At one time, the prospect of a four-day work week – followed by three blissful days of freedom – would have felt like a distant dream to most of the working population. But in recent years, it’s a reality that has been edging closer and closer to the mainstream. Founded in 2019, the 4 Day Week Global Foundation was launched to achieve exactly that, by funding research into the future of work and workplace wellbeing. Over the last three years, the team behind the foundation have been running a series of four-day week trials in countries around the world, including Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and, most recently, the UK.

The early findings, released late last year, are promising. Of the 30 companies and almost 1,000 employees who took part in the six-month pilot schemes across various regions, while still taking home the same pay, none decided to return to a five-day week. Workers felt less stressed and burnt out, and reported higher rates of life satisfaction. The business case showed that there was less absenteeism and resignations, with revenue increasing by an average of 8% over six months. When compared to the same six months in 2021, that rose to 38%.

London-based creative agency Mox hadn’t really considered the four-day week when Ian Pons Jewell’s production team approached them about a campaign film the director had made with a bunch of illustrators, which highlighted the history of the working week and why we might be getting it all wrong. “That was how I first found out that there was a trial going on,” explains Mox co-founder and creative director, Matt Bolton. “The guys asked us to help promote it for them and we were like, we can’t really be seen promoting the four-day week without actually doing it ourselves.”

We made a decision that we wouldn’t proactively make any clients aware for the first six months, and one measure of success was if clients didn’t realise, then great

Since deciding to give his entire team every Friday off for the same level of pay, it’s very quickly become the new normal for Bolton. “It’s very hard to go back,” he laughs. “I think the main thing for us why it’s been successful is just the honesty. We were really clear with the brands we work with about our intentions, and put together quite a substantial handbook for our staff and our clients to let them know why we’re doing it, and the importance of making sure that we’re not going to miss deadlines and the quality of the work won’t change.”

For digital marketing agency Literal Humans, which was founded in 2020 during the height of the pandemic and whose team was already well-versed in flexible working, the four-day week felt like the logical next step. “The trial came up and we said, we can bake this into the DNA of the agency,” explains co-founder and CEO, Paul Perry.

As a small agency, the decision to close for business on Fridays made most sense to Perry, although he says they may experiment with more flexible work options in the future. So far, it’s been an overwhelmingly positive experience, although there have been a few challenges to overcome into order to get to this point. “For us the stickiest wicket was our content strategist, who is the project manager for every single client project. There’s lots of little tasks they have to get done so that the rest of the team can do their work. So we had to really think about how to give them more support for their role, to automate more things, to bring in another person as a backup, to reshape the role a little bit in the context of the four-day work week,” he says.

Although it hasn’t made a dent in productivity overall, the reality is that there’s still one less day to interact with both clients and one another, Perry adds. “It made us think about what meetings we really need to be having. I think there’s already pressure on us as a remote team to over-communicate and have more conversations about stuff than you might do when you’re in the office. And you have less time to do that, so that’s a bit of a tricky thing to navigate.”

Since deciding to try out the four-day week back in 2019, Edinburgh-based creative agency Lux has taken a different approach to managing workflow, setting up a counterpart for each team member on each account and having them work a different pattern. “That ensured that every discipline was always available and covered in the agency,” says co-founder and creative director, Alice Will. “We made a decision that we wouldn’t proactively make any clients aware for the first six months, and one measure of success was if clients didn’t realise, then great.”

Within the first year of running the pilot, the agency boasted a 24% increase in productivity and a 30% increase in profitability. “Ultimately, that makes a lot of sense, because working in a creative field you’ve got to get your brain rested but also stimulated from other things,” says Will. “We could see people being nourished and also having much more agency themselves. It spoke for itself in our outputs – doing some of the best work and being the most profitable we have been.”

I think introducing a four-day working week can also be a really positive step towards building an encouraging, more prosperous and fair culture and working conditions

Despite the practicalities of a four-day week presenting larger businesses with a number of different challenges, it’s been shown to be just as effective so far. Unilever New Zealand, for example, recently announced it was extending the pilot scheme to Australia after an initial trial showed strong results against business targets such as revenue growth. The vast majority of staff also reported feeling more engaged, and absenteeism dropped by 34%.

Affiliate marketing network Awin first introduced its own flexi-work policy in the wake of the pandemic in early 2021. The policy enabled the company’s 1,200 employees to take one day off per week, working four full days, or choose to split the fifth day, working three full days and two half days. Since its introduction, the business has seen a 13% increase in gross profit. Crucially, before the policy was even put in place, a series of taskforces incorporating Awin staff from across various departments and global teams was set up. This included many members of client and partner-facing teams who would still be expected to maintain high standards of client service across all five days of the week.

“This period was incredibly important for us and gave us valuable learnings,” says Awin’s head of people and culture business partner, Kelly Perry. “We were able to assess automation, culture and mindset change and ensure all employees understood that they had a personal responsibility to assess how they work, for example reviewing meeting practices, shortening meeting times and removing meetings altogether if unnecessary.”

While the benefits of the four-day week are obvious on an individual level, and there is clearly a business case for it, one of the big sticking points for the creative industries is the notorious always-on culture that has prevailed for years, particularly in the world of advertising. Is a radical rethink of the working week actually feasible for an industry that is so beholden to the whims of clients? “Yes, and it should be, because that culture needs to go,” says Will.

“I think introducing a four-day working week can also be a really positive step towards building an encouraging, more prosperous and fair culture and working conditions, because we shouldn’t be expected to still do that. It’s up to business owners to make those changes and that all comes down to ethics and values and culture.”

Perry agrees, although he admits that there is an element of self-selection depending on the nature of a company’s work. “We try our best not to work with assholes who would actually care, we want to work with people who encourage us to have better work-life balance. We can do that because we’re small, but I think other agencies if they have bigger clients who are more demanding, then maybe that would be a reality,” he says.

What does this mean for the young Muslim girl from a big family who’s literally giving her salary to her parents to help them, and now she has more time to help her sister raise her kid?

For Bolton, being realistic about the need for a degree of flexibility has been the secret to overcoming any client-shaped hurdles so far. “We’ve been really clear to the guys in the team, it’s quite a huge step for us and it’s not going to be perfect, so there are going to be times where we end up being called up because unforeseen circumstances happen,” he says. “I think starting off on that foot and being really clear and honest with everyone meant it’s worked really well for us. If we have to work on Friday then everyone just chimes in and helps out.”

So what should creative businesses be keeping top of mind as the four-day week debate continues to gain momentum? Ultimately, a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work. “Undoubtedly, flexible working is more suited to some industries compared to others. For Awin, we evaluated the cost versus the reward,” says Perry.

“It comes down to companies being comfortable with the salaries they are offering and that they are fair within the market. Businesses need to ask themselves: are they prepared for the shift or will they struggle to attract high calibre candidates within a competitive recruitment market?”

One part of the debate that hasn’t been touched on as much by business leaders, and will likely have much broader implications for the future of work, is the role of equity. “Obviously, the environmental implications are one thing, there’s just one less day that people are travelling and putting carbon in the atmosphere because of running their computers and servers and stuff like that,” says Literal Humans’ Perry.

“We also have a very diverse team, and we’ve just noticed that people are doing different things with their time that align with their economic, ethnic, family background, and things like that. What does this mean for the young Muslim girl from a big family who’s literally giving her salary to her parents to help them, and now she has more time to help her sister raise her kid? I think people are going to be more attracted to companies that are offering this, and it’s going to fall along the lines of diversity and inclusion.”

moxlondon.com; literalhumans.com; getlux.co.uk; awin.com/gb