Imagine at six am on a Friday morning, you wake up about to get ready for work, but then you remember you don't have to go to work. Instead, you have a blissful three day weekend ahead.
Now imagine that you get.
To experience this feeling every single Friday morning. Yeah, you're still on a full time salary. This is what life is now like at my consultancy, Inventium. Back in July last year, we ran an experiment to see if we could improve our productivity and fit our work into four normal eight hour days yet still get paid for five seven months on I can tell you that the experiment was a huge success. And on today's episode and also on next Thursday's episode, I'm unpacking how on earth we
managed to make this work. My name is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational scologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium. And this is how I work, a show about how to help.
You do your best work.
On today's show, I speak to Inventium's head of Learning, Charlotte Rush, because shar led Inventium's approach to implementing the four day week. And I imagine that you probably have a bunch of questions on your mind, because although Inventium is definitely not the first company to do this, we are still only.
One of a handful globally.
So how did this idea for having a four day week even come up, how did we make it happen? And how did shar manage to fit all her work into just four days. We cover all these questions and more, and on next week's show, I'll be speaking to Inventium CEO to uncover how you actually run a business when staff only work four standard days, yet we pay them for five. So we are talking about the new that we started an experiment with in the middle of last year,
the four day week. And for listeners that are not familiar with the four day week or simply think that it's trying to fit five days of work into four really long, exhausting, arduous day is Shaq, can you just explain to listeners what the four day week actually is.
So the four day week is based on this concept of taking one hundred percent productivity, reducing the time down to eighty percent whilst maintaining one hundred percent pay. So it's not about reducing your pay by eighty percent. The intention is not to do super long days and fit that into four days. It really is about how you can change your behavior so that you can do what is essentially five days work in four days and maintain the same pay.
Yes, and it was pioneered by Andrew Barnes from Perpetual Guardian And I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to dig a bit deeper for listeners wanting to hear more about it. That's a really good interview to go to. Now I want to talk about how we even came up with the idea for trialing this four day week, because it was something that we generated pretty soon after COVID had hit, and COVID hit Inventium pretty hard. Within a few weeks, pretty much all our work was canceled or postponed.
We very sadly.
Had to let go of four staff members and so that was the environment and Inventium things were pretty full on.
So, Shaq, can you talk us through how.
This idea even came about in amongst this crisis.
So we decided that seeing as we had this reduced team and we were all going to be working remotely whilst we still had previous to COVID, whilst we were working quite flex and a lot of us working from home, we did still go to the office. We would often
see each other a few times a week. So there were a lot of changes, and there were also a lot of challenges external to Invent Him, obviously because of COVID, and so we decided to run a little internal idea generation workshop which was solving the challenge of how can we make eight great? So our team was reduced down to eight people, but we really were passionate about, okay, even though we have a reduced team, how can we
still have great impact? And also how can we work better together with this reduced team in a really hard time? So I ran that workshop and we have our challenge, how can we make eight great? We had a bunch of stimulus and we all got together remotely and came up with lots of different ideas. And our CEO, Mish, she actually came up with the idea for the four day week at Invent Him.
She did, didn't she?
And it was so funny when I saw that idea, because I remember when I'd.
Interviewed and Drew on the podcast.
Just in the back of my head, I thought, oh, wouldn't that be great to try that out, and then I just thought, no, no, just focus on getting through COVID before you get all experimental with your ideas.
Amount So I actually really loved that.
Miss suggested that that was very cool, and do you remember what the team's reaction to that idea was.
Initially?
I think it was really funny because I remember after we shortlisted our ideas down and so everyone gets a chance to vote on which ideas we actually want to try out an experiment with and how can we Sorry, the four day week was one that obviously got through, so people were voting and saying, this is something I want to try. But once we'd actually decided, okay, this is something we want to try, I remember Mish calling me afterwards and saying, you know, it seems Charlotte that
everyone wasn't that excited about it. And I think the reaction within the team was excited, but also like, you know, this is something that we're going to just have to
try out. And this is we already had a lot of practices around flexibility, and so for example, we had our rebalanced leave process, which was what some people might call unlimited paid leave, and so this was just a new thing that we were going to try out, and I think people were excited, but people were also like, how on earth is this going to work for us? How are we going to get five days work done in four days?
