Is the four-day working week a unicorn?

Work-life balance and the number of hours in the working week are a hot topic at the moment. From Tim Ferris and his 4 hour plan (still hot although not new), to companies that espouse flexibility and a four-day week – in reality, can your team achieve all they need to reach company goals, in less time?

According to the majority of Australia’s ’50 best places to work’ as revealed last week by SmartCompany (see the list), you can. Many of the companies featured on the list say they focus on flexibility and allowing employees to manage their own time, while half of the companies that made the list offer a short working week as standard. What is it about these companies that means they can successfully achieve their goals with up to 20% less time in the working week?

Two things:

It comes down to two things – trust and productivity - both strong signs these companies have high levels of employee engagement.

Leaders recognise that employees need a balance between the high-intensity, high-reward environment of being part a successful team, and the rest of life. After all, while every employee usually has a long to-do list on their desk or workstation, the list of expectations for life outside the office can be epic too. Good leaders know that if it is all work and no play, employees will leave or simply burnout. Great leaders also trust their people to manage their individual and team workloads and find that sometimes elusive balance.

Studies on the changing face of the workforce indicate that trust in leadership is a key consideration for employees when they join a new organisation, a key measure for those who are loyal, and a key contributor to engagement. By placing trust in employees to manage their own schedule and still tick everything off the to-do list, leaders are building a trusted and trusting environment and therefore, building engagement.

Engaged employees recognise that their contribution is valuable and valued, focussing not only on what they want to achieve, but overall company goals. Knowing the personal satisfaction they will enjoy from being a part of a successful team delivering meaningful projects, engaged employees will deliver more.

Not only do high levels of engagement indicate you will have employees who are more focussed and productive, engagement is also linked to a decrease in absenteeism.

Harter et al. did a meta-study in 2009 – yes, we know this is a while ago but we have not evolved as humans that much since then – looking at combined data from 199 studies across over 150 companies in 26 countries. They looked at the relationship between employee engagement and performance of over 32,000 businesses or teams, employing almost one million employees (955,905 to be exact).

They found dramatic productivity differences between the groups of employees who ranked in the top 25% when it comes to engagement, and those that ranked in the bottom 25%.

When looking at the meta-data, they found that absenteeism increased by 37% for the bottom quartile employee groups. So not only do companies with lower levels of engagement have less productive employees, they don’t turn up to be less productive. You can see the link, no employees doing work, less work being done.

At the other end of the engagement scale, the meta-study found that employee groups in the top quartile on the scale, performed 18% better than those in the bottom quartile. At close to 20% improvement in productivity based on engagement, that is close to a full day work.

It seems the four-day working week is not a unicorn but with engaged employees who are productive, loyal and amped to be at work, you may see some other magic.

Sources:
Gonring, M.P. (2008) Customer loyalty and employee engagement: an alignment for value, The Journal of Business Strategy
Harter, J. K., Schmidt, F. L. & Hayes, T. L. (2002). Business-unit-level relationship between employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and business outcomes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology