The Unity Project: Employee Engagement, Work, and the Return to Work for a Fair Pay: A Study from the U.K. Case Study

It wasn’t hard for Samantha Losey, managing director of Unity, a public relations firm in London, to convince her team to work fewer hours for the same paycheck.

But after a “very difficult journey” to convince her board, and a rocky start, Losey said her team has hit its stride. She said that 80% of the people will continue the routine after the trial is over.

The United Kingdom has more than 70 companies participating in the trial. For the past six months, more than 3000 employees have been working 80% of their hours for the same rate of pay in exchange for a promise to deliver all of their work.

The pilot program was a collaboration between the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global, the 4 Day Week Campaign in the United Kingdom and the think tank Autonomy.

It was “a resounding success,” according to organizers, with 92% of the 61 participating organizations continuing with the four-day week beyond the end of the trial. A majority of workers said they had lower levels of burn out at the end of the six months.

Employees of 5 Squirrels, a skincare manufacturing company in southern England, during ‘deep work time’ in the office, where they can focus on projects without email interruptions.

Do we live in a technological world? A study by Sheppard-Losey and Losey-Lessy on the lack of innovation in the workplace

He said all of them had lost a lot of weight. The team has more time to prepare healthy food. People are going to the gym a lot more.

Losey said that her clients are happy with their performance, while her team is more inspired and creative. The internal study found that productivity was up by a third and employees were more positive about their lives.

She said that the clients were desperate for the experiment to pay off, so they could convince their bosses to adopt the routine.

It is the humans who build societies, workplace and economies. The five-day workweek is not innate or natural and the 40-hour workweek was not handed down from God. Yet suggestions that we change it can feel like an affront to ambition or the American work ethic, or simply an impossibility.

It also makes for happier and healthier employees, Schor said. That’s especially important given the demands of the pandemic pushed many to simply burn out.

Managing the Workweek: How a Losey Executive Becomes “Armageddon”, a Story about Change, Resilience, and Attention

“Americans are finding that two days is not enough for the weekend. They can’t get all of their errands and family care [done] and taking their kids to activities, and even just a little bit of time for themselves, and preparing for the work week,” she said. It isn’t enough because all of that gets crammed into two days.

She described the first week as “Armageddon,” with too few colleagues available to respond to a client emergency. She cried while sitting on the kitchen floor.

The team has changed and introduced new habits that have made a difference. Internal meetings are 30 minutes and client meetings are capped at 15 minutes. Emails to colleagues are not allowed to exceed more than a quarter of a day’s total emails.

In particular, Losey’s staff swears by a “traffic light” system to reduce distractions in the office. Colleagues have a light on their desk, and set it to green if they are happy to talk, amber if they are busy but available to speak, and red if they do not want to be interrupted.

Conroy said he has introduced “deep work time” where, for two hours every morning and two hours every afternoon, his staff ignore emails, calls or instant messages and concentrate on their projects.

The office phones were too distracting and his team decided to stop using them. He said clients were initially bothered, but responded by sending more emails.

Why are we so lucky to be working? The impact of technological revolution on the UK workers in the early 1990s: The case of 80% of UK work hours volunteered for the same pay

Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on social media. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. CNN has more opinion on it.

In the last few decades, American work life has undergone a revolution. Many of our jobs have been made more efficient by the use of technology. Automation has replaced many forms of manual labor. Working women, once an anomaly, are a standard part of a workforce that is more diverse and better-educated than at any point in American history.

Instead, technological innovations have made us more tied to machines and devices and threatening to take over our creative works. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

In recent years calls to shorten the working week have gathered steam. The calls have grown louder, after millions of employees switched to remote work and stopped working.

That fear may be incorrect. I am a sample size of one, and as a freelancer my hours are all over the place, but I will often at least try to schedule out my week so I am working four full days rather than five (or sometimes seven) partial ones. Creating these boundaries around my working hours means that I am much more focused and efficient; I spend less time perusing social media or doing non-work tasks so that I can enjoy the reward of a free Friday.

We are three years into a pandemic that upended work life (and life-life) as many of us knew it. We are living in an era in which out-of-work demands, most especially parenting and other forms of caregiving, are more extreme than ever. And we are living in a country that, unlike other nations, provides meager support as its people strive to balance it all: a slim majority of Americans and a strong majority of workers still get health insurance from our employers, there is no universal childcare on offer and we have no guaranteed paid parental leave – let alone enough sick days or vacation that we are empowered to take, even when offered them.