So do you think there was trepidation from the team based on what you're saying there?
I think yeah, like if we are already we were a consultancy, and so absolutely there's times of the year when we have downs in terms of not as much work, and then there are other times the year when we are working really hard. And over the history of inventing, we've struggled to find that sweet spot where we can consistently ensure that people can get great work done and
not feel overwhelmed. And we've tried lots of different things around resourcing models and hiring new people and things like that, but it is a challenge that we keep coming back to. And so this to me felt like, whilst it would be great in the perfect world, I even thought, how are we going to make that work in the long run.
That's interesting.
I didn't know that you were a bit cynical about it, Shah, that's really interesting.
What do I call myself a cynic? You know? We you know, you and you, Amantha and Mish. It's great that Mish was able to bring that to the table and she was really excited about that, and that's really awesome. But I guess sometimes it's like, well, we're the ones that have to get out there and be managing our relationships to our clients and still making sales and doing
all these things to be affective employees. So there is that thing in the back of your mind of how am I going to make this work and still be able to perform?
Well, yeah, definitely, Okay, i'll rephrase that, I'll call you a realist rather than So with that in mind, we did as a team decide that we would give it a go. And with pretty much everything at Inventium, we always frame a new thing as an experiment so that we can measure it, track it, see how it goes. So the next thing was actually designing the logistics and the guidelines and the rules even around how this four
day week concept would work. Because while it sounds simple, oh, just to your work in four days, there are actually quite a lot of different decisions to make. So can you talk through what that process that we went through was in terms of designing what the four day week would look like for Inventium, yes, And.
So I kind of broke it down in my mind into two different objectives, and one of them was to think about the experiment and how we were going to run the trial and what we were going to measure
and the hypothesis to test. But the other side of this was really thinking about how are we going to make this work at Inventium and how are we going to bring this new work practice to life and essentially manage this change because we've seen this happen before where you bring in a new work practice, and because we are as humans are, you never know what's going to happen.
Sometimes there's negative outcomes that you don't expect, and so I was thinking, I really want to make sure that we are thinking ahead of you know, if this was to be a complete failure for us, what would that
look like. Obviously we want it to be a success, but if we could have some foresight and think in advance, what are those risks as well as those opportunities, how can we mitigate them now instead of getting ourselves into this situation of six months or a year from now where we've got people that are feeling maybe burnt out. Maybe they're feeling disconnected, maybe they're feeling like they're not
part of a team anymore. So what I decided to do was run with the team a pre mortem, and a pre mortem is something I learned about from at Lassian and that's basically where you kind of think in advance what could go wrong with this initiative and all of the things that could go wrong, work out those risks, and then essentially work backwards to try and think, Okay, how do we mitigate those risks? So I ran a
workshop with the team. I put half of the team into the success team, So what would this look like if it was an absolute success for us? And half of the team into a failure team, which is what would this look like if it was a complete failure for us? And we just basically worked through putting together a list of ideas around well, this is the potential risks and opportunities.
And I remember I was on the failure team, which I hated that you did that to me.
I did that deliberately.
I know you did, because I'm naturally very optimistic and enthusiastic about most things. And it was funny because there were so many things that we identified, like I want to say, fifteen or sixteen genuine things that could really go wrong and make this a huge failure. Do you remember some of those failures that we came up with.
Yes, So the risks of where it could go wrong were we were thinking, Okay, what if communication decreases because everyone's so focused on being individually productive, maybe we won't be willing to work together anymore. So obviously then that would loot lead to a reduction in collaboration, and collaboration is so important for us to help us to innovate and deliver great outcomes for our clients. There were risks
around things like divisions within the team. So part of our team is the digital team, and part of our team does a lot of client consulting, and so we were worried, what if the digital team can't make this work but the consulting team can make it work. Is that going to lead to divisions?
And obviously we identified a whole bunch of successes which are probably quite obvious to listeners.
I mean, what's not to love about a four day week? Really?
But what did we then do with those failures in this pre mortem process?
