How Does a 4 Day Work Week Work in Lockdown?!

One thing Andrew Barnes’ book – the 4 Day Work Week didn’t cover off for us was how it all works in a lockdown environment!! Of course, Andrew was not alone in not anticipating COVID19 and how it has affected not only our work lives, but our entire communities also.

We began our 4 Day Work Week in June – and things were going great.  A few of us (myself included) were slowly reforming ourselves into a new way of working, others embraced it from day one.  At the same time, business was thriving so all was great!

Going into lockdown on the 17th of August wasn’t in the plans.  But with all good plans, we had to make changes to ensure that it continued to work for the business and for our people.

So here is what we did to ensure we didn’t lose the 4DWW during lockdown:

• We’ve been lucky enough to have been incredibly busy during this time.  Organisations are desperately trying to find good talent so we’ve been run off our feet!  It would have been very easy at this point to drop the 4DWW, but we didn’t!

• Instead – we modified it a little.  Normally, Friday is the day where we observe the 4DWW (due to it being quiet and matching our needs of candidates and clients), but during lockdown we found that some days were busier than others, some days you had more energy than others, some days you felt great and others you didn’t.

• We moved our 4DWW to a flexi model – so our people could determine what day best suited them, their calendar, their energy and their home commitments.  

Overall, we’ve been able to maintain the integrity of our four day work week, we’ve been able to work WITH our people, their energy, their calendars and their home life in order to get the best outcome in what has been a tough time.

As we move forward and begin to return to a new normal, we’ve got an open mind about what that means.  We’re not letting go of our 4DWW, but we are certainly going to be having some good chats about how we can also incorporate more flexibility into our work week, without losing the magic of our team!

Thanks for reading and continuing to support us.  It means a lot to us all, and we certainly feel great about being able to help so many people this year.  

For me personally, I am incredibly proud of the team and what they’ve achieved this year – it is afterall during these tough times that the real test of a team occurs – and the Consult team has thrived.