May 2023
In the fifth episode of our “In Conversation with…” podcast series for 2023, Lucy Lewis, Partner at Lewis Silkin LLP speaks to Joe Ryle, Director at the 4 Day Week Campaign.
“All these long working hours that we put in don’t really produce very good results but produce a lot of burnout, a lot of stress, a lot of overwork, a lot of unhappiness and, not only is that no way to live, it’s also no way to run an economy.”
The UK’s four-day week trial has been hailed as a breakthrough moment for the move towards a four-day work week. Joe and Lucy explore what this means for employers and the future of work. They consider key learnings from the trial and address the most common concerns held by employers when considering moving to a four-day week. They also reflect on the important role government has to play in driving an economy-wide transition, and the potential for lasting legal and societal change.
Key takeaways from the conversation:
- The UK’s four-day week trial was a success: the vast majority of companies (almost 95%) have decided to continue with a four-day week following the end of the trial.
- Introducing the four-day week benefits employers as well as employees: companies adopting the four-day week can benefit from higher employee retention, more motivated staff and increased revenues.
- Employers should avoid top-down implementation of the four-day week: organisations that empower their staff and consult with them in advance are more likely to succeed.
- The four-day week can drive wider cultural change: individuals can balance different aspects of their life, enabling men to take up a more equal share of caring responsibilities.
- The government has a key role to play: an economy-wide transition to a four-day week will require industry leaders, business leaders and trade union leaders to work with the government, supported by the introduction of new legislation.
In Conversation with…Joe Ryle
Season 3: Episode 5
Lucy Lewis: Hello, and welcome to the Future of Work Hub’s “In Conversation with…” podcast. I’m Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin’s employment team, and in this podcast series I’ll be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspectives on the longer-term trends and immediate drivers shaping the world of work.
And debate about the concept of a shorter working week has been building over recent years, lots of countries and organisations have been looking at different models and different ways of working, but the pandemic really shifted the dial. It forced employers to be more flexible and, as we all know, lots of employees have said they’d prefer it to stay that way. And employers at the moment, in what is a tight labour market, are facing challenges with attracting and retaining staff and, looking at some of these well-established norms in terms of how we work are one of the things that have been looked at to create a competitive advantage.
And so today we’re going to be looking at the results of the UK’s 4-day week trial. The trial ended in December, the results have been hailed as a breakthrough moment for the move towards a 4-day week, and we’ll be exploring what that means for employers, but also what it means for the future of work more generally.
And my guest today is perfectly placed to discuss all of that with me. Joe Ryle is the Director of the 4-Day Week Campaign, that’s the UK’s national campaign for a 4-day/32 hour working week, with no loss of pay. He’s also the media and coms lead for the think tank Autonomy and they published an important report on the UK trial, and Joe, I’m hoping that’s something that we can come to talk about, but welcome.
Joe Ryle: Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me on.
Why the 4 day working week is gathering new momentum
Lucy Lewis: Now, we both know the last few years have been really turbulent, we’ve, you know, we’ve lived through the pandemic, we’re experiencing the war in Ukraine, we’re currently living through a cost of living crisis and seeing unprecedented levels of industrial action and, all of those things are meaning that the work landscape is shifting pretty rapidly and employers are having to pivot, to adapt to shifting employee expectations. And one of the things that we’re seeing a shift around is the role that work plays in our broader lives. There’s a growing recognition of the importance of wellbeing, the importance of work life balance and, in that context, it would be great to start by you telling us a little bit about the background to the campaign for a 4-day working week. How has the campaign got to where it is and what do you think is driving the momentum that’s behind it at the minute?
Joe Ryle: So, historically, we used to work a 6-day working week, it was only 100 years ago that, you know, looking back at history, it used to be a 6-day working week, people used to work on Saturdays. And through various campaigns and pioneering business leaders at the time, and a movement really which was led by the trade unions, they campaigned for a 40 hour week, you know, as we understand it today, the kind of, 9 to 5, 5 day working week with the weekend. And so, we think, you know, 100 years later, the call for a 4-day working week quite naturally comes as the next step in terms of reducing working time, with the kind of, you know basic premise being that, you know, if there’s productivity gains in the economy which we have seen over the last few decades, then they should be passed on to workers through more leisure time. Now that hasn’t happened in the last few decades, since the 1980s, working hour reductions have stalled so, yeah, we do think that a call for a 4-day/32 hour working week is long overdue. And just to be clear on it, that is what we call for 4-days/32 hours no loss of pay. This isn’t about compressing the same amount of hours into 4 days rather than 5, although some companies have experimented with that. You know we’re very clear that, this has to be about reducing hours for workers if we’re going to be seen to be serious, you know, to tackle some of those issues around burn out, stress, over work etc.
