The company that has been running the four-day week experiment is the Melbourne-based digital agency Versa. For one year the company, which develops apps and websites, has been closed on a Wednesday. The employees of the company continue to put in around 37.5 hours per week, but they divide this time across four days instead of the traditional five, rolling up on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.
This means that any customer attempting to contact Versa on Wednesday is met with an answer message or return email, and for the technology staff there are no client meetings and no new business to work on. For contractors there is no point making any deliveries no deliveries either, the doors remain shut.
Four-day per week models or other forms of flexible working are being linked with improved performance for the business and for employees, as well as boosting employee well-being.
Versa sees the move as not only good for employees, restoring their work-life balance and making them happier, it has also led to a more productive workforce and boosted company turnover. Chief executive Kathryn Blackham says: “We are three times more profitable than we were last year, we have grown by 30 or 40 per cent in the last year in terms of revenue, and we have got happier staff who are much more productive.”
Blackman, who is also the company’s founder, adds: “So all of the factors that you would have thought would have gone down because we’re working 20 per cent less — in theory we’re working one day less, although we are doing longer days on the other days — actually we’ve seen them increase dramatically.”
Signs are that other companies, especially technology firms, are starting to follow similar practices. In the U.K., for example, he digital services company Normally adopted the four-day working week and it is something that is a “non-negotiable” principle of the company which employees are require to abide to. Another successful example comes from New Zealand firm Perpetual Guardian, which manages trusts and wills. Here the company’s 240 office workers to work a four-day week (at eight hours per day) instead of five days, and continue to be paid their usual five-day salary.