So we then voted on what we saw together collectively as a team, what we saw as the biggest risks and opportunities, because we came up with this full extensive list of risks and opportunities, but we needed to tone in and understand what we as a collective group thought
were the biggest risks and opportunities. So we voted and then once we'd landed on the top ones, which were things like that division between the teams, people taking this as something for granted and treating it as a right not a gift, or people saying well, I just can't get this done because I'm too busy, I've got too much of a workload. Once we'd identified that short list, we then used that to co create our guidelines for
the four day week. Now, what we do it in mentum is we try first to focus on intentions of the initiative rather than first getting to guidelines. So we want to understand, well, what is the intention behind this, why are we doing the four day week? What are our primary objective? Because then that helps us to come up with guidelines and make decisions throughout the journey that
aligned to those intentions. So then we basically got the team to sit down with all those risks and really think through, Okay, well, how do we mitigate this and for the opportunities, how do we make sure we take
advantage of those opportunities. So, for example, when it comes to people thinking well I can't make this work or I've got too much of a workload, we really talked about the fact that actually the onus is on each individual to make it work, and Inventum will support you, we will provide training and support on that, but it's up to you to change your habits. You need to
change the way you work to make this work. And we need to make sure that we're clear on how much work that we want to get done each week so that we're not feeling guilty if we do choose to take that fifth day off. So it was really just about having that open conversation and setting the right intentions for the four day.
Week and Inventum and what were some of the key decisions that we made.
So once we'd run that exercise with the team, I went away and through conversations with our general manager and Mish for example, I just had to make some decisions and say, well, this is the way that it's going to look. So First of all, we wanted to align on the primary objective of the four day week for Inventium.
So when Andrew Barnes talks about the four day week, he really talks a lot about the productivity gains, and that's because he's obviously having to play a really big role in convincing big corporates that are very much focused on the bottom line in terms of the benefit of
the four day week. But for us at invent Him, this was really about The primary objective was to reduce intention to leave at Inventuum, so to ensure that we could maintain our team of age given that we had a smaller team now, and to ultimately make people want to stay at Inventum longer, so give them a more engaging workplace, a more satisfying workplace, a place where they
could do really great work. Now, obviously we still needed to be able to make a profit and achieve our goals, but increasing individual productivity and getting people to produce greater output wasn't the primary objective. Do you agree with that amount one?
I do agree with that, and it's interesting because I think it was a big ass because our engagement scores were very high when we started the experiment, I think they were in the ninetieth percentile, which means they're in the top ten percent for our industry of management consulting. So it's not like we were starting from a low base.
And I think intention to leave it's not something that we'd measured before, but I think it's quite low just based on our average tenure when I last looked at it was three point seven years, which is pretty high in this day and age. And yeah, absolutely there's the human experience of things. But if that was all going brilliantly but we were unprofitable, then obviously there would be
a problem. So it was maintaining all our company goals and certainly the financial ones as well and customer satisfaction, but also seeing if we could increase from a very high base get it even higher in terms of that employee experience of working at inventing it.
And I think also like we were just really curious as well about could we improve our productivity because we'd already been on a journey for about two years where we'd done training internally as well as consulting work to help people improve their productivity, and so this was just another way to actually take a really curious approach to could we actually do more with less time? Which was exciting.
Yeah, it definitely was.
So coming back to those other decisions, we also had to decide, Okay, so the mechanics of this, is this going to be a day that everyone takes off so one day, or is it going to be you can choose whatever day you want to take off. So we decided that it was going to be one day for the entire team and we would do that for the trial of six months. And the reason we decided that
was that we're a small team. We wanted to make sure we still had those opportunities to connect via for example, internal meetings, and we also had to think about our clients and making sure that we weren't putting too much strain on resourcing, making sure that we could still deliver for our clients, and that would be a bit challenging if we had people constantly taking off different days and then what day and so At Inventium, our mondays are
generally where we run a few internal meetings, like our team meeting. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are what we call our delivery days, so we were working with clients and then Friday is a day when we don't do client work and we tend to do some of those additional internal meetings. So we decided that we would make it Friday, and that just seemed intuitive that people would want a long weekend, and that meant that we could still connect at the start of the week.