Results from the world’s largest 4 day week trial - pros and cons
Lucy Lewis: Yeah really interesting, and that’s a good way to get on to the trial that we’ve seen, and as I said at the beginning, the trial ended in December, the results were published in, in a report by Autonomy and I know that there were academics involved in that, from the University of Cambridge and Boston College in the US and, so it would be really great if you could talk to the audience a bit about the trial, what was involved in the trial, and then the key findings that came out of that trial.
Joe Ryle: Yes, so we ran the world’s biggest ever trial of a 4-day working week, took place in the UK last year. There were about 61 companies, nearly 3,000 workers signed up and, companies from across a real wide range of, you know, sectors of the economy you know, this was kind of financial sector, retail, manufacturing, hospitality, construction, all sorts of different sectors of the economy. We had a fish and chip shop take part, a brewery. And with that kind of underlying principle that, you know, companies are reducing their hours to 80% while maintaining pay and also trying to ensure productivity and business performance was maintained and, for the vast majority of companies, almost 95%, it’s been so successful that they’ve decided to continue with the 4-day week at the end of it. So really pleasing results, and it builds off the back of results we’ve seen from elsewhere across the world. From government trials in Iceland and big companies trialing this from Australia and New Zealand. And, you know, really has shown again, there’s so much evidence out there now which shows a 4-day week with no loss of pay is a win/win really for both workers and employers, because the wellbeing side which perhaps is easier to understand, you know, workers having better wellbeing, they’re better rested, greater life satisfaction you know, happier in their life and, that’s on the one side. But on the other side, what effects that has on productivity and performance you know, we’ve seen for many of these companies taking part in the pilot you know, that revenues have gone up, based on before when they were working a 5 day week, we’ve seen job retention you know, improvements, you know, workers much happier to stay in their jobs and all of these impacts you know, having really, really positive results for companies so, it has a been a win/win really.
Lucy Lewis: That’s fantastic, Joe and I’m going to come and ask you about some personal reflections but, before I do that, I think there’s one thing that’s useful to clarify because, there’s a tendency I think still to think, “well a 4-day week means the sort of classic Friday off model” but the trial looked at lots of different models didn’t it? And I wondered if you could explain a little bit about that, to move away from this sort of instinctive feeling that what we’re really talking about is taking a day out of the week?
Joe Ryle: Well for the vast majority of companies, you know, they did take a day out of the week. So they did, in most cases it was, you know Friday off, just shut operations on a Friday and everyone come back on a Monday. That was the most popular option but, you know, lots of companies, in recognition of the fact that they’re moving to a 4-day week in a society which is still dominated by the 5 day week, they had different ways of doing this.
Some wanted to, sort of, maintain the 5-day coverage, particularly if there’s a service delivery or service sector and so, what they would do is, kind of, rotate days off. Some staff would have Mondays off, some staff would have Wednesdays off, some staff would have Fridays off, for example, and others did it differently you know, more staggered hours, and there were a few cases of workers doing 32 hours or less but over 5 days, so working 5 much shorter working days. I would say that was rare, and where we want to get to with this is, you know, essentially is that Friday becomes the weekend and we have, you know, a 3-day weekend for everyone but we recognise, you know, it’s going to take quite a long time to get there. It took a decade, at least a decade, to move from a 6-day week to a 5-day working week, so there’s many flexible ways of doing it and, you know, we allow for companies to participate in our programme, to do it in a way which suits them best - with the underlying principle that hours are reduced while maintaining pay.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you and I said I was going to come and ask you about any, sort of, personal observations. As you said, the results are really striking in terms of the success and the number of businesses that wanted to continue with it. I wondered if you had any sort of particularly personal reflections or any points that stood out to you personally when you looked at the results?
Joe Ryle: I mean I wasn’t…firstly I wasn’t surprised by them. We were pleased by them, but I wasn’t surprised because, you know, there is so much evidence out there now which says basically the same thing, has produced similar results.
