A listener production.
Hello, Katrina blowers and Tom Tilley here with you. And if you're relatively new to the Briefing first up, welcome and thank you for listening. We love having you with us, and we'd love to have you with us every day. So whether you're listening via Apple Podcasts or Spotify or another podcast app, if you could please hit subscribe and then you'll get the briefing in your feed every morning from 6 a.m. we give you a survey of the
latest news and then a deep dive interview. Now, Tom, imagine if you were starting your workweek today.
All right. So you're talking about this fabled four day work week. I hear so much about that never happens.
Well, for some people, it actually has happened. 26 organisations across Australasia have been trialling this and the results are in.
Right. So in this briefing today, we're going to hear how it's going in those companies that are giving it a try. You'll speak with the business in southern Queensland that's done it and apparently never looking back.
Truly we didn't realise how much time we were actually wasting in just those quick conversations in the hallway or not having an agenda for a meeting or even just turning up a couple of minutes late to a meeting. It's amazing how much your productivity goes down with those tiny little incidences.
Yeah, so they're absolutely loving it. And we're going to hear from the CEO of the four day workweek about how you can possibly bring it into your organization, too. But first, here are the headlines. It is Tuesday, the 20th of June.
So the bride and the groom at the center of the wedding bus tragedy have made their first public statement. Mitchell Gaffney and Madeline Edsel thanked the community for the outpouring of love and support since the crash that killed ten of their wedding guests. They've said that the primary focus at this time is processing the tragedy and supporting our family and friends. Just a devastating situation for that whole community and the people that lost family members and
also this couple, just unbelievable. The groom's parents have been posting on social media for action on seatbelts. So going a little bit beyond supporting their friends, making a point there as well.
Yeah, I know that often you sort of look at this stuff and you think, oh, you feel really helpless. But there is a way that you can pledge some support by way of funds. Donors are being directed to the Rotaries, Hunter Valley, New South Wales Bus Tragedy Fund. That's going to help out the families of the victims. We'll all officially now be voting in a referendum on the Indigenous voice to Parliament between 2 and 6 months from now after legislation on The Voice passed through the
Senate yesterday. Here's the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Linda Burney.
People in this country understand that things are not fair, things are unequal and the life outcomes for Aboriginal people are not correct. The voice is about helping us understand what the answers are.
Yeah, so the most likely dates range from October 14th to the end of November. Anthony Albanese is expected to announce exactly when the referendum will be held at the annual Garma Festival, and that is Australia's biggest Indigenous festival that's happening in the first week of August.
Yes, it's over a month till we find out the date and then several more months till we have the vote. I do, you know, look, I've put it out there before. I am a supporter of the voice. I will be voting yes. And the debate has has sort of gone on since January without that much new information being inserted in it. And you just see polling start to slowly support for the voice slowly fall away as the months
go on. So I am concerned that it potentially should be happening sooner unless there's a major change once that date is set and and the campaign really ramps up.
I think that's exactly what we're going to see. I mean, especially from the yes side of things, you know, we're going to see some advertising blitzes really begin hitting us in the next few weeks. You've got to remember that as well as having pretty big private war chests of funding on both sides, there's also public funding, so they've got to start using that.
And the window of opportunity is closing for tens of thousands of people to take legal action over the Defense Department's use of forever chemicals, also known as pay. So there was a big settlement approved in the court in New South Wales yesterday, a $22 million settlement for the Wreck Bay Community and they've been devastated by these past toxins on the New South Wales south coast where they are.
So there's 11 communities. Rick Bays, one of them who are launching class actions against the Defence Department for using these pollutants generally used in firefighting foams. And a lot of people weren't happy with this decision, though it sounds like a lot of money, $22 million. But they say it's nowhere near enough for the damage it's caused their community.
