The Four-day work week – is it the future for the industry?
It’s an idea that’s been floated around for years, largely implemented by a number of progressive countries (and scoffed at by the rest) but now, as 30 UK companies have signed up to a six-month pilot program testing out the shorter work week, is this the future of the recruitment, marketing, PR & Digital industries?
If you follow us on social media, or receive our monthly newsletters bursting with the latest news, you’ll already know that next level Recruitment are now a 4-day work week company.
In this blog we’ll explain why and how we’ve done it, but before all that, let’s look at why the once fanciful idea has gained merit and traction across the corporate world and take it back to where it all began…
The UK’s work-life balance problem
Many of the world’s most productive countries including Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France and Norway work an average of less than 30 hours per week, and have done so for quite some time.
Perhaps this alone should have been enough to trigger conversations about working hours and patterns in the UK, but even as a global study, dubbed 'The Better Life Index', from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ranked the UK as the 12th worst country in the world for quality of work-life balance (2019), only one thing has really catapulted society forward; a pesky little thing called a global pandemic.
While we have COVID-19 to thank for pushing the 4-day work week into the spotlight in the UK, Iceland was studying the idea way back in 2015.
A study that ran from 2015-2019 was conducted on 2,500 workers from a variety of industries including schools, hospitals, social service providers and private businesses, and the results were found to be extremely encouraging. Researchers found that, contrary to popular belief, productivity either remained the same or improved in every single workplace they studied. Thanks to the trial, now over 86% of Iceland’s workers have the right to work shorter hours for the same rate of pay, leading to other countries such as New Zealand and Spain starting their own experiments.
In the UK, the pilot of a four-day work week will begin in June 2022. The six-month long program will see firms allowing staff to work 32 hours per week while leaving their compensation and benefits unchanged.
How these companies implement this will be up to them, they may ask staff to spread the 32 hours over five days, or work 4, longer days. The program will help “companies move away from simply measuring how long people are ‘at work’, to a sharper focus on the output being produced,” said Joe O’Connor, a pilot programme manager for the campaign.
All of this, is of course music to our ears, as we have been vocal about the need for companies to put people before profit for years. During the pandemic, everything we in the UK had always been told was impossible became possible, giving companies and in particular, candidates, more scope to negotiate with and a career worth fighting for. (This is something we wrote about extensively in our Top Trends for 2022 Report, which is still available for download by clicking the banner at the top of our website!)
The 4 Day Work Week in our industry
We reported a few weeks ago that 80% of marketers in a 2022 Marketing Week investigation say hybrid working is important to them – not surprising, but promising, showing that the 4-day work week may just be the final nail in the proverbial coffin for the ‘traditional’ workplace and working patterns.
For the marketing, creative, digital, PR and client services industry, this is a natural progression, as many agencies and businesses had already begun to embrace remote and hybrid working before the pandemic, but now the majority of our clients have completely adopted this model, and we look forward to seeing how this escalates.
We believe in the importance of challenging the status quo, levelling up the recruitment industry as well as the industry we recruit in, so it was a natural choice for us to trial our very own 4-day work week, and much like all the experiments that have come before; so far, so great!
When our co-directors, Claire Summerfield and Laura Mercer decided to create next level Recruitment, they decided that it was their long-term goal to leave the industry in a better, happier and more progressive state when they eventually retire, both citing the extremely high and well-documented levels of burnout in the recruitment industry as one motivation for introducing a shorter work week for the team.
Recruiters typically work extremely long hours and are often working around the clock. While next level Recruitment are no different in ensuring a seamless service to our candidates and clients, implementing the shorter work week is just one way that helps our team to restore a greater work-life balance, enabling them to fully switch off from work for an extra day.
Laura and Claire, who are both working parents, also wanted to ensure that this opportunity is not just accessible to colleagues who have children, with Laura observing this trend in the corporate world saying,
“As a rule of thumb, the opportunity to work part-time hours is generally only offered to working parents, but we wanted to be inclusive and recognise that everyone has their own commitments, and deserves the same opportunities”.
The team managed to organise our working week so that the ‘office’ is open 5 days a week, despite different working patterns. Our service levels haven’t dropped and productivity from the whole team has skyrocketed.
Both our fantastic directors speak of the great reward they personally feel in hearing about how their teams have spent their extra days off, and seeing how much better rested and enthusiastic the team are, reporting improved mood and teamwork across the office (in-person and remotely)!
Our clients are more and more vocal and interested in our trial of the 4-day work week, and we will continue to champion new, innovative ways of working by showing, not telling how it can be done better. One thing is for sure, the 4-day work week is possible in our industry and we expect to see it being rolled out much more going forward.
Want to hear from the team about how our trial is going? We have a video for that!
You can watch it on our LinkedIn page here, and as always, get in touch for a chat about how we can help you level up your business, your recruitment and attract and retain the very top talent.