As the coronavirus crisis forces more companies to participate in a massive experiment in remote working, it raises questions about how work might change when the health crisis passes, and if companies may be more open to alternative forms of working in the future—including not just letting employees work from home but allowing new variations in schedules, such as the four-day workweek.
“Often when companies don’t allow remote work, it has to do with not necessarily a lack of trust in the person, it’s a lack of trust in the process,” says Amy Balliett, CEO of Killer Visual Strategies, a creative services firm that shifted to a four-day workweek in 2017 and also allows remote work. “They’re so used to a very specific traditional process of work that they’re worried about what happens when that process shifts. I think what we’re about to see, as all of these companies that have been set in that tradition for so long are forced out of it, that there’s going to be a new level of trust and a new willingness to consider alternatives to the traditional going to the office nine-to-five.”
Companies that have adopted four-day workweeks have found, repeatedly, that productivity doesn’t decline even when people work fewer hours. Perpetual Guardian, a statutory trust company based in New Zealand, first tested a four-day workweek after seeing research that suggested that employees were only truly productive for around three hours a day; by giving workers a day off each week, the CEO theorized that employees might be more focused on their jobs when they were in the office. It worked. Researchers from two New Zealand universities found that after the first trial, employees were happier with their jobs and productivity hadn’t dropped. The company made the policy permanent.
When Microsoft tested a shorter workweek in its office in Japan—making every Friday a paid holiday for the office’s 2,300 workers last August—it found that productivity actually increased by around 40%. The company asked employees to chat online to avoid meetings, and to limit any physical meetings to half an hour and no more than five employees.