Investigating a four day week- 3 things we did, 3 things we learned

Over the last few months we’ve been looking into whether moving to a four-day week might be right for Wellcome. We started with a clear question in mind – could we increase our overall impact as a foundation through improving staff wellbeing and productivity at the same time? Our independence and health-focussed mission made the idea a really interesting one for us, and one we felt worth exploring.

After lengthy consultation and debate, we’ve concluded that while we think there are merits to the model, we’re not confident that we could proceed with a trial without an unacceptable disruption across the organisation to our business. Although it's not right for us to go ahead with a trial of the model, we've learned a lot from the process which we hope will change how we work over coming months and years.

What we did

1.    Took a picture of the organisation – close analysis of a year’s worth of meeting patterns, building and email usage showed an organisation that was heavily interconnected, dependent on meetings and with ‘visible’ work (i.e. done through emails or meetings) largely confined to normal working hours. We weren’t surprised to find that in line with many other workplaces, Fridays were comparatively quieter in the building, with many of the Wellcome employees with flexible working patterns choosing not to be in the office on that day.  We also found that over half of the organisation work in jobs with a comparatively high level of control over their workflow and ways of working, which would suggest a greater capacity to adapt to a shorter working week.

2.    Took a wider view – John Maynard Keynes famously wrote in 1930 that “In the 21st Century a 15-hour work week will suffice, as we turn instead to how to use freedom from pressing economic cares.” While we haven’t quite reached that, the general trend of a reduction in the length of the working week has persisted, with a few bumps, through the 20th Century and into the 21st; and that trend could continue as automation increases in many sectors. Looking at the available literature, our sense was that there was quite a solid basis for the view that reducing working hours could have a positive impact on both productivity and wellbeing, particularly when starting from a long working week. However, there is relatively little formal analysis of reducing hours from a working week of, say, 38 hours.

3.    Talked and listened – the four-day week idea started a vigorous debate around Wellcome, with strongly held views across the spectrum both around the building and outside. We spent a lot of time talking through the idea with teams around Wellcome and consulting with our staff networks to understand the potential for unintended impacts on particular groups of staff. These conversations were really valuable in getting a strong sense of how colleagues feel about our current ways of working, and how we could use our working time to the greatest possible impact. We also spoke with a number of firms who have experimented with shorter working weeks to learn from their experience, including the Perpetual Guardian team who were incredibly generous with their time.

What we learned

1.    Any move to a four-day week needs to work for everyone, not just those jobs that could most easily adapt– like many medium-sized organisations, Wellcome has a diverse set of teams; in addition to funding research, we also manage the endowment that funds our charitable activities, run Wellcome Collection (requiring a 7 day week rota), our free museum and library, and have increasingly active policy, public engagement and communications activities. These teams work in very different ways and to different working patterns. There were some concerns this could place additional pressure on staff if not managed carefully – particularly for anyone already doing extra or out of hours work to meet their current work pressures – and a risk that compressing the working week might reduce participation in the broader corporate activities that ‘make Wellcome Wellcome’.

2.    Four-Day weeks are likely to be most effective when part of broader organisational change –  one factor we had to take into consideration is the ‘hedonic treadmill’; our remarkable human ability to take pretty big positive and negative life changes in our stride.  Once the initial rush of the extra day has normalised itself, how could we keep up the momentum and make sure we continued to improve the way we work? For example, Perpetual Guardian has tackled this by describing their Four-Day week offer as a ‘gift’ to staff alongside/for increased productivity.

3.    Increasing wellbeing goes hand-in-hand with a focus on productivity –  despite not going ahead with our trial, perhaps the most important lesson we have taken away is that by considering time as a finite (rather than infinite) resource, to be spent carefully in a similar way to our funding, we can help our teams achieve the greatest impact to improve health globally. We’ve got much more to do to properly achieve and embed this, but think that it will be critical for how we work in the future, and suspect that may be the case for other organisations like us.