And I think in retrospect they were both really important and really good decisions, and particularly now we've been doing it for six months now a little bit longer, and that rhythm feels really good and it certainly hasn't had an impact on client satisfaction.
So I want to.
Get into measurement because, as we said, it was an experiment, and so as with all good experiments, you need good measures. So can you talk about what we decided that we would measure and how we went about doing that.
So based on that pre mortem and that identification of the risks and opportunities, we worked out our hypotheses to test. So a few of those hypotheses were, first of all, that employees can participate in the four day week, So we didn't want to just do this and then find out at the end, oh, no one even used it. Maybe, you know, maybe a month was just take Fridays off every week. Everyone else was still working. So a fundamental assumption was that people can participate, so we wanted to
measure that. We also wanted to measure intention to leave, so the hypothesis was that the four day week will reduce intention to leave. We measured things like all of these kind of people centric measures like productivity, so self reported productivity, energy levels, job satisfaction, engagement, stress control, and well being. So obviously we wanted all of those to improve. And then just some of those additional hypotheses around things like the four day week will not have a negative
impact on inventing achieving our company goals. So we were okay, if we maintained our company goals, it'd be great if we surpassed those goals, but we didn't want it to negatively impact our ability to achieve our goals and obviously remain profitable. And then we also wanted to make sure that it was not going to decrease team connectedness, collaboration and cohesiveness. And finally, we didn't want it to have
a negative impact on our ability to respond to clients. So, you know, one of those big assumptions was what happens if a client needs something urgently on Friday, So we wanted to measure this and ensure that we didn't get to the end of the trial and suddenly our clients are saying, oh, well, you never respond to me on Fridays. I don't want to work with you ever. Again, that didn't happen.
That didn't happen, and it wouldn't have been great if that did happen. Now we goodness, there are a lot of surveys that we did.
Can you talk about.
The like how frequently we measured those variables? And this is really getting down into the weeds, and there might be some listeners that are like, oh, come on, just get on with it. But I know that there'll be a lot of listeners that are thinking, how do I
actually implement this? So I think it's important that we get into that detail around what are the variables that we measured at the baseline, what are the things that we measured literally every week, like every Monday morning, the whole team would complete a very quick one minute survey. But just some of the choices that we made there and why we made those choices.
I will try to move quickly through it whilst providing the detail this was something you have to balance the ability to measure and capture good measures. And I really went into this warning to capture a lot of data because I was like, this is a great opportunity. We can gather so much data. I love running experiments on people, hence why I'm a psychologist, but I have to balance that with the people experience and not annoying people on the team. I'm sure I still did annoy the team, but.
Hopefully it will we got yoused to it.
I think those weekly surveys, yeah, every Monday. Ah N this survey again, but it was quick and easy, So it is finding that balance, I think, because like Yushah, I love getting data from surveys. I just don't like doing surveys and recognize that that is not a passion for most people.
So in that weekly survey, it was a very quick one. It asked if you participated in the four day week in the previous week. So it was sent Monday morning and it just asked did you take the day off? And we broke that down into did you take the full day off a half day or did you work just about two maybe two hours? And our definition of having the four day week was you took either the full day off or you worked less than two hours.
So then we also measured cohesiveness and collaboration, so we asked questions like were you able to reach out to people and your team for help last week? Did you receive help when you requested it? And then we also measured that client responsiveness, so we asked did you receive any urgent requests from clients on Friday or Thursday night? And if you did, how many of them were you
able to respond to? So there was this We did talk about this in the sense that even though you take the Friday off, it was expected that if you had a that called you needed something urgently, you would still help them out. You would still do what you need to do and get that work done if they have that urgent request. Luckily, we very rarely received those urgent requests on Friday, and whenever we did, people told us that they were able to get back to those clients.
So that was the weekly survey. Then throughout the six months, every two months we did another survey where we reported on self reported productivity, job satisfaction, engagement, energy level, stress control,
and intention to leave. And then we also have another survey that we already do an eventing that comes out monthly, and so I just pulled the data from that, so people were already answering these questions, and that asked about cohesion, so how much you felt a sense of togetherness with the team, as well as flexibility, because we were hoping to see that this wouldn't make people feel like they
were less flexible at work. We actually wanted to improve flexibility, but I thought, in the back of my mind, maybe this will make people feel more constrained. So I just also kept an eye on that measure.
