WCIPromoting a Balanced Life
The Four-Day WorkweekPERPETUAL GUARDIANt one large company in New Zealand, some em-
ployees no longer work on Fridays. Others don’t work
Wednesdays. But everyone is paid a full-time salary.
Perpetual Guardian, a statutory trust company with
240 employees, first tested a four-day workweek in
early 2018, collaborating with academic researchers
from two Auckland universities to study the impact on
its business. After the eight-week-long trial, employees
reported lower levels of stress, higher levels of job sat-
isfaction, and a much greater sense of work-life balance. Just as significantly,
despite the reduced hours, productivity didn’t decline. In November, the com-
pany decided to make the changes permanent. Andrew Barnes, the company’s
founder, has thus far seen no downside. “In
fact, the company is performing better than
it did last year.”
Barnes had noticed employees strug-
gling to maintain work-life balance when
he happened upon research about average
levels of productivity: One U.K. survey sug-
gests that British workers are productive for
only two hours and 53 minutes each day. By
giving people an extra day off, he theorized,
they might be better able to manage the
other demands in their lives, which could
be distracting them in the office.
He tasked employees with creating
their own plans to maintain and measure
productivity. “The teams themselves sat
down and said, ‘How do we make lots of
little changes that will enable us to deliver
the outcome?’ ” Barnes says. Meetings were
shortened or cut. People spent less time
browsing the internet. Employees experi-
mented with small flags on their desks to
signal to coworkers that they were busy
and shouldn’t be disturbed. “At the end of
the trial, most people said they were better
able to deliver their workload over four days
than the five,” he says.
Employees also reported feeling signifi-
cantly more empowered than they had be-
fore the trial, more stimulated and satisfied
by their jobs, more confident in the company
leadership, and more committed. Work-life
balance scores increased from 54% to 78%.
Job stress dropped seven percentage points.
Employees began gradually making the tran-
sition in November, and by early this year,
roughly half of the staff had opted in. The
company ultimately expects three-quarters
of employees to make the change.
“It’s real flexibility, not buzzword flex-
ibility,” says Emily Svadlenak, who works
as the company’s one-person marketing
department. She now takes Fridays off, and
she says that having more breathing space
on the weekend makes the rest of the week
easier. Like other employees, she will have
to meet certain performance standards to
be able to opt into the program again at the
end of the year.
Other companies, including multina-
tional corporations, have approached Per-
petual Guardian to learn more about the
transition as they consider making similar
changes; one is Wellcome Trust, a U.K. firm
that is considering a four-day workweek
trial with the 800 employees in its main
office. Barnes is confident a larger-scale ex-
periment will prove out the concept. “If we
were to have a country bold enough to really
give this a go,” he says, “I think we would
find that actually there is not an adverse
impact on the economy.” —APWO
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