same pay?

Well, this is the con­ver­sa­tion cur­rent­ly tak­ing place around the world and be­ing spear­head­ed by the or­gan­i­sa­tion apt­ly named 4 Day Week Glob­al.

Thou­sands of work­ers in the Unit­ed States, Cana­da, the Unit­ed King­dom, Aus­tralia and New Zealand are cur­rent­ly par­tic­i­pat­ing in a six-month pro­gramme to de­ter­mine the ben­e­fits of short­en­ing the work­week.

Par­tic­i­pants and ob­servers around the world are hop­ing that if the ex­per­i­ment works out, a four-day work­week could be­come a re­al­i­ty.

“A hun­dred years ago, we moved from work­ing six-day weeks to five, and we’re over­due for an up­date. The four-day work week is a re­duc­tion in the work week from a stan­dard 40 hours to 32 hours for the same pay and ben­e­fits. This re­duc­tion has been proven to work for em­ploy­ees and em­ploy­ers,” the 4 Day Week Glob­al web­site states.

In the 4 Day Week Glob­al pro­gramme, busi­ness­es go through work­shops to fig­ure out more ef­fi­cient ways of work­ing.

Most com­pa­nies re­duce the work­week to 32 hours over four days, rather than main­tain­ing 40 hours with­in four days.

The or­gan­i­sa­tion calls this a 100-80-100 mod­el: work­ers re­ceive 100 per cent of their pay for 80 per cent of the time and main­tain 100 per cent pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

But this con­ver­sa­tion is not on­ly hap­pen­ing be­yond T&T’s bor­ders.

Chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of 4 Day Week Glob­al Joe O’Con­nor told the Busi­ness Guardian mag­a­zine that he has been in con­tact with T&T com­pa­nies hop­ing to be a part of the pro­gramme.

“We have had some com­pa­nies from T&T down­load our white pa­per and ex­press an in­ter­est in tri­alling a four-day work week. How­ev­er as it cur­rent­ly stands we are not ac­tive­ly run­ning a pro­gramme in T&T,” O’Con­nor said.

“We are hop­ing that over the course of the next year we will be in a po­si­tion to run pro­grammes where com­pa­nies from pret­ty much any­where in the world can sign up and par­tic­i­pate and that we will have the in­fra­struc­ture and sup­port in place to be able to fa­cil­i­tate that re­gard­less of their time zone,” he said.

O’Con­nor said in terms of T&T the time­zone would not be an im­ped­i­ment.

“Be­cause the time­zone is aligned with US East­ern Time. It would be very straight­for­ward for us to fa­cil­i­tate com­pa­nies in T&T to join our North Amer­i­can pi­lots and we are plan­ning to run a tri­al with a start date of Oc­to­ber 1 lat­er this year and cer­tain­ly, we will be very open if there is in­ter­est in T&T to get in­volved with the project,” O’Con­nor said.

On March 5, 2018, Per­pet­u­al Guardian em­barked on what it be­lieves is a world-first among pri­vate­ly held com­pa­nies any­where in the world.

It start­ed an eight-week tri­al that in­volved all 240 staff around New Zealand and sought to test pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, mo­ti­va­tion and out­put by chang­ing the work mod­el to give every staff mem­ber a paid day off each week.

All oth­er em­ploy­ment con­di­tions, in­clud­ing re­mu­ner­a­tion, re­mained un­changed. So staff worked 30 hours but were paid for 37.5, and were asked on­ly to de­liv­er the same amount of out­put as in a stan­dard week.

“It’s not just hav­ing a day off a week, it’s about de­liv­er­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, meet­ing cus­tomer ser­vice stan­dards, meet­ing per­son­al and team busi­ness goals and ob­jec­tives,” Per­pet­u­al Guardian’s founder An­drew Barnes, stat­ed.

Since then more than 30 oth­er com­pa­nies around the world have joined in the tri­als.

O’Con­nor said the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has helped peo­ple re­think what work is sup­posed to look like.

“It’s been very pos­i­tive. We have cer­tain­ly seen the pan­dem­ic like is of­ten the case when you are talk­ing about some­thing that is very deeply em­bed­ded cul­tur­al­ly and so­ci­etal­ly dom­i­nant like the tra­di­tion­al five day 9-5 work­week some­times it takes a great dis­rup­tor to dis­lodge some­thing like that and the pan­dem­ic has re­al­ly had that im­pact,” O’Con­nor said.