And that survey for those that are interested, is from p con p Eakon, which is a global tech company that does engagement surveys that we use and is a really good one a small business, so I'll link to that in the show notes. So a lot of measures and we did set baseline measures on all of those things.
So what were the results? Yeah, what did the results tell us?
So in terms of participation, we were measuring that weekly, but then once I looked at it across from the baseline to the end of the six months, So participation on average across the entire team was about seventy percent and so remember when I say participation, that meant that people were either taking the full day off or they were working less than two hours on that Friday. So that was great, and our metric for success was fifty percent.
And does seventy percent mean that across the team on average, seventy percent of the team took the friday off. Is that what you mean by seventy percent.
It means across the team, across each week, on average, you were able to take the four day week seventy percent of the time. What we found, basically, at a high level, all of our hypotheses were validated except for one. Okay, so I'll leave that last one to the end. But essentially what we saw was a and this is comparing baseline to six months. We saw a twenty six percent
increase in productivity. We saw a twelve percent increase in job satisfaction, a nine percent increase in engagement, an eighteen percent reduction in stress, an eleven percent increase in a sense of control, and a twenty two percent increase in
well being. So those were all statistically significant. We did see a twenty one percent increase in energy levels, but that was non significant, and so what that means is that there was probably just too much variability and not even though it sounds a lot twenty one percent, there must have just been too much variability for that to
be statistically significant. Now, the one that was not validated was intention to leave, So we did have a nine percent reduction in intention to leave, so that is an improvement, but it wasn't statistically significant.
And it's probably worth pointing out that sample size of eight, so small sample size. It's always tricky when it comes to statistical significance and reading too much into that. I mean, it's pretty insane when you do get statistical significance in a small sample size, but it's probably not to be expected.
So I know, for me, I was.
Just hoping that the numbers were trending in the right direction, which is about as much as you can expect from
a sample of eight. And then the other thing that we also looked at our company goals, and financially, we met our company goals two months early for the first half of this financial year that we're in, which is insane and I think from memory, this is the first time that we've actually met every single one of our company goals, which are around customer or client satisfaction and also around employee experience for the first half of the
financial year. I think this is the first time that we've met all of them.
Yeah, it was amazing, and I guess you put that into context of the year that we had last year, and it was obviously a really tough year, and so the scientist in me is kind of like, you know, you would love to do this in a controlled environment where you don't have a global pandemic happening in the background, and to have, like you said, a larger sample size so that you could, you know, if I was to do this again, I would love to have a huge number of people and to be doing this without the
global pandemic hanging over us, because it would be really amazing to see the results that we could have with that as well.
It would be yes.
And it's interesting because we started the experiment just before the second Wave happened in Melbourne and we all I think in August it was or late July or went into stage four lockdown. So that was kind of interesting to have that going on in the background because a lot of our team are based in Melbourne. So yeah, I mean, the results were fantastic and it was really an easy decision to go, well, of course we will keep this going.
So I want to move on.
Now to hearing about what it was like for you, Shat and what your experience was. So to start with personally, what did you change about how you worked to fit everything into four I'm assuming normal length work days.
I definitely didn't increase the amount of time I was working on the other four days. If I kind of reflect back over that six months, I generally work kind of like eight till five, and that didn't change. But what I was thinking when I first when we first started this was how can I be sure that I can take that Friday off each week? I was worried about what if I get to the end of the six months and I haven't achieved my goals, and now
the team doesn't achieve our company goals. And how do I actually know that I can take the Friday off and not feel guilty? How do I know that I'm doing enough work? And so what I did is I broke down my six monthly goals, so we use the okay our framework, and I broke that down into quarterly, monthly, and weekly activities. So I really wanted to be prescriptive of okay at this point, so by the end of July,
I should have achieved this for this specific goal. Now, obviously they weren't hard rules, but it was allowing me to have that guidance of you know, if you've got this sales target for six months, here's what it should look like generally throughout that six months. And that really helped me to know that I was tracking well enough to take that Friday off. The other thing I did was at the end of each week, so on the Thursday afternoon, I would write down my deep work tasks
for the following week. So deep work, maybe I'll get you to explain it, Amantha. I mean, I'm sure your listeners know what it is because you talk about it a lot.
