MAXINE SELMER-OLSEN: A case for the four-day work week

The SA leg of the four-day work week trial is set to start early next year. The theory goes that since most of us aren’t working on production lines geared to maximise efficiency, the five-day week is as outdated as the technologies that spearheaded the industrial revolution when working eight hours a day for five days was implemented at scale. 

Since then we’ve got more efficient (or lazier, depending on your point of view). Think about your average work day. How many coffee breaks do you take? How many WhatsApps do you respond to? How often do you open TikTok or Twitter? 

If we’re not working every minute of every eight hours of every weekday, so why should that week be five days long?  Instead, the four-day week proposes a 100:80:100 model — 100% pay, for 80% of the time, while keeping 100% output. 

It’s incredibly attractive for employees. A three-day weekend promises more time to spend doing the things that make you happy, or even the things that don’t necessarily make you happy but have to be done — such as queuing at the licensing department. 

If the stress of the pandemic highlighted the need to prioritise mental health, this model gives you an entire day for self-care. This is particularly valuable to parents, whose children would more than likely be at school during that extra day off, so they get an opportunity they otherwise wouldn’t have to focus solely on themselves. 

This boost to general wellbeing can be quantified: according to the Henley Business School at Reading University, companies that have adopted the four-day week have reported that their employees are 78% happier, 62% healthier and 70% less stressed. 

Happier employees mean more successful companies. The study reports that staff took 75% fewer sick days, and that companies saw lower turnover while attracting three times the number of applications they would normally get.

Having fewer days in which to work doesn’t seem to have had a negative effect on output. In fact, these companies report work of a better quality, since staff are less tired and more motivated. There is also an increased feeling of goodwill among employers, which HR will tell you is invaluable. 

Full pay and a fuller life? It sounds like the dream. But the grass might just look better on the shorter side of the week. Some of these perceived pros could potentially come back to bite both employers and employees. 

The obvious flaw is that the concept of a four-day week is limited to skilled office workers. It seems a bit uncharitable to limit all those wonderful benefits of a shorter work week to them, and leave people who can’t necessarily rearrange their work hours to do the same in less time, such as security guards, petrol attendants, retail workers and bus drivers.

Unless school timetables are also adjusted to a four-day week — and education professionals are already under pressure to cover the curriculum, the same would apply to teachers. 

Companies don’t exist in a vacuum, and many of the people whose jobs don’t lend themselves to a four-day week form part of a business’s value chain. If a business were to adopt this new format there would be a knock-on effect on outsourced security and maintenance staff, who could then face a cut in wages if they are working less, or be sent somewhere else for that day. For those of us in advertising, this extends to media agencies and production houses. 

This forms just a small part of the practical considerations of implementing a shorter work week. The bigger concerns are that legislation may need to change to meet adequate conditions. For one, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act lays out that leave is calculated on time worked. With full pay but fewer working days, employers would be well within their rights to give staff fewer than 15 days’ leave.

The longer weekend doesn’t really make up for it, because it would mean shorter holidays. National Geographic reports that holidays have to be at least eight days long to have any effect, so when you add in company closures over December, people would realistically only be able to take one proper break a year. 

And while that extra day a week to take care of errands so that you can really relax on Saturday and Sunday sounds tempting, the reality is that you can’t limit life to one day a week. Yes, you can schedule certain appointments or tasks for that day, but children still need taking to school and extramural activities, bread and milk still needs to bought (and not everyone can call on Checkers Sixty60), and meals still need to be cooked. These chores would now need to be squeezed into a more condensed workday, limiting time for wellness-boosting activities such as socialising, exercising and doing hobbies.  

More stress

For productivity needs to stay the same, employees would need to be hyper-focused and efficient for the entire eight hours a day that they work. The fact that they’re not productive 100% of our five-day week is less because we’re lazy and more because we’re humans, not robots. Unless you’re on a production line where your activity is tightly controlled and monitored, your mind is going to wander at some point. 

That’s why many people who have taken part in the trial are seeing their work days become longer and more stressful. Removing one day a week means meetings need to compete with work for time and attention in the days available. Wired ran a story on a four-day week in the US, and reported that digital consultancy Elephant Ventures lost staff while implementing the idea. Employees ended up working more hours per week than they had before, with some regularly working more than 12 hours a day. 

The same article cites Bolt, where a post-trial survey among the company’s office staff found that 40% were more stressed. It also revealed an unintended consequence of the four-day week: that with fewer hours in which to work staff have less time to do things that might not count as productive, but are still important to morale, like chat to a colleague while making a coffee. The risk is more stress and less of a work-life balance. 

Pitfalls

Like stress, productivity levels seems to be split along the middle. After the UK trial 49% of people said their productivity had improved, with 46% saying it had been maintained. If happier employees make for successful companies, unhappier employees make for struggling ones. 

It’s hard to pick one side over the other. The benefits of the four-day week are instinctively and immediately attractive, but the potential pitfalls are enough to set at least a couple of alarm bells ringing. But like most things in life, we’ll never really know until we try. There were plenty of concerns about what effect working from home would have, and many of us are still happy to do that. 

Businesses tempted by a shorter work week would need to liaise closely with their staff to make it work in a way that suits everyone and make sure they minimise stress and not pile extra pressure on people.

To sign up for the trial and prepare to convince your employees (or employer) of the benefits of a four-day week, click here.

• Selmer-Olsen is a strategist at Grey advertising & marketing agency. With contributions from Thando Mafongosi, Boitumelo Thebe, Chad Otto, Julia Ridderhof, Sindiswa Masuta and Stuart Walsh.