Friday Fatigue? Not for MRL. They’re championing the four-day working week – and for them, it works
An edited version of this interview will appear in Platinum Business Magazine and on the Brighton Chamber of Commerce website. It was commissioned for the Chamber in February 2020
Anticipating the Chamber’s next Big Debate ‘Would a 4-day week work for Brighton?’, Chamber Vice-President and Chimera Communications MD Jill Woolf interviewed the charismatic and charming David Stone, founder and CEO of global high-tech recruitment consultancy MRL at their UK offices in Hove.
David and his business partner started MRL in 1997 and last year challenged their staff to make a four-day working week trial work for both the business and them. It did work and is now the norm for MRL, who pay the same five-day a week salary for a four-day working week to all their employees.
Here we learn how the anticipated benefits are working out and what, if any, are the downfalls.
Jill: Your focus is the recruitment,
retention and motivation of great people for your company. You made the bold
decision to introduce a shorter working week with the expectation that your
people can do in four days what they did previously in five. With increasingly
advanced tech and remote working, how do you stop your people from working 24/7
if they want to?
David: I don’t stop anyone from working if
they want to, but I don’t enforce an over-working culture. When we brought in
the four-day week, we didn’t stretch the hours (8.30am to 6pm). A lot of people
suggested we make the hours 8am to 8pm or 8am to 7pm, but I didn’t want to do
that. To me, it’s counter-intuitive to the premise of a four-day week.
Recruitment
is the type of business where you’re pretty much ‘always on’. It’s sales and it’s
intense so we do check our phones in the evenings, especially as we’re a global
business dealing with different time zones. If we need to return a call or do
an email because it’s the only time we can, then we do it – it comes naturally
to those in recruitment. I wouldn’t forcibly stop someone from doing that but equally
I don’t ask them to do it, and I don’t encourage them to do it either.
I think
many people do this in different walks of life anyway but the big difference
here is that there is zero expectation they’ll come into the office on a
Friday, although they’re being fully paid for it. I encourage them to take
down-time.
Jill: Do
they come in on a Friday though?
David: The odd person, now and then, may do. I am
probably the worst culprit for coming in, if only for a few hours! I’m trying to
do better this year though. I’ve added in a few hours at the leisure centre
then maybe lunch with my wife and a trip to the mall if I need something.
Jill: Microsoft’s
Japan offices four-day working week trial saw a 40% increase in productivity. Have
you had to change the way in which you work, and how are your stats proving
it’s working for you?
David: We
did our four-day week long before Microsoft Japan did theirs!
Our trial was from May to November last year (2019) and
we rigorously checked all the stats. We’re hitting our five-day sales targets in four
days, which in theory translates to a 20% productivity rise. ‘Sickies’ have
gone down by half and staff retention is at 96%. If people are going to leave,
they’re going to go to somewhere with a five-day week so they’d have to be
pretty miserable to leave! But sales-wise, we’re hitting 100% of all our
five-day targets.
Jill: How have your staff members taken to
the change?
David: We launched the idea at a swanky
hotel in Barcelona, along with all our overseas people.
It was hugely exciting
and then reality kicked in when we got back to our desks. Generally, the older team
members adapted quickly while some of the younger ones took a little more time as
they had to up the tempo, so they needed a bit more support.
I found a stat which said that the average worker
works for something like 3 hours 12 minutes per day, which is frightening. If
you extrapolate that to a five-day working week, that’s around 16 hours of
work. I’m giving my people four days in which to do those 16 hours. They’ve
still got four hours left to talk about Love Island or last night’s football
(or they could do four more hours of work!).
What I did was pass the trial over to the team, and
said “OK, it’s up to you. You can make it work, in which case we’ll keep it, or
if not we’ll go back to five days” and of course no-one wanted it taken away.
People had to up the tempo of the work they were doing. We saw a decrease in
the “chat” and an increase in productivity.