I do. I do talk about it a lot on the podcast. So deep work, for those that are not familiar, term from Professor Callan Newport from Georgetown University, and deep work is work that really requires a great amount of focus and attention and a lack of interruption. So it's kind of like the heavy duty brain power work.
So I would get to Thursday afternoon to reflect on Okay, can I take tomorrow off and then with that in mind in terms of where I need to be tracking for this six months, do I need to achieve next week? In that deep work chunk of time that I do every morning and throughout the six months. At one point when I was a little bit behind on my sales target, I also started working out, you know what I need
to do in terms of business development next week. Beyond that, we'd already done a lot of training around productivity, but there were things that I just added in. And that's after we got you to run a little bit of additional training with the team in terms of his I think you gave people like twelve tips of things that you can change to help you to succeed in this
four day week. So I started time boxing emails, so instead of just sitting with my inbox constantly open, I set three points throughout the day when I would check my emails. I wasn't as disciplined with that as I need to be, and so I've just started using inboxmen Ready, which is a software I plug in in Gmail which just locks you out of your inbox. To make me a little bit more disciplined about that, and just really using my calendar to make appointments with myself and really
being disciplined about deep work. You know, bad habits creep in and you are obviously a very productive person, Amantha, But I feel like I'm still I'm not at that level of like being automated around not getting distracted. Like for example, right now, I am looking to buy a property and I feel like using those apps with the domain and real estate, it's now that is fighting from
my attention and distracting me. So I constantly need to be coming back to what am I trying to achieve and removing those bad habits.
I must say my bad habit last year became checking the news, I think because I was based in Melbourne and the environment here was at some points of the year changing on a daily basis, and so that was definitely my bad habit that I needed to kick from last year.
So I can understand that.
How about for your client's Shah, because you are a consultant in what you do and your client facing what was the reaction from clients who knew that you were off every Friday?
So we had this team auto Responder which you could put on your email every Friday, so that if people did email you, they knew not to expect a response. But with my clients that I have those longer term relationships with, I told them that I would be taking Fridays off and most of them were like, you know, they know what invent Him's like, and they're like, oh, good for you, and that's really cool and let us
know how that goes. And for those clients that I was forming new relationships with, I might just not mention it. And I was happy to check my emails in the morning on Friday and let people know I'll get back to you on Monday. And I don't think I even
remember anyone kicking up of us. I think it's about the relationship that you build with clients and building that trust and they know that we do always deliver and there's not an exception here just because it's where we're trying out a new thing and invent him.
Yeah, I found the same.
I'm I think I'm less client facing than you because of some of the other things I'd do in my role, but I'd be speaking to clients every day, and I think for me.
The response was a very positive one.
Like I would quite frequently have conversations with clients or prospects who were like, oh, I love what you're doing. I sent your out of office email around to my team because it was so interesting this experiment. So I
think I only heard a positive response. And in terms of urgent things, I mean, let's face it, we're not cardiac surgents, so we don't really have emergencies or urgent things, Like the most urgent thing that would happen in my life is a client or a speaker's bureau urgently in inverted commas, needing to know if I was available on
a certain date for a keynote talk. And for me, while I was able to take a lot of Fridays off, I would typically do an hour or two worth of work in the morning, which was generally just playing a little bit of catch up on something. But also it meant that during the work week, during those four days, I was less stressed if I didn't quite get to finish a few things, if I had a few loose
ends to tie up. But yeah, I found that having that buffer time of just an hour or two on Friday morning really useful, and certainly for the clients that I was liaising with. I don't think I had any negative feedback at all around the fact that we don't really work Fridays.
And to be honest, I definitely didn't take it every week, and it just really followed already how I was working previously in terms of consulting, where you have busy weeks and then you have more quiet weeks, and so there would be months where I would work probably like five hours every Friday, but then there'd been a whole nother
month where I could take every Friday off. So it changed your mindset in terms of, like you said, just having that spare day up your sleeve, so that if you don't get to those things you can get to on the Friday, and then the weeks that you can take it off, then that's great.
