Yahoo Finance Why companies should consider swapping flexitime for a four-day working week
Flexitime is usually seen as a boon for an employee. Essentially it’s up to the employee to choose when they start and finish work, all the while making sure they still clock a set number of hours as agreed within their contract.
However, during an interview withYahoo Finance Presents: It’s A Jungle Out There, the CEO of UK-based marketing company Reflect Digital, Becky Simms said she had looked at flexitime and “while we try to be as flexible as we can, but what we didn’t want to do is have it where we literally wouldn’t know what time of day people are working.”
“They’re not able to collaborate and so much of what we do is collaborative so if we don’t know who is where and when we can speak to them, then our clients don’t know that either and they become really difficult to service. So that’s why we opted to go for a four-day working week instead,” she added.
The Jungle podcast is a new 10-part series that unpacks productivity lessons from nature. This week’s episode looks at ants and what we can learn about productivity and how companies can get the most of their staff by rethinking the ways we nurture people while making the firm more efficient.
Reflect Digital is the latest in a line of companies that are breaking the mould for standard working practices and instead opting for new processes that have proven to improve productivity.
As of 1 October, Reflect Digital’s 24 staff will still work a 37.5 hour week, just spread across 4 days. Staff will still get paid the same wage and the days they are allowed to take off are Monday or Friday, to make sure that the office is still operating on a five-day basis.
“We really wanted to do something to focus on the culture and happiness for the team. We’re in such a high-pressured environment where it’s deadline after deadline, so for us we wanted to see how we could ease that burden and people are coming in refreshed every single week. You know when you have a long Bank Holiday (public holiday) weekend, and people come in refreshed? We thought why can’t we emulate this every week,” said Simms.
Ohio University highlighted how the typical “40-hour working week is not based on the ideal total hours humans can work productively.” It used an example of Sweden, where people work considerably less hours than their counterparts in countries such as the US and UK. The average worker clocks only about six hours a day, compared to the average minimum of eight hours a day. Ohio University said that the switch-up in hours resulted in a “marked reduction in absenteeism, [improved] worker health in addition to improved productivity.”
According to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development data, people in Germany actually have the shortest working hours compared with all OECD member countries. However, it also has one of the highest productivity levels and employees are 27% more productive than UK staff that work more hours per year.
READ MORE: How ants could hold the key to a more productive workforce
If you want to hear the full conversation between Reflect Digital’s Simms and Mark Di-Toro, careers expert from Glassdoor, and understand how you can make your workforce more productive, you’ll find it on Apple, ACast, and Google podcasts. More articles on the subject are on the dedicated Work & Management hub at Yahoo Finance UK.