One of the, kind of, more interesting lessons I guess for us was that, companies that used a kind of bottom up approach, so very much empowering staff to be very involved in the delivery of it. Those companies tend to, kind of, smoothness of the transition and the kind of overall impact tended to work a lot better than the kind of top down implementation where kind of, very manager led, kind of, you know, staff sort of been directed and told what to do. And we had one company where it was a sort of conditional 4-day week, so they only kind of, got to keep it if they were seen to be meeting their targets at the end of the month. And that, sort of, that carrot and stick approach didn’t seem to work very well and it was a kind of, bottom up trusting your staff you know, because ultimately, staff know their jobs better than anyone else and so trusting them in the process to look at, you know, concerns and hopes and fears that come up beforehand, those companies that did best. I would also say as well that it was, it tended to be companies, the much newer companies that hadn’t been around for so long, were much quicker and more dynamic kind of, working through any of the hurdles whereas some of the companies who were a bit older, they may have been around 20 or 30 years or longer, they had more rigid ways of working and more set patterns which perhaps, didn’t allow for, for change in the same way that, that those kind of, smaller and younger companies embraced it.
Will culture at work be affected in a 4 day week?
Lucy Lewis: That’s really interesting and actually, before we finish, I was hoping that you’d be able to share some practical tips for businesses that are inspired by this and we’ve started to go there which is great. Before we come back to that, and as I’ve got you, I think there’s value in just, you know, exploring briefly some of the, some of the challenges or perceived challenges that when you hear people talking informally about a 4 day week you know, those sorts of things that you hear said – we’ve covered the “one size fits all” approach which is great, but the other thing that you hear said is a concern that well actually, really, what’s going to happen inevitably is essentially people are going to be doing 5 days’ worth of work over 4 days and that has an impact on health and well-being potentially, but also potentially has an impact on culture because what you, what you lose in that day is, all of the other stuff that is, important to the culture of the workplace. So, you know, do you have to give up team meetings, do you give up the time that people sometimes take to support and supervise new or junior members of staff? Do you lose those unscripted sort of, water cooler moments, so things that build cultural capital, build creativity and, I’d really welcome your response to employers that are concerned that, actually, what’s going to give is not the work but the cultural bit?
Joe Ryle: Well, I mean, moving to a 4-day week is about looking at, you know, and the process of doing it is about looking at every single way that you work, all of your processes and really try and improve them. You know, there’s many areas in nearly every workplace, there’s many bits of people’s jobs which, actually, tend not to contribute very much to the overall output or goal of an organisation, so it’s really focusing on what are the strategic priorities, what are the strategic outputs of your organisation that you want to see at the end of the week? And really focusing in on that because, once you do that, you start to, quite quickly start to see bits, areas of people’s work, which actually, perhaps don’t really contribute that much to the overall goal and, it’s about output focus working rather than kind of bums on seats, the amount of hours, you’re just sort of there for the sake of it. And I think everyone can understand that, because we’ve all had, had times and we all still have times in our jobs that we’re doing stuff and perhaps can sometimes feel a bit pointless, but that’s the kind of first side of it.
Secondly, you know, there’s ways in which productivity can be improved you know, cutting meeting times, the classic one is organisations that have a meeting about a meeting, about a meeting, you know, does everyone need to be at all three of those meetings? You know, you quite quickly start to see ways in which you can kind of, save time, so it’s not necessarily about, you know, working, producing exactly the same amount of work in 4 days rather than 5, but I would say, you know, because staff are better rested and they’ve had their time to themselves, they’ve got a better work-life balance and they’re also therefore more motivated in their job, that means that you just do deal with stuff more effectively/more efficiently. So you can get through more work and be more productive in the time that you do.
So, it’s about, you know, it's a kind of, the whole scale systems change, looking at your entire organisation to make it work and, you know, it seems to be that the vast majority of companies that took part have done it and, it’s very very rare that companies ever go back to a 5-day week. So I do accept that there probably will be some less time in the office together, but that’s already happening anyway with the move to remote working you know, and the move to hybrid remote working is very very popular with workers so, I don’t know how much of that becomes, becomes a problem you know. Most of the companies that we saw move to a 4-day week, they did like to get people into the office at least 2 days a week still and so there is that time to still kind of, come together and see people face to face but, yeah, overall massive benefits and life satisfaction going up for all the workers and I think it was, 9 out of 10 workers saying they could never ever imagine going back to a 5-day week and they wouldn’t want to do it so, win/win really.
15% of employees say no amount of money would induce them to go back to a 5 day week
Lucy Lewis: And one of the interesting things for me, I think 15% of employees said that no amount of money was going to induce them to go back to a 5- day week which, you know, speaks volumes doesn’t it?
