The post-pandemic 4-day work week: FAQs with Charlotte Lockhart and agency leaders

One major jump in advocacy for four-day weeks started a few years ago, when business leaders such as Charlotte Lockhart implemented policies in their own organizations and encouraged others to do the same.

Lockhart is the founder and managing director of advocacy group 4 Day Week, creators of pilot programs in the UK, US and elsewhere. 150 companies worldwide have signed up (and plenty more have instituted four-day policies outside of these programs).

The Covid-19 pandemic has hastened these conversations. Governments and businesses all over the world are talking about reduced working for a host of reasons: to increase productivity in Japan; to rebuild the economy in New Zealand; to offer a sustainable work-life balance in Finland.

At an event hosted by The Drum, Lockhart acknowledges the pandemic’s role in creating a “massive conversation around how we’re going to work differently.”

“It became clear,” she says, “that we were going to need to have a structure to support more companies to do it.”

‘We borrow our people from their lives’

“We’ve spent the past 15-20 years talking about health and safety, but really we’ve only been talking about safety,” says Lockhart. To address the ‘health’ side, she argues, we’ve got to rethink the role that work plays in people’s lives. Step one is acknowledging that work shouldn’t be the full extent of our lives: “We must as business leaders remember that we borrow our people from their lives.”

What life outside work amounts to is different for everyone. For some it’ll be artistic or sporting passions. For others, it will be family. Lockhart tells a story of one worker who wanted to walk his daughter to school every morning; starting at 10am rather than 9am was able to “unlock what makes him happy.” This reflects the fact that the movement, more than focusing on one day working less, is increasingly focused on “flexible reduced-hour working”: reducing the overall demand on workers’ time in a way that’s responsive to the life each individual wants to lead.

The contention is that by “running the business so that we can give people the one benefit that really matters to them,” each worker will be able to bring “a better person to work.” By compressing workers’ productive moments into a shorter timeframe, Lockhart argues that most businesses can operate on the ‘100-80-100’ rule: 100% payment, 80% time, 100% productivity.

The four-day week in practice: FAQs

Our panel features two agency leaders who have adopted four-day weeks for quite different reasons. Jonny Tooze, chief exec at Lab Group, was an early adopter. At Lab, workers are contracted to a 37.5-hour work week over four days (or are given the option of a regular five-day week). His motivation is to “create a world where everyone is free to do what they love ... how can they do that when they’re chained to a desk?” Tooze has an eye on automation and a post-scarcity world: with productivity and wage growth diverging, reduced working will become a necessity, he says.

Ray Sherlock, chief exec at Engage Group, is more pragmatic. Its scheme began explicitly as a post-pandemic measure to respond to workers’ shifted expectations and “bring people back to the office.”

“The four-day work week for us was perfect,” he says, as a “compromise between the team and leadership team.” Workers spend two days at home; two in the office, and have one for what they will.

Our panel responded to questions from assembled industry leaders:

Can a four-day week work on a time-based model, or does it mean reducing your billings?

Tooze: “Take your day rate and divide it by 7.5. Do it in hours. That’s what we did.”

Lockhart: “Clients aren’t paying for a day. They’re paying for a creative output.”

Can it work with unlimited holidays?

Lockhart: “If you’ve got unlimited holidays, just take one day off a week. It’s the same thing ... This is about how you fit more of your outside-of-work life into your normal weeks and what happens in your life ordinarily.”

Tooze: “I’m very anti-unlimited leave. The reality is, there’s no such thing ... you’re putting the burden on someone to make a choice about how much leave they’re going to take.”

Do you require a minimum number of hours?

Tooze: “The best way is to give people a choice and say, ‘you can be part of this experiment or not’ ... everyone’s contracted to work 37 and a half hours, but when you start thinking like a rational human being rather than automaton, the reality is, how productive are people in their working day? Real value comes from thinkers, not just grinding out hours.”

What if people want to do freelance work on their day off?

Sherlock: “We’re giving them that day off to do whatever they want ... What you do on your day off that you’ve earned is your business.”

Lockhart: “Good on them, as long as they’re not stealing your customers!”

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