We have a major search and rescue operation underway off the east coast of Canada after a tourist submarine visiting the Titanic shipwreck went missing. Unfortunately, we don't know how many people were on board or exactly when it got lost. What we do know is that the craft usually carries four days worth of oxygen on board. It has the capability of carrying five people. The Titanic sank in 1912. It's located nearly four kilometres under the water. It's become
pretty popular for tourists to get in submarines. I mean, that sounds amazing, but not when things go wrong.
Oh yeah. Look, as someone who is a little bit prone to claustrophobia, that does.
Yes, sounds fun.
And 3800m down into the ocean like that is just a crazy depth. And if you thought it was a little bit cold this morning, well, you're right, particularly if you're on the whole eastern side of Australia, basically. So two cold fronts have come in two days and temperatures have dropped below freezing in parts of Tassie, Victoria Act and New South Wales. It's going to get particularly cold in Canberra down to minus five. Katrina in your old hometown.
Yeah, I remember chipping the ice off the windshield every morning in WA. You're not as cold, but you are going to cop some wet weather. A big rain band is going to soak you guys in WA every day until the weekend. I don't know what I'd prefer. Cold or.
Wet.
I'll take dry and cold any day. There's lots you can do. You can get out and exercising, including skiing, of course. So they were having a shocking early start to the season. The resorts couldn't even open. I think with the exception of Mount Buller. Certainly the New South Wales resorts couldn't open properly on opening weekend, but now they've had this massive dump and it looks like the middle of winter all of a sudden. So that's good news.
Amazing. All right, Tom, we'll leave you there. We are about to get the lowdown on the four day workweek. Three day weekends. It sounds amazing, but does it work? Well, the results are in from the first ever Australasian trial of a four day workweek. So 26 different organisations jumped on board last August. They've been doing it for six months and we're about to find out how it went. We're going to hear from the brains behind this concept
in just a second. We'll also get the gist of how you practically implement this with a whole bunch of different staff who want the same days off and how you reshuffle clients. Basically the nuts and bolts of it from a company who took part. But first, let's bring in Charlotte Lockhart, who's the managing director and founder of the Australasia Four Day Workweek. First up, why are you so passionate about the four day working week? And where did all of this begin for you?
I mean, why.
Not be passionate about working less? Look, Andrew Barnes, my partner, did a four day week in his business, perpetual Guardian, back in 2018. And it was a very big success, not only for our business, but we got a lot of media and attention from academics and companies and governments. And then of course, we had a pandemic. And then and through that, of course, we all changed our view around and expedited this whole idea of of changing the way that we work. And so we're we've ended up
with four day week. Global is really just this process of doing it in our own business, talking to other businesses and academics. And then in 2022, we started running pilot programs around the world, which the research that has been announced as part of.
Yes, let's talk about this research. So we've had six months of data in Australasia. 26 different organisations have jumped on board. How did it go?
So the interesting thing about the Australasian data is it's very similar to the data that we've seen in the UK, Ireland and North America. And interestingly we've got a pilot running in South Africa at the moment and we just launched one in Brazil. So it would be very we're quite interested to see whether the data remains the same.
But what it says is that it is entirely possible in our programmes we get people to focus in on productivity and so that you can look at how you can improve your business so that you can give people time off. This is not a case of just saying, Oh well, if you give people time off, your business will be better. That's possible. But you know, one also needs to be a lot more targeted about these things. Also, as we've driven through the process, we're no longer really
talking about a three day weekend. We're talking about how can you do some form of meaningful reduction in time. And so we have a number of businesses now more and more joining our pilots that actually look at 180 100 rule, which is 100% pay, 80% time, 100% productivity. And it might be that they stay open five days a week. But then, you know, people work shorter hours or what is increasingly becoming popular and is what is what Perpetual Guardian does is it's a fully flexible but
reduced work. And so therefore, people take the sort of time off that suits them, the business and their customers.
How is it that you can get 100% productivity out of people? How does this actually work?