So shout what you do with yourself on these Fridays.
Well, the first one, I went to visit my sister and my brother in law and my two nieces. So I drove on the Thursday night. My sister lives about five hours away from me, so just knowing that I had that long weekend with them. I remember the first morning we got up and we went out and we were moving the sheep from one paddock to another, and I'm sitting on the four wheel or with my three year old niece, and I was like, because of inmentium and the four day week, I can sit here and
be part of this, which is important to me. Beyond that, I think I was about a month in and I was like, you know what, I don't want to waste this time. If something happens and we don't get to do this anymore, I need to know that I've used this time valuably. And so I decided to start training to become a bar instructor, which you know is just a bit different to what I do day to day, which I liked.
So shout what is barr?
Like like, I'm imagining that some listeners are thinking of alcohol, but that is not what you're talking about.
So what is bar?
I did tell a friend that I had started a bar instructor course and he thought that I meant working at a bar.
Yeah, but it is.
You might have heard Scott Morrison talk about it as barre, and it is a combination of ballet, yoga and pilates.
So are you qualified now?
Shah No, I'm still going. I've got a few more months and I'm doing all my teaching now I've done all of the learning, but I'm still working through it. So you get it takes like a six month process, so I'm like four months in I think, so yeah, I'm really enjoying it. I love that I get to use a different part of my brain and I've always been really passionate about the body and exercise and wellness and I'm really enjoying it. And it's just a new way to connect with a new community as well.
That's so cool.
I remember in Melbourne a few years ago I did bar class pretty religious, like three or four times a week for about a year.
And it was so fun.
So you're going to have to run like virtual by classes for the team show. I can't believe we haven't had this discussion yet.
Yes, I will, I will. I will absolutely do that, and so yeah, outside from the bar and they're just great. Like spending time with family and doing a little bit of extra work sometimes on Fridays, I think what I really loved is also just having that headspace to read
as well. So I read a lot of business books and psychology books and it's something I enjoy, but it is also for work, and so knowing that I have that time on Friday to read those sorts of books, and then on the weekend I can read my fictional fun books because I really love reading, but it's hard to find that time to read. So I really loved having that free space to do that on Fridays.
And I know that because you're an organizational psychologist and you've got a lot of org psych friends, I know that you've had a few people question the idea of the four day week, and I'd love to get into that, like what are some of the critics saying to you or the skeptics saying to you, and maybe we can address some of those things.
Yes, And I'm also interested in your viewpoint as well. So the critics that I've heard would say, well, you must just be working less, like you're literally just taking that extra day off and working less. And I think that really comes back to this idea that it is difficult when you are a knowledge worker to really see the output of your work in the day to day. It's not like we're in factories where you can just see, okay,
I've made fifty widgets today or something like that. It's a little bit harder to see the outcomes of our performance in a short term kind of basis.
I find that an interesting one.
I think that for me, knowing that the week is four days and not five, my mindset is different. I feel like in a five day week, even though I feel like I a more productive than the average bear, I'm still not one hundred percent productive one hundred percent
of the time. Absolutely not. But I felt like the move to the four day week just brought a new level of discipline to my work days where I would be much more conscious about how I use my time, and really with the reward being that I get to free myself up on Friday to do all sorts of things that I might not have previously had time to do. So yeah, it's hard to quantify, but I think you
have a sense of it. And also, ultimately, if you're meeting your own OKRs, then and I like how you talked about breaking yours down to quarterly and monthly and weekly, then you are on track and you are achieving that output. I just think that question comes from the assumption that people are productive one hundred percent of the time, and I just think that that's absolutely rubbish.
And I think also the mistake is thinking that the four day week is just about dropping that fifth day, which it's not. It requires a change in your behavior to get what was done on that fifth day done in the other four days. And so this actually means
becoming more productive. So really consciously think about removing unnecessary meetings, doing more of that deep focused work so you can actually have better outcomes, and putting some more discipline around not getting distracted by chat and social media and things like that. And so that's what facilitates the four day
week being possible. And so this concern of well, you're just working less, I think that that's a view of Well, there's people that might just take the piss out of it and just literally work the four days, but then you would probably see a twenty percent reduction in their achievement of their goals, in which case, if you have some structures in place to manage people's goals and manage people's performance, then you would need to deal with that.
