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A few weeks ago, the 29-year-old boss of a small Wales tech startup had gone to LinkedIn and tried out a new way of working.
“We are abandoning our four-day work week,” said staff, who worked about 32 hours a week from Monday to Thursday, but had not had their pay cuts from the previous five days.
This has helped to boost production and staff retention, he said. So he took him a step further with a completely flexible 32-hour, three-month exam. Employees can work anywhere they want, from Monday to Sunday.
The idea was to make Lumen SEO, a Cardiff search engine optimization company founded in 2020, as attractive as possible to parents, new joiners and seven existing staff.
It’s fair to say that his response to his post was, of course, big.
About 1,000 people commented on the idea that many said it sounded “epic,” “glorious,” and “splendid.” Some were asked if Nermes was hired. (He plans to do so). And some of them asked the question that first came to my mind. How do people know who works and when? Do you feel compelled to be able to contact staff 24/7? How does your business respond to clients’ needs?
Nermes acknowledges that this effort will deprive you of discipline. He uses a software platform that delegates tasks to staff every Monday, depending on the expected time for each job. Messaging tools let everyone know if people are available. A lot of preparations are made for the meeting to avoid wasting time.
Everyone has to work at least two or three hours a week at the same time, but Nermus generally believes that the corporate labor world is too industrialized in the digital age. This allows people to shape their working hours as much as possible.
“I argue that because staff have more time outside of focused and continuous structured work, they tend to come to the office with more ideas,” he says.
So far, lumens seem to be outliers.
The UK’s four-day foundation has been encouraging 32-hour four-day weeks for many years, but campaign director Joe Lille says most companies employing the idea work in four weeks.
A small number of organizations tried 32 hours in five weeks, he said. However, he didn’t know to try the 32-hour full-fat version of lumens over seven days.
If they’re in the white-collar sector and have a business like Lumen, you can see why some people give it a try.
They also need bosses like Nermes. Nermes likes to travel the Canary Islands for several weeks at a time, then travelling the winter weeks. (“You meet a lot of interesting people and it’s just healthy.”) And I’m sure it will help if the business is small.
Still, Lumen’s testing fits the pandemic fuel shift towards more flexible work.
The traditional four-day week itself has proven more tenacious than critics have predicted, but perhaps not as successful as some campaigners wanted.
In actual workplaces, the percentage of posts mentioning four-day week has risen significantly since 2020 in the US, Germany, France, Canada and the UK. But even the UK, which has the largest share of five countries, is still below 1%.
In 2022, Belgium gave workers the right to request a four-day week, but only reduced existing time by condensing it. Other regions have tried their ideas, as many companies do.
Of the 61 organisations that took part in the UK’s large 2022 trial, 56 have decided to continue the model, and the Four Days Week Foundation says it has accredited more than 230 four-day organisations. Most have between 10-50 employees. The biggest is Atom, an app-based bank with around 470 staff. Most of them are in areas such as technology and marketing. But what bosses like Nelmes are definitely doing is that this is the path of the future and not important. Their ideas may stick much longer than you think.