“Work­ers and em­ploy­ers are now much more open-mind­ed about look­ing at dif­fer­ent ways of or­gan­is­ing work and new mod­els like the four-day work week so our ex­pe­ri­ence has been that a few years ago we were try­ing to gen­er­ate in­ter­est in the idea of a four-day work week but it was still some­thing that was very much a niche con­cept where­as now we are no longer re­al­ly in the po­si­tion of hav­ing to gen­er­ate in­ter­est we are just re­spond­ing to this in­cred­i­ble surge of ac­tiv­i­ty that we have seen par­tic­u­lar­ly in the last six to eight months,” he said.

O’Con­nor said the ben­e­fits of the four-day work week from an em­ploy­ee per­spec­tive are well known.

“I think the ben­e­fits from an em­ploy­ee per­spec­tive are well es­tab­lished in both re­search and case stud­ies. This is some­thing that can en­hance well­be­ing, im­prove work-life bal­ance, and can be re­al­ly trans­for­ma­tive in terms of en­abling peo­ple to spend more time with fam­i­ly, on new projects and in the com­mu­ni­ty. That is some­thing that has shown to re­duce lev­els of stress and burnout and over­work,” he said.

“What we are al­so see­ing is that this can re­al­ly be a win-win for em­ploy­ees and for com­pa­nies, busi­ness­es are us­ing this as a way to re­al­ly gen­er­ate a fo­cus of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and ef­fi­cien­cy with­in their com­pa­nies.

They are part­ner­ing with their em­ploy­ees as part of the tri­als to re­al­ly fo­cus on the key dri­vers and re­al­ly take the fo­cus away from the num­ber of hours worked to the ac­tu­al out­come that their com­pa­nies are de­liv­er­ing,” O’Con­nor said.

O’Con­nor said they have seen com­pa­nies achieve great suc­cess with this ap­proach.

“It is al­so some­thing that in a re­al­ly com­pet­i­tive labour mar­ket com­pa­nies are turn­ing to as a so­lu­tion to re­cruit­ment and re­ten­tion chal­lenges. If they are suc­cess­ful in be­ing able to of­fer a four day work week while still main­tain­ing their lev­el of ser­vice or their lev­el of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty then it gives them a re­al edge in terms of be­ing able to re­tain their best peo­ple and be much more at­trac­tive in terms of re­cruit­ing new can­di­dates to their or­gan­i­sa­tion,” he said.

O’Con­nor said the main ob­sta­cle in im­ple­ment­ing the tri­al are close-mind­ed lead­ers.

“I think the biggest chal­lenge for a lot of com­pa­nies is that it re­quires a cer­tain lead­er­ship mind­set to be will­ing to do this be­cause ac­tu­al­ly the process be­hind the four day work week is not a top-down one, the most de­tail-ori­ent­ed CEO in the world does not know the de­tails of every­one in their or­gan­i­sa­tion’s job well enough to be able to in­struct them on how to re­design it,” he said.

“It in­volves a re­al em­pow­er­ing bot­tom-up ap­proach which ac­tu­al­ly hands the pow­er to em­ploy­ees to re­design their own work week so for some lead­ers that can be some­thing that is quite un­com­fort­able for them. It al­so re­quires a cer­tain kind of or­gan­i­sa­tion­al cul­ture to be able to make this a suc­cess be­cause it is a part­ner­ship be­tween a com­pa­ny and its em­ploy­ees and in or­der for it to work there needs to be a de­gree of trust in place that this is some­thing that is go­ing to be done in the spir­it of main­tain­ing per­for­mance while al­so de­liv­er­ing these ben­e­fits for em­ploy­ees,” O’Con­nor said.

O’Con­nor said com­pa­nies should not be fear­ful to try the pro­gramme.

“My view is that this is some­thing that is go­ing to be­come the norm rather than just an am­bi­tion very, very quick­ly. It is very clear that this is some­thing that is re­al­ly grow­ing in mo­men­tum it is some­thing that is go­ing to be a re­al com­pet­i­tive edge for com­pa­nies that are able to em­brace it and get it right,” he said.

“For those com­pa­nies that may be scep­ti­cal about this, my mes­sage would be that their great­est risk is not that they try this and it doesn’t work, their great­est risk is that their main com­peti­tor is go­ing to do it first,” O’Con­nor said.

O’Con­nor says some 10,000 em­ploy­ees around the world will have been through a short­ened work­week tri­al with 4 Day Week Glob­al by the end of the year.

He es­ti­mat­ed that rough­ly five per cent of com­pa­nies drop out dur­ing the tri­al pe­ri­od, which tends to hap­pen if there’s a change in lead­er­ship or oth­er or­gan­i­sa­tion­al dis­rup­tions such as down­siz­ing that makes it dif­fi­cult to con­tin­ue.

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