Trialling the 4DW to enhanced flexible working
Jannine Anderson, Canon Medical
Yes. So as you said, I’m here to talk about our four-day week trial that we started in August 2022. And I’ll also share where we are now.
Okay. So in terms of where it all started, as you’ll see here attrition was at an all-time high after COVID due to a huge demand for tech roles. People that were leaving were effectively doubling their salaries. And so we knew we couldn’t bridge that gap fully. So we needed to get creative. So the aim of our pilot was to see if we could get hold of these retention issues, improve employee satisfaction, and understand if we could still maintain output as well as stakeholder satisfaction. I’ll now take you through some of the stages.
So preparation. Preparation is key, and we probably underestimated the amount of time that that needed. We worked with the Edinburgh Business School to do some baseline analysis which included focus groups. In terms of stakeholders with our headquarters and some project teams in Japan, and the huge gap in working culture, it took us a long time to get their buy-in and it required multiple interventions from the leadership team. We managed to get traction by agreeing to work the pilot in phases. So we started small with one team and then gradually included all others.
In terms of employees, employees were all asked to opt into the trial. And as you see, most people did and provided we maintained output and we effectively gifted a day off, but the company remained open for five days. Each team were then asked to do monthly reports which focused on productivity, milestones achieved, and also staff engagement and wellness.
So we now move on to sharing some of the outcomes. And again, these will be different for every organisation, but this is just a couple that we focused on.
Okay. Is it going to go? In terms of stakeholder satisfaction at project level, it steadily increased. At sponsor level, it increased and then it tailed off slightly. And in terms of outcome evaluation, again, it steadily increased. So again, we managed to essentially maintain it.
The two other aspects that we were looking at were engagement and wellness, and these peaked at 7.9 during the trial out of 10, and this is really high participation rate at 73%. So all pretty good.
So what did we learn? We generally managed to maintain productivity. People were happier and more focused, and turnover essentially had returned to normal levels.
In terms of some of the challenges that we faced, getting buy-in from our parent company, collecting all the data that satisfied their needs and reporting on that. And actually interestingly, some employees found the intensity of the four-day week quite challenging.
So I’ll now move on to talking about post-pilot and where we’ve ended up today. And again, this will all be different if anyone else was considering a trial.
So for us, it was really essential that we managed to find a way forward for both employees who obviously really enjoyed the experience and also managing our stakeholder. They were essentially concerned that all subsidiaries would suddenly want this four-day week. So after some further research we landed on the term enhanced flexible working, where we reduced contractual hours from 37.5 to 34 hours a week with no change in pay. And then we allowed everybody their flexibility to choose their working pattern.
So in terms of where we are now as you’ll see here, attrition is now down at 4%. Overall engagement and wellness are still remaining stable, and this is now almost two years old.
So my top three takeaways would be, engage with stakeholders early, be prepared to collect and report on metrics, and don’t assume that everyone wants the same thing. My view is that enhanced flexible working to suit individual needs is actually better than a four-day week.
