Mark Mullen is the chief executive of Atom, a U.K.-based bank.
So we switched to a four-day week.
Atom bank is a nine-year-old digital retail bank based in the north of England. We have about 470 employees, and we’re proud of our culture. But this move to such a liberal employment regime wasn’t a manifestation of “wokeism” gone mad. Far from it. This was a pragmatic response to the employment market and the development of our company. We wanted to increase productivity, not reduce it.
The idea of a four-day week has gathered momentum since the pandemic, in part as a possible way to counter the “Great Resignation.” In the United Kingdom last year, a trial of the four-day week involving about 3,000 employees at 61 companies was largely successful. The trial, which was conducted partly by researchers at Boston College, found that employee well-being went up while company revenue was not significantly affected. Other similar pilot programs have found a four-day week can reduce absenteeism and staff turnover.
Before making the decision, we planned it out in great detail to remove the risk of the policy backfiring. We designed new shift patterns and established some core hours that had to be worked. We looked at studies in Nordic countries that showed it could be done and suggested best practices.
And in November 2021, we introduced the four-day workweek to our staff, cutting 3.5 hours off each employee’s workweek while leaving their pay unchanged. We figured this investment worked out at about 9 percent of the cost of each staff member.
And guess what happened? Employees were very receptive, of course. And at first, there was no measurable deterioration in productivity, either. So what does that tell us? I believe there’s some buffer in just about every company. I don’t believe staff members are lazy. But perhaps having fewer hours in the workweek encourages everyone to be more efficient, streamlining cumbersome processes. This is probably even truer in bigger companies than in start-ups such as ours, where keeping an eye on costs is more critical.
As time went by, we continued measuring the effect of this new work policy. Since we made the change, we have seen a reduction in recruitment costs, a fall in unwanted staff attrition, lower absences because of sickness and higher employee engagement with our brand. We’ve also seen higher employee productivity, higher profitability and higher customer satisfaction. These are not handpicked, rose-tinted performance measures — they are the fundamentals of building and running a business.
And hough we can’t be sure of cause and effect — some of the positive trends could be because pressures on staffing eased, or because our company is getting older and wiser — it’s hard not to believe our approach to the workweek is contributing in some measure.
None of this is easy for executives at older companies to hear, and I have some sympathy with their position. We have also embraced working from home, which suits our digital business. But that is perhaps easier for a company such as ours than it is for legacy businesses. Senior executives who are not accustomed to working alone, or from home, are understandably unnerved by rows of expensive empty desks in even more expensive and cavernous office buildings.
Certainly, I have felt from time to time a feeling of isolation and a sense of unease at working from home. But I’m convinced that it’s only because I didn’t design Atom bank to be as remote and self-service-style for employees as it has become. The transition to an entirely new way of working is bound to be uncomfortable, but it doesn’t make it wrong.
I’ve spent the greater part of my 33-year career commuting to and from offices and working five days a week, at least. In common with millions of workers around the world, it wasn’t until February 2020 and the outbreak of the global pandemic that — of necessity — my behavior changed.
In the years since, though, I haven’t just changed my behavior. I’ve changed my attitudes and beliefs. It’s as though the pandemic broke a spell that had kept us all enthralled to a working paradigm that turned out to be well past its sell-by date.
With the acceleration of artificial intelligence and other technologies, I believe we should all start to prepare for a radically new world of work. In this context, even a four-day week working from home might seem positively outdated.