Joe Ryle: Yeah exactly. I think, you know, that does tell that people really feel the benefits of it quite quickly and, just, you know, can’t even imagine going back because, you know, if you’re getting, if you’re managing, if the company is managing to be as successful as it was before, if not more successful, because, you know, staff are much more bought into the organisation, they’re enjoying their work more, then why on earth would you go back to, why on earth would you add an extra day on the week for working? There’s just no need.
Lucy Lewis: Yeah, the other thing that I found interesting from a cultural perspective was the, the responses around caring and I think more than 50%, I think about 60% (I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong) of employees found that they had more ability, it was easier for them to combine paid working with caring responsibilities and, obviously, we’re seeing a lot in that in the press at the moment. We’re talking about, you know, child care costs but elder care costs and challenges as well, and I wonder if you’ve got any, sort of, any more comment on that? It seems striking to me that actually, perhaps, it helps some of the diversity and inclusion challenges because it specifically addressed the time issue with caring responsibilities.
Joe Ryle: Exactly. I mean, you know, the 4-day week is and can be part of a much wider cultural change around, you know, improving the balance in life, you know, because at the moment there’s many, and it tends to…the burden tends to fall particularly harder on women who have more kind of child care caring responsibilities and, actually, as we’ve seen on this trial, you know, by moving to a 4-day working week no loss of pay, staff and employees were much more able to manage those responsibilities they have in their life, whether it's care, social…it wasn’t just caring responsibilities, it was also like social you know, socialising and just managing all the different aspects of your life and just have more time to do that. So, we do think that if the 4-day working week you know, is rolled out at scale, it’s going to have massive benefits for the kind of, care sector, for the care that people are getting, both childcare, of elderly care. And will also be spread out much more evenly between men and women and men will take up, will be able to take up, a much fairer share which, you know, we think needs to happen anyway and it’s part of a bigger conversation going on at the moment.
Lucy Lewis: The other challenge we see, and this is really focused around the trial, is that it was only 6 months and there was a degree of novelty in that necessarily. So is it, is it possible that employees can really sustain that level of increased productivity through a 4-day week over the longer term or would it inevitably mean that, as it becomes normal and you take out the novelty factor, people just end up being stressed and burnt out and we haven’t really made any meaningful change?
Joe Ryle: Well, we’ve got many companies who joined our accreditation scheme – we also run an accreditation scheme which recognises permanent 4-day week employers and many of those have, you know, done it for years and years, some up to 5 years, 10 years. So I do think, you know, overall it’s a much better way of working and a much better way of living.
You know, we have to remember that this kind of model that we’ve got, where we kind of, work, work and, particularly in the UK, that we work some of the longest hours in Europe while also having one of the least productive economies. So all these long working hours that we put in, don’t really produce very good results but produces a lot of burn out, a lot of stress, a lot of overwork, a lot of unhappiness and you know, not only is that no way to live, it’s also no way to run an economy. It really is, does feel like it’s time for a change on this issue.
4 tips for implementing a 4 day week
Lucy Lewis: Yeah, I can see that. And a lot of what you say is really inspirational and there will be people that have chosen to listen to this specifically because they are considering a 4-day week, and I know, I mean, I know from the trial, that some of the companies reported in their first few weeks it was a bit chaotic, you know, there were a few teething problems so just things they had to overcome, work allocation for example. Is there any practical advice that you can share as a result of the trial that you could give to companies listening that are, sort of inspired to give it a go? How they go about starting and what they should be doing?
Joe Ryle: Yeah, sure I can, I’ve actually just recorded a video on this, I can talk through this. I mean, yeah and I should say, you know, those reports that, there was one, I think, story in the Telegraph about… which definitely overplayed the difficulties companies were having at the beginning, there were only a few of them. But, you know, it is normal that you know, you would expect those first couple of months for there to be some kind of teething issues along the way, like any kind of major changes in the way that we work is going to take a bit of time to get used to it, as we saw with the roll-out of remote working. But, from a top tips perspective, number one I would say you know, don’t overthink it, I’ve seen many companies that have really really overthought it and over thought about every single possible eventuality and you can get a bit lost sometimes you know the kind of basic idea is quite simple, you know, trying to achieve roughly the same amount of work or, trying to achieve roughly the same amount of success for your organisation while giving staff one day less at work, it’s as simple as that really.
Having said that, you know my second tip would be to, to prepare properly, you know consult with staff, listen to your staff about what their hopes are, what their fears are you know, it may be that, actually, you know that the most common concern is staff saying, “Well I’m already struggling to get the work done in 5 days, how am I going to get it done in 4?” Well, that’s already a problem that you should look at, you know, why are there a few particular staff members that struggle to get their work done? Can that be rectified before moving to a 4-day week? Because that may make, again may make the transition smoother.
