4-day Working Week 

Following our recent webinar with Jane Johnston of Neonhive, we wanted to share some of the key takeaways and discussion points for those that were unable to attend. 

The 4-day working week has been growing momentum, following the largest government trial concluding. In addition, we have seen a rise in employers implementing a 4-day working week, due to the perceived benefits such as better work life balance, positive contributions to wellbeing, increased productivity and attraction as well as retention of staff. 

Although there is lots of positive PR around the 4-day working week, there will undoubtedly be some reservations from employers and business owners, so it was useful to talk to Jane to hear about the motivation, process, and results from her own first-hand experience. 

One of the key motivators for Neonhive implementing a 4-day working week was to improve overall staff wellbeing. Some employers who have made this change have required staff to work compressed hours, meaning that in order to receive one day off, those hours are spread across the remaining working days resulting in employees working longer days. In order to ensure that staff felt the benefit of the extra day off each week, Neonhive decided not to implement compressed hours, with staff working 80% of full-time hours for 100% of their salary, to avoid staff spending their newly instated day off exhausted from working longer days. 

In addition, there were also considerations around using the 4-day week to retain the current staff, given that this would likely be received quite well by staff. Given that more and more employers have been implementing 4-day working weeks, Neonhive also saw this as an opportunity to attract new staff when recruiting. While surveying their staff it was found that if there was a vacancy advertised with the same title, salary and benefits, 85% of staff voted that they would be more inclined to accept an offer from the employer who offers a 4-day working week over the employer who does not. 

One of the main concerns that Neonhive experienced was the fear that staff had about meeting deadlines. As Neonhive are very project based in terms of the type of work they carry out in order to ensure their 4-day working week trial was a success, Jane recognised that it wasn’t as simple as just reducing the team’s hours and hoping for the best. Neonhive created a strategy that consisted of surveying their staff to obtain their thoughts and opinions, they became ruthless with meetings, whereby no meeting would last longer than 30 minutes and all meetings were grouped together to maximise efficiency! 

Given that Neonhive have since made their 4-day working week permanent, the trial was successful and when looking at the impact of the 4-day working week, 100% of their staff said that they had a strong work-life balance in comparison to 87% before the 4-day week was implemented. 

If you were unable to attend the webinar and want to hear all about Neonhive’s experience, the full webinar can be found here. 

We’d love to hear from anyone who has or is thinking of implementing a 4-day working week, so please do get in touch or share your experience with us!