As many return to work after the summer break, a new development in the UK is catching attention. Two hundred companies have signed up for a permanent four-day working week for all employees, with no loss of pay or entitlements. But the question remains: will it work, and could it be implemented here in Australia? John Hopkins, Associate Professor at Swinburne University’s School of Business, says the success of a four-day working week largely depends on the industry.
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00:00We've been interviewing Australian firms who've moved to a four-day week since the beginning
00:07of 2023. So for two years now, we've been conducting those interviews. There's certainly
00:13a lot of pros for it. So these companies have gone into it for lots of different reasons.
00:20So it may be productivity, but usually it's more around things like recruitment, staff
00:26retention, even addressing rising concerns like burnout as well. So there's certainly
00:30a lot of positives. I'm not saying it's for every firm, but certainly the ones that we've
00:35spoken to, it's had lots of success for that.
00:38Yeah, because I'm wondering, what about the arguments against it? You mentioned the issue
00:41there of fatigue and burnout, but I've read some arguments against the four-day working
00:45week that say, well, hang on a minute, compressing your hours into four days, that could actually
00:50make fatigue and burnout worse.
00:52Yeah, look, that's a very good point. And it's probably important to mention that the
00:58firms that we have been interviewing, they haven't adopted that four-day week. They haven't
01:04adopted the compressed week. What they've adopted is a new model of four-day week called
01:09the 180-100 model. And what that is, it's four standard days. So it's actually not only
01:16a reduction in days, but a reduction in hours as well. So rather than working those, let's
01:21say, four 10-hour days, compressing a five-day week into a four-day week, it's four standard
01:27days instead.
01:29You mentioned their productivity, and that's interesting in terms of how you measure productivity,
01:33right? I mean, it depends on the industry, because I'm thinking in retail, for example,
01:39if you compress your number of hours to a four-day week, by definition, you're serving
01:44fewer customers. So that means less productivity. It would be very, very dependent on the industry.
01:50Oh, yeah. And not just the industry, but even the role type within the industry. So every
01:55role is going to be different. It's not necessarily going to work as well in some roles than others.
02:00And retail is a really good example, because you can't just be really good at retail for
02:05four days a week and make up for what you've missed on the fifth day, because obviously,
02:09there's still going to be customers coming in. So in those roles where presence is required,
02:14another good example would be, let's say, a security guard. You can't be really good
02:18at security, doing 25% extra work for four days and then skip a day. Physically, somebody
02:25has to be there. And in instances like that, so for those types of roles, there's going
02:29to be a cost incurred to cover the fact that that person isn't going to be working that shift.
02:34So back to that sense of optimism, some viewers might be feeling, listening to this. We're
02:39seeing that momentum in the UK, but what's your feeling researching it here? I mean,
02:43are we seeing a similar sort of similar progress here in Australia, some companies at least
02:50willing or willing to test out going down that same path?
02:54Look, it's definitely growing for sure. Like I said, we've interviewed 20 companies already
03:00and the number are growing each year. I wouldn't say we've had that big insurgence of 200 companies
03:07like they've experienced in the UK. But of course, the more that companies do it, and
03:11the more we talk about it, the more that it's on the radar of other companies are more
03:16likely that others are going to try it.
03:18Why do you think some companies might be reluctant to go down that path?
03:24It's interesting in that when we asked what the biggest obstacles or challenges were for
03:29companies moving to a four day week, they said scepticism. They said that a lot of people
03:35simply couldn't see how you could do four days worth of work, sorry, five days worth
03:40of work in four days. So overcoming that scepticism is certainly a big challenge.
03:45Other challenges that we that we encountered as well were things like what to do when there's
03:49a public holiday in the week or what to do with part time workers.
03:53And each of the companies we've spoken to have had their different solutions to each of those problems.