Thirdly I would say, you know, trial it first. We always recommend at least a trial of 3 months or 6 months before kind of, making it permanent and that gives you the time to assess, you know, whether it’s been successful before or after.
And the last one is, you know, is think about ways in which productivity can be improved before moving to a 4-day week, so have those conversations with your team, is there a ridiculous amount of meetings in the diary? Are some staff working in projects which perhaps don’t contribute to, you know, the main overall outputs of an organisation? And have those conversations beforehand so that you can really, you know, make that transition smoother.
Is there a role for legislation and should the government be getting involved?
Lucy Lewis: Thank you, that’s really great and really really good practical advice for people that are thinking about it. Before we get to the end, I sort of wanted to ask you what’s next for the 4-day week campaign and what’s on the horizon? I’m assuming that, you know, there’s a big part in driving societal and cultural change you know, that’s going to encourage adoption, particularly when people see it’s a success, but do you think there’s a role for legislation? Is this something the government should be getting involved in?
Joe Ryle: Absolutely. We do think there’s a role for government to play in this, we’re talking about an economy wide transition to a 4-day working week, which we do think is possible by end of this decade, then we need to have government involved in that, you know, government coordinating this across the different sectors. You know, we need industry leaders, business leaders, trade union leaders working with the government to make this a reality because it’s, as we’ve already been saying in this conversation, there’s lots of different ways of implementing it, it’s going to look quite different in different sectors, but without any overall coordination, it’s all going to get quite messy. So we do think there’s a role to play in that and there are some key bits of legislation the government could introduce now, for example, kind of trial in the public sector, it could also give workers the right to demand a 4-day/32 hour working week for flexible working legislation, workers currently don’t have that. In the longer term, there could be laws around reducing the maximum working week to 32 hours to enable us to have that period, we’d suggest something like 5 years to make the transition.
Secondly, we’ve just launched a kind of national roll out programme to kind of, sign up the next wave of companies to move to a 4-day week and we’re keen to have as many companies sign up as possible. One of the beauties of the 4-day week is, you know, it doesn’t, we don’t need to sit around waiting for the government to make this happen, you know, companies can get on with this and introduce this themselves, as we’ve already seen many, many hundreds of companies doing it so, yeah, we’ve launched that roll out programme. And the last one you know, really is, is the trade union movement you know, we really want to see the trade unions really driving this through their kind of, you know, collective bargaining negotiations, we want to see, yeah, we know that we can’t rely on you know, pioneering bosses handing this down to us, because we’ve got to see a bit of, kind of, demand in the other way, you know we want to see workers demanding this too.
What is missing from the current conversation about the future of work?
Lucy Lewis: Thanks Joe, it’s really been fascinating to talk today, and I’m going to finish by asking a question that I’ve asked everybody on our 2023 podcast series. What we’ve seen in the last few years is a real spotlight on the future of work and there’s a huge amount of opportunities and challenges that lie ahead, but what I’d really be interested in hearing from you, is what you think is missing from the current conversation? What’s not getting the attention that it deserves, and why is that important?
Joe Ryle: I think on a personal level for me, I want to see more attention on the kind of, smartphone addiction and overuse and the way, you know, work drives that. Without any kind of thought or legislation you know, almost overnight really, over a period of a year or two you know, everyone has a smart phone which has their emails on, and it means that the boundaries between work and the rest of our lives is very blurred and so I do think there should be more of a spotlight on that. I don’t think it’s very healthy for people to be sort of checking, work emails into the night, and on tubes on the way home – I do think something like the, kind of, right to disconnect law that we’ve seen implemented in a few other countries across Europe…I know Portugal it was implemented, France too… where workers have you know, they have the right in law not to be able to, not to have read any emails after work time. I think we do need to see something like that as the first step, because I do think that kind of “always on” culture that we now have, which is, I think, largely driven by smartphones, is very unhealthy.
Lucy Lewis: Yeah, thank you. Really fascinating, fascinating thought and you’re right a lot of Europe are experimenting with rules to try to address that issue. Thanks Joe so much for joining us, it’s been absolutely fascinating, it’s really helped me, and I’m sure the audience, understand some of the key issues surrounding 4-day working week.
If you’d like to find out more you can visit 4dayweek.co.uk and a lot of the information that Joe has shared today will be available there. Thank you, Joe.
Joe Ryle: Great. thank you.