Want people to come into the office? How about offering a four-day week?

People used to make their living doing piecework at home, until the industrial revolution herded us all into factories to stand at machines for set hours. Then the move to a knowledge economy sent most of us into the office working on computers rather than looms, which meant we could wear white collars, but the basic concept of travelling to work remained steady. And then Covid turned the puzzle upside down.

Everything we had known about the office, all the organisational habits we’d accumulated since Charles Dickens’ overworked clerk Bob Cratchit asked his boss Scrooge for a Christmas holiday, were overlaid with an entirely new and incompatible set of rules that were enforced not by supervisors but by governments (and, of course, the threat of imminent death).

Working from home became the norm, leaving us to wonder why we’d ever thought it was impossible. We saw, as if for the first time, that spending two hours a day travelling to and from an eight-hour day was a colossal economic loss that benefited neither employers nor employees. And when vaccines allowed us to cluster together again in comparative safety, we didn’t forget.

Many employers are now seeking to bring staff back into the office. Most staff are reluctant to comply.

I’m an employer, and I’m presumably biased. I think there are advantages at my company, Our Community, to having to have all of my staff in the building together.

We work in teams, and teams work more easily together if they share silly jokes and common grievances at the coffee machines and perform complex ballets at the automatic doors. People who communicate only over work emails find it easier to be critical and unfriendly.

On the other hand, staff enjoy the flexibility of WFH, and if you take it away they may turn mutinous, or pull back, or simply not apply for jobs here. I have to strike a balance between diffusion and cohesion. At the moment, that means everybody works two days in the office, except when there are reasons to shift in either direction.

To make that balance work, though, my staff have to trust me to take their interests into account when making structural decisions.

That trust may be a little easier to call up now that Our Community has moved to a four-day week. We did the change right, too, consulting staff over what bits of the workload we could cut back on (or simply stop) to make way for an extra day off – fewer meetings, for example. From the productivity point of view, our evaluation tells us, it was entirely successful. More importantly, it gave everybody on the books about two extra months a year of their own time, for the same pay: four days of work for five days of pay.

It's easier to do this stuff in a comparatively small business like mine (nearly 100 staff) than it would be for BHP, Qantas or the public service. The real difference, though, is that at Our Community we genuinely behave as if we had to balance different interests, whereas the big buggers don’t. They may smile and backslap in the good times, but given a choice between mass layoffs and a couple of sharemarket points, they’re not going to hesitate. They have a single measuring stick, and that doesn’t register the interests of staff, or the public, or the environment, except incidentally.

Well, that’s capitalism – except that it’s also shortsighted, conservative, and the coward’s way out, and it best serves the interests of the privileged. It worked, more or less, with the last century’s workforce, when every family included a woman at home managing the domestic front, but things are different now, and workplaces need to keep up.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.

More information

More about the Our Community four-day work week

Read the full 52-page report of the Our Community experience

4 Day Week Australasia findings | 4 Day Week UK findings

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