Should Companies Move to a Four-day Workweek?

The way we work is undoubtedly changing. Exacerbated by COVID-19, we are edging toward a world where remote working is far more ubiquitous, and productivity isn’t simply measured by the time we spend in the office.

Increasingly, it can’t be measured by the time we spend logged in from home, either.

It is no longer sufficient for employers to offer work from home flexibility when they physically can’t open the office, but otherwise manage their staff the exact same way they always have. Now is the time for every company to think very carefully, and far more broadly, about how they assess the performance, contribution, and success of their people.

If the past few months have taught us anything, it’s that performance needs to be increasingly tied to outcomes. Success isn't just to do with how much time someone spends in the office.

It’s also not about working at certain times of day—recently, we have all adapted to when time is free to take a call or when kids need to be homeschooled.

I hope the pandemic will spur us on to reevaluate what “productive” really is, when people can be productive, and simply to trust our teams to do what they are paid to do.

We often think of remote and flexible working as the preserve of more “techy” startup companies, but manufacturing giant Siemens (founded in 1847) has become one of the most recent evangelists.

The business, which operates multidisciplinary teams with vast numbers of staff, has adopted a new approach allowing employees to set their hours more independently. In July, amid COVID-19 lockdown measures, it announced “employee-led flexibility.” This means staff are empowered to employ a flexible location for parts of their week and adjust their working pattern to suit them, as long as they make up the time.

Siemens says that ELF “has been identified as one way we can help make a real, positive difference to staff retention, wellbeing and growth and succession skill planning,” and it’s being introduced through a blend of contractual and informal cultural changes.

The company also understands that it will need to change employees’ mindsets too. Siemens has offered part-time options for 12 years, but since this hasn’t been more widely adopted, Siemens is now working on this challenge. Currently, 16% of women work part time, while just 2.5% of men do.

But for a global giant, this will require a major rethink and the technology infrastructure to make it work (like its digital workplace app Comfy). It’s not just about allowing staff to work flexibly, but providing them the tools to do so, and tying together assessment, performance, and outcomes to this new way of working.

This is just one example of a shift to more flexible hours, and a four-day workweek could be a natural extension of this. If bosses gain confidence that there are different paths to performance and that as long as the work gets done, whether that’s in four or five days, in the office or out of it, then we could see a more productive and empowered workforce.

At the moment, if people are working from home, nobody is checking them in or out every day but the work is somehow still being done. If it’s done in fewer hours, perhaps you need to give your team more work. If 40 or 50 hours isn’t enough, it’s probably time for the boss to reevaluate your responsibilities, goals and targets.

Once the balance is found, then where people are physically based and the hours they work shouldn’t matter as long as they are doing their work to a high standard and making themselves available to stakeholders as needed.