Four-day week: Dream or reality?

The weekend, a relatively new addition to the culture of work, is about to get even longer for employees of some Irish businesses: a pilot programme for employers to try out a four-day working week for staff — with no loss of pay — was launched last month, after the shift to working from home during Covid-19 paved the way for a total re-imagining of the way our working lives are organised.

The five-day work week originated in the Industrial Revolution, when the measure of productivity was how much labour could be wrung out of a factory worker over a period of time.

Worker campaigns for an established weekend started during the 19th century, but only found favour in the early 20th century among employers, when some discovered that giving staff Saturdays and Sundays off reduced absenteeism and improved efficiency.

In the US, the famously anti-union auto-tycoon Henry Ford introduced the five-day work week in 1926 to give his workers more time to spend money on leisure — including cars.

Joe O’Connor, chairman of the Four Day Week Ireland campaign and director of campaigning at the Fórsa trade union, says: “We invented the five-day week a century ago. The debate back then saw employers say that a weekend was an unaffordable luxury and wouldn’t work.

“The last 20 to 30 years has seen incredible productivity gains as a result of technology. Yet we are still working the same number of hours as we did in the 1980s. We need to share those productivity gains with workers.”

The four-day week pilot, which will run on a coordinated basis with other countries such as the US, the UK and New Zealand, will run in Ireland for six months from January, with participating employers receiving coaching, mentoring and advice from other companies that have already trialled the concept.

The Government is making up to €150,000 available for research into the impact of a shorter working week on staff productivity, well-being, job satisfaction, the environmental footprint, and the division of labour with in the home.

In the three days after Four Day Week Ireland announced the pilot, O’Connor was contacted by about 40 employers seeking information on the process, with eight of them asking to participate.

When the experiment to ditch the fifth working day was launched, Leo Varadkar, the Tánaiste and minister for enterprise, trade and employment, said the pandemic has caused us to rethink and re-evaluate how we work.

Indeed, before the crisis, it was a badge of honour among some professionals to complain about how busy they were. But the greatest health emergency in generations and the daily spectre of death and disease prompted many to shift their priorities to their own mental and physical well-being while working from home.

Accustomed to a much greater sense of autonomy and a slower way of life, many white-collar workers are unwilling to return to expensive and lengthy daily commutes and other obligations associated with a five-day week in the office.

Sinéad Brady, a career psychologist, says: “Anyone who had been spending a large amount on lunches and fuel to go to the office before the pandemic has seen their bank balances improve.

"At the same time, the (crisis) has resulted in people thinking, ‘I don’t need as much money as I thought as I needed to survive’. If you’ve never done a four-hour daily commute, you have no understanding of what toll it takes on you and your family .

“People now want to experience a different way of living and working. That might be a four-day week for some people, but there are so many different types of working arrangements now and what people want will depend on what stage they are at in their lives.”

Sought-after job-hunters in IT, medical technology and pharmaceuticals are now actively seeking out employers that offer not just a higher salary but shorter working weeks and flexible working, according to Hero Recruitment.

Just as cutting back to a five-day schedule from six days took off in the US during the Great Depression to retain underemployed workforces, Galway-based Hero Recruitment turned to a three-and-a-half day week during the first Covid lockdown to retain all of its staff.

After discovering that its recruiters were still managing to achieve their targets and in a shorter time-frame, Hero introduced a four-day week in September.

Róisín McNamara, a director and co-owner of Hero, says: “Our team get head-hunted daily and we made a decision a long time ago to be the type of company that when another company knocks on the door, our people’s heads wouldn’t be turned.

"The latest survey of our team that we did showed that the four-day week was one of the most popular measures we ever had.” To ensure its service to job candidates and clients didn’t slip, Hero deployed a “buddy system” for each sector, with one employee working Monday to Thursday and another Tuesday to Friday. Karl Lippett, a senior IT recruitment consultant, opted for the Tuesday to Friday schedule.

“I don’t dread Mondays anymore,” he says. “My mental health and overall health is so much better. Every weekend used to be a rushed weekend, trying to get chores done and shopping done.

"Now I just feel I can just do so much more, like going camping. I’m from Tyrone, and going to see my mum is a three-and-a-half hour journey. I used to dread doing that journey on a Friday and coming back on Sundays to be in work for Monday.

“As a company, we had been banging on about the importance of flexibility to hiring managers for years. Now that it has been pushed on them, they embrace it — their productivity went up 25pc to 30pc in some cases.”

Even when companies are allowed to begin a staggered return to the office, with Varadkar saying this week that it will likely happen in September, Hero will allow its staff to choose how many of their four days they want to spend in the office.

Deirdre Finnerty, a divisional manager at Hero and mother-of-three who spends two days at the office and two at home, says she has already come across candidates who want a new job because their existing employer is insisting they return to the office full-time in September.

The four-day work week is not a new concept. But worldwide progress on the movement had been glacial until the arrival of the pandemic. When remote working became the norm, it only made sense to switch the measurement of employee performance to their productivity, rather than the number of hours or days an employee put in.

Four-day week experiments have taken place in the US, New Zealand, Australia, Spain, Germany and Iceland, with Japan and Russia even legislating to reduce working hours. Kickstarter, the US-based crowdfunding platform, intends to introduce a four-day week next year, while Unilever, the maker of Dove soap, said in November it would put staff at its New Zealand office on a four-day week on the same pay.

The conglomerate had analysed the lessons learned from a local financial advisory firm called Perpetual Guardian. Andrew Barnes has been running a 32-hour week at the firm since 2018, and found that the amount of time employees spent on non-work websites fell by 35pc because employees were more focused and efficient.

However, John Barry, head of Management Support Services, believes Covid has made the four-day week seem “horrendously outdated”. Barry, who sits on the board of the Irish Small and Medium Enterprise association’s (Isme) national council, says the concept is “becoming obsolete with new flexible and hybrid working arrangements”.

Even then, Barry, whose own staff enjoy flexible working, has advised companies “not to rush into any hybrid working arrangements until you have your business back to normal and you can plan for requests for a change in working arrangements.

"It will involve a huge amount of logistics,” he says.

“The one thing I don’t like to see is this concept of entitlement, with people saying, ‘I am entitled to work a four-day week’. One of my concerns with this process is that you will be able to refer a dispute to the WRC if you are refused flexible working and an employer may have to justify if they want a person in the office five days a week. It’s creating all these potential conflicts and the more legislation comes in, the more employers will become intractable.”

Core, Ireland’s largest marketing communications company, has already made its decision.

The agency, which has offered remote working for almost eight years, doesn’t plan on returning to its office at Sir John Rogerson’s Quay in Dublin’s south docklands after surveys of its 330 employees showed that “very few” wanted to work in the office five days a week, HR director Catherine Fitzgibbon says.

Instead, the agency will retain its office at nearby Windmill Lane, which was custom-built to foster innovation and collaboration.

“Quite a lot of our people have moved out of the city,” she says. “So the amount of time spent in the office will be limited. Life has changed for everyone.”