Jill: In your experience of other businesses, including your clients,
do business leaders really know when their staff are most productive?
David: No, I think most managers are woeful
at knowing what their people do and how they do it. They haven’t got a clue as
to their productivity levels. I know in some fields it’s very difficult to
measure absolute productivity but people have become so conditioned to working
9-5 or 9-6 Monday to Friday that it’s almost a lemming mentality. You do it
because your parents did and their parents before them.
Let’s face it, in many
places these days, no-one really does much work on a Friday afternoon, possibly
because you’ve done all your work but you have to stay till 5pm even though
there’s nothing to do.
Jill: And you’ve got to be seen to
be doing it.
David: Exactly.
It’s nonsense, and I think companies and managers need to get much better at
measuring what each job is, what it entails, how you do it, how much time is
involved in doing it, and so on. It’s what we used to call Time & Motion.
Jill: Have you
quantified cost savings in electricity or heating or the environmental impact of
less commuting/fuel consumption?
David: No, other than to say they must be
down 20%!
Jill: How would this work for smaller businesses and how could
they compete with bigger ones?
David: It depends what industry you’re in.
Recruitment is perfectly positioned because what we do is so measured and
simple – you’re either hitting the numbers and filling the jobs or you’re not.
I’m not well placed to comment on other sectors – if you need your solicitor on
a Friday, then you need them. Could they find a model that worked? I don’t
know.
Jill: Maybe they
could work a rota system. Do you need offices then?
David: Yes. I’m not a massive fan of
working from home. I think there are very few people who are self-disciplined
and structured enough, and I know I’m certainly in that category.
We’re
in a sales industry and sales people are gregarious, they need others to bounce
off, to check things over with, talk through their problems and so on. Also,
there’s training. Who’s going to train my young rookies if all the experienced
people are sitting at home? You need that learning culture. It’s something I
get asked about a lot, and I am mulling over some options at the moment because
about 85-90% of our work is overseas and we’re doing so much in America.
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| David Stone |
Jill: How could
Brighton make a 4-day week work, especially hospitality, tourism, seasonal
workers, tech, start-ups, SMEs etc? Is there anything about Brighton that would
make it work better or not?
David: For the recruitment companies here,
once their owners or managers get their head round the concept, no problem.
We’ve proven that.
For others
and the public sector, what they need to get clear on is what are the actual
productivity metrics and expectations of their staff. Then work out how people
do their jobs and how long does it take to do a proper week’s work? It would
have to be sector by sector in terms of how to measure that.
I’ve
got this theory and I don’t know how to prove it. Maybe someone reading this
can come up with a way. If you go for a four-day week, you’ve got immediate,
tangible benefits – better mental health, wellness, happiness, sick time
reduces, retention rate improves. Therefore, you’re not paying to hire new
people or train them. If you went to a hospital and applied the four-day week
to nurses, for example, they can’t do a five-day week in four, we know that.
Nurses are massively overworked and stressed. The burnout rate is high and the
mental health incident rate is high, as are the sickness rate and churn of
people leaving the industry. If you said to the nurses – we’re going to pay you
for five days but you only work four, immediately the hospital is presented
with a 20% increase in their salary bill because someone’s got to come in and
cover the fifth day in the wards.
But how much of that 20% is offset by the
decreased sick time, decreased mental health incidents, increased retention and
decreased churn? I don’t know you’d get all your 20% back but I think it would
be 10-15%. You’d have a happier workforce, they wouldn’t be so sick or
stressed, and they’d stick around for longer – and that is worth money.
You
could take that theory to the police force or Tesco or wherever there’s high
stress and churn. People underestimate the cost of hiring and training people
up to speed, sometimes it’s 30-40% of their salary.
Jill: Maybe one of
the universities could look at this, or maybe one of the private hospitals
would like to try.
David: That would be fascinating for me. It
would be a game changer for a sector. The Said Business Unit at Oxford has a
whole policy team looking at the four-day week concept.