But you know, once you make these changes, you become more productive so that you can take that fifth day off, and it drives this sense of motivation so that you're saying to yourself every day, all right, I could take an extra long lunch. Lunch break right now, or I could allow myself to get into a social media hole. But then you're saying yourself, well, if I do that,
then I probably can't take Friday off. So I'm not going to let myself get distracted, and I am going to change how I work to enable me to have that gift of the time.
Yeah, couldn't agree more.
Now, I know that another skeptic that you spoke to thought, well, how does that appear from a client's point of view? Because don't clients want to see that you're one hundred percent committed to work? And how can you possibly be one hundred percent committed to the job if you're taking Fridays off?
What do you think about that?
Well, lots of research shows that working around the clock leads to burn out. And when you're burnt out so stressed, tired, not feeling engaged, that doesn't lead to high quality work. And so what does lead to that high quality work is the reduction of distractions, having employees who are happier, less stressed, more engaged. And these are all the things
that we measured. So if we look at that, then it's actually saying, well, our clients pay us because we're intelligent people who put together solutions to help them solve really challenging problems. Like you know, I'm one hundred and fifty year old company, and I want to be more innovative. How do I get my workforce of a thousand people to question the status quo, come up with new ideas,
and implement really game changing ideas. So these are really challenging problems, and so it requires us to think really deeply about things and be able to deliver this high quality of output, which is not something you can do when you are burnt out.
Definitely, I feel like it's a really old school view to go, oh, well, clearly you're not as dedicated to the job if you're taking fridays off.
I just think you want to.
Work with people who are energized by what they do and passionate about what they do and not tired and stressed. And also you don't want to work with people that have nothing else in their life other than their work. I feel like you want to work with people, and I'm assuming our clients want to work with people who are well rounded, and I think that that's one of the things that makes all of us in the team
really great At what we do. Because we do all have quite broad interests, we are exposed to all sorts of things in our lives, not just our work.
And I think.
Because of the various ways that we've tried flexibility and now with this four day week, if you're dealing with inventium, you're probably dealing with someone who's pretty happy and pretty energized by work and you know, also life in general.
Is that fair to say? Do you think so?
Yes? I think that's fair to say. And I think that this other criticism might be that being more productive actually goes along with more working more days. Like if you think about someone who works only three days a week versus someone that's fully immersed in their work maybe six or seven days a week, then they're going to be really really productive. But it's not necessarily about working
more days. I think that getting really productive work done actually comes from being really immersed and fully focused on something, and that being the causal effect of productivity. So people might assume that if you're only working three days a week, you're not fully immersed and focused. It's not about the hours, it's about the habits that you have in that time that you're working to enable you to be more productive.
So whilst you might be you know a lawyer that works really hard five days a week, it's really I think about not confound the time that they're putting in with actually the habits that they have that enable that really productive output.
Couldn't agree more. Now, Shah, I want to say thank you for sharing your views on the four day week, and also thank you for really leading the process at Inventium.
I think it's been.
Such a good, solid process in terms of how we involve the team, how we measured things, how you kept us on track with everything, and now the ultimate outcome that we all get to enjoy a four day week for the foreseeable future. So thank you for your time, Sharon. Thank you for leading this initiative at Inventium.
My pleasure and I hope that more people take it on and it's just an exciting thing to be part of. And I hope that someone listens to this and takes this to their boss and maybe they can get a little bit of an experiment going.
Yeah, that would be bloody awesome. So that is it for it today's episode. I hope you enjoyed my chat with Shah and maybe it's got you thinking about how could you implement a four day working week where you work, or maybe how could you suggest it to your boss or the powers that be in your organization. And if you're keen to know even more, I'll be interviewing Michelle la Poidevin, who is Inventium CEO next week on how I work to understand how from a leader's point of view,
do you actually lead a four day week? How as the CEO does mish fit five days worth of work into four, and we both will be talking about how we have managed to increase our productivity, which I think was pretty high to begin with, and condense our week into just four normal days.
So that's it for today.
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