For six months starting in June last year, about 2,900 workers across 61 companies in the United Kingdom worked 80% of their usual hours — for the same pay — in exchange for promising to deliver 100% of their usual work. It is the largest amount of companies to ever participate in a trial, according to 4 Day Week Global.

The time male workers spent looking after their children rose by 27%, according to time diaries they kept during the trial. By comparison, female participants reported an increase of 13% in childcare.

“It is wonderful to see that we can shift the dial and start to create more balance of care duties in households,” Charlotte Lockhart, founder and managing director of 4DWG, told CNN.

More than half of employees said they were less fatigued, and three in five said it was simpler to balance work and care at home.

Women’s experience is better after the new schedule, according to Dr Dale Whlehan, chief executive of 4DWG.

Last year, managers and employees who were in the trial described to CNN how they would use the extra day off to take up hobbies, or simply spend more time with their families.

What do workers really do during the work week? Employers’ feelings on the benefits of a four-day work week: An international study last year

The UK study follows a separate international trial last year involving 903 workers across 33 companies, with the majority of workers based in the United States and Ireland.

It was even more successful because all of the 27 companies that responded to the survey said that they didn’t plan to go back to a five-day routine.

Advocates say the results help validate the idea that it’s possible for companies to shorten the workweek to 32 hours with no reduction in pay while maintaining previous levels of work output.

“We feel really encouraged by the results, which showed the many ways companies were turning the four-day week from a dream into a realistic policy, with multiple benefits,” David Frayne, a research associate at University of Cambridge who worked on the trial, said in a statement.

It included roughly 2,900 workers at 61 companies — from nonprofits, manufacturers and finance firms to even a fish-and-chip shop — and ran from June to December of last year.

Largely, workers themselves approved. Employees reported that they had less work related stress and higher job satisfaction. A majority of employees reported working at a faster pace.

Juliet Schor, a Boston College professor, said that the results were largely steady across the different workplace sizes.

The researchers found that the way employees used their spare time was different for each type of work they did. Those who worked in nonprofits and professional services spent more time exercising, while those in construction and manufacturing reported saw the largest declines in burnout and sleep problems, Schor said.

According to data from 23 organizations that provided it, revenue increased by an average of 0.4% over the study period. Absenteeism fell, and people were less likely to quit during the trial, even though it took place during what’s been dubbed the Great Resignation, the authors noted.

4 Day Week Pilot Pilot Trial: Focusing the Mind During Workdays to Reach the Best Productivity for the Best Possible Threshold

Tyler Grange is an environmental consulting firm based in England. Simon Ursell, the managing director of the firm, told NPR that the firm stopped doing certain administrative tasks in order to shorten their weekly workload into four days.

“If you give a really cool incentive, like a money-can’t-be-bought incentive, to people that they want to do something, they’ll just do it, and you’ll focus the mind, it’s a good thing,” he said.

Ursell encouraged managers to think about what is needed to get the work done if they choose to stick with a strict four-day workweek.

The trial has shown that working in a manner that’s most applicable to your organization to reach the best productivity for the time is what you have to be aiming at. It could be more than just four days. The question is what is the best thing to do for your organization. What are the best outcomes for you?

4 Day Week previously conducted similar trials in the U.S. and Ireland and says it will also release results from pilots in Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil, North America and elsewhere in Europe.

How to set up a personal day off? An application to the CEO of an online marketing firm and a public relations executive who doesn’t like a day off

It just keeps coming up, doesn’t it? The concept of a perma-long weekend with no reduction in pay. It’s so attractive in theory that we as a society refuse to let it go.

Want more journalism to get you thinking about work and money? On the Consider This episode, we discuss how to develop a personal recession toolkit.

Lindsay Tjepkema, the CEO of a marketing technology company called Casted, last year told NPR she wasn’t convinced an extra day off is the relief people crave.

It is possible to say “Hey I want to start my workday late, for kid reasons, for friend reasons, for personal reasons, for pet reasons”) or “I want to cut out early on Wednesdays for personal reasons.” So if I mandate that flexibility at our company means you get Fridays off, that’s not flexibility. That’s mandating a day off.”