The
schools in Colorado were broke and a year or two ago, several of them went down
to a four-day week because they didn’t have the funding to keep the schools
open five days a week. What happened was that the grades improved. By giving
the kids a three-day weekend, they were happier and the teachers were less
stressed.
Jill: That’s
interesting, because you’d think the reverse would happen.
David: Totally, but it’s the same theory.
What wasn’t made so public was that there was an increase in juvenile
delinquency but that’s because their parents work a five-day week so the kids were
left unattended and got up to mischief!
Jill: Are there any
downfalls of the four-day working week that you’ve found?
David: None. Some of the stories of what people are doing on
their extra days off are lovely, like one guy who was able to take his new born
baby swimming for the first time, or we have two people in our German office
who are doing PhDs.
Of course, it would be a different proposition if we were only paying for
four days. Most people can’t afford to take a 20% hit on their budgets and
still have the same standard of living. Our people would have left and gone
somewhere else.
Some people have asked if they get more stressed because they’re doing
more in a shorter time, but we haven’t seen it. We did a staff survey after the
trial and 89% said they felt their mental health had improved.
Jill: How did your
Radio 4 interview go for ‘The Bottom Line’*?
David: You have been doing your research! I was quite chuffed
and pleased to be asked. Apparently they have a listener base of 11m which sounds
high. Broadcasting House is impressive and Evan Davis was charming. He wanted
to talk about a five-day week with shorter daily hours, or an early retirement
age so you do your five days then retire at 55.
Overall there was nothing to argue about really because we’re proving
that it works and we know it’s not going to work for everyone.
Jill: Should there
be more choice?
David: Technology was meant to set us free to consider our
choices. But what happened was the opposite. We were told by now we’d be
working two or three days a week and enjoying our leisure time.
But technology means we’re working harder and longer than we ever used to.
Before, when we finished our working day and went home, there was no way to
contact us apart from our home phone. Certainly, there was no way of contacting
us when we were on holiday. Now we’re on our phones every evening and all
weekend, and that’s probably where the mental health issues are coming in as
well as FOMO, fear of missing out. It’s not healthy but I don’t know how we
change that.
I don’t believe Government should dictate that everyone works a four-day
week because some companies would go bust. If you get a few entrepreneurial
companies setting the pace with a four-day week and reaping the benefits, then
there’ll be a huge “me too” rush.
We weren’t the first recruitment company to do it but since we did, there
have been at least another dozen in the UK, Ireland and Holland which have. What
will happen is that people working a five-day week will go to an employer
working four and those companies will lose their best employees. Eventually the
whole sector will follow.
But I’m not trying to change the world, I’m just trying to give my
company an advantage and my people a decent working environment.
Jill: What are your
final words of wisdom for business leaders who are considering, or are nervous
about, changing to a four-day week?
David: Don’t ever rule
anything out. Consider all options. Look at your business with fresh eyes.
Don’t be stuck with preconceptions. Look at what you’re trying to achieve with
a four-day working week and ask if it could be achieved in another way first.
And rather than pocketing the effects of increased productivity, share the love
with your employees because they’ll stick around longer, be more loyal and work
harder for you. You’ll get your profits in the long run if money is your
motivator, maybe not straight away, but you will get them.
Finally, my top tip is consider a four-and-a-half-day week trial first
and dangle the carrot. If I had to do it over, that’s what I’d do. I’d say to
staff – have Friday afternoons off on me, the weekend starts at 1pm each
Friday. But I’m going to want 105% of target. You give me that for the next 12
months, then we’ll go four days, and that would also give them the time to make
the change and adapt.
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You can see more about MRL on https://www.mrlcg.com/ and hear David Stone’s interview on BBC
Radio 4’s The Bottom Line on https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000fpc7
MRL also gives staff a one-month sabbatical for
every five years worked and pays the air fare for trips to eg Australia, the
USA and South Africa.