So what we're saying is 100% of the productivity that you've already got and the reality is you've not got 100% productivity across your 37.5 or 40 hour week as things are now, because what happens in Parkinson's law says that work expands to the time that you make available to it, but also what happens in businesses that we actually have a lot of layering of things that don't necessarily add into the current requirement for productivity in a business, because
we get very much, you know, this is the way we've always done it sort of behaviour, particularly for businesses that have been around for a while in startups. What we see is people looking for what is best practice so that I can ensure that I'm not driving myself into an early grave and I'm not, you know, making
my people work ridiculous hours as well. When you look at your business and you go, wow, okay, so this is why we're really here and this is what our customers really want, then the majority of businesses find that they actually have wastage and that can be wastage and systems wastage and time wastage and all sorts of various things, or just running a production line in a different way.
What we encourage the differences that we get bosses to partner with their people and actually let their people run the programme rather than going, right, well, this is how we're going to save some time and money because when you do that, when you say to people, I want you to be more productive, when you're getting time and motion people and all that people hear is you want me to do more with less? And layoffs are on the way. And you don't trust me when you say
to people. Look, guys, we want you to be more productive because if we can improve productivity, you can go home. People go. Right. Let me think about that for a minute. I will come back with some good ideas. And that's the modern way we run the workforce now, isn't it? We don't dictate from the C-suite anymore, you know, quietly quitting great resignation and the kind of the post-pandemic workforce won't be dictated to. And that way. And why should they?
A business doesn't exist without its people and the people don't have a job without the leadership. So partner together. And we're seeing this more and more, particularly in Australia, where the unions now are getting on board with us who've got Bunnings, their union is driving this Oxfam, their union is driving it and it's actually understanding that the benefits that we get for our employees with them having better wellbeing means that they are better at work. So
that's been proven not just by our study. There are other studies that prove that wellbeing at work actually makes your business better, but also from a people perspective, we actually all deserve a better life. And so it's it's the delicious circle of happiness where people are happier at work, so then they're happier at home. So then they bring a happier person to work, then they're happier at home, and then they bring that out into society and then they're just healthier, too.
That was Charlotte Lockhart from the four day workweek. Let's find out now how you get this to actually come together on the ground with one of the Australian companies who's tried it. Wendy Green is from Momentum Mental Health, which is a company in Toowoomba in southern Queensland. Wendy begin for us by describing the working culture at your company. Before you began this trial, what did it look like?
Right. So momentum mental health in Toowoomba, Queensland. We are a small community mental health organisation. We rely on funds from the Government and also philanthropic fundraising to operate essentially. So our small team of 12 people were basically working our butts off. There's more need than what we can cover and I would say that we were experiencing the very familiar staff rotation. Yeah, retaining staff is tricky in our industry and people burn out on the average of
between sort of two and four years. You see quite a high rotation through the mental health system specifically. So we definitely were looking for better ways to reward our staff without necessarily having that beautiful slush fund of money to give everyone a pay rise. We wanted to reward this hard working team and also find a way to, yeah, retain them.
So you guys do a lot of coaching and you do a lot of client facing stuff. So you're, you're having to juggle other people's schedules as well as your own. How do you even go about managing workflows for implementing a four day workweek? That sounds really complicated.
You have amazing mentoring support through four day week global when you go into one of these trials. And so a key thing for us was we did three months of pre-work and we created our own rules of engagement. And yes, we are a forward facing organisation. Closing one day a week just is not an option for momentum. So we tried. One of the other models that Andrew Barnes talks about quite a lot, which is where people
do a smattering across the week. If you are a forward facing organisation, some of our staff chose to do shorter hours so they could do school pickups and then others of us chose a full day off. But they happened all the way across the week with one non-negotiable day that we were all on site because we needed to make sure that there was one day where all personnel were on site so we could do training and make sure that we connected with one another. That's a
really key finding out of our rules of engagement. People were concerned about losing some of that authentic relationship with one another, so we made that a priority in our planning.
So there must have been some hiccups along the way. What were some of the failings that you've learned from?
So the first thing was everyone put in their their optimum day that they'd like off. And of course, most people chose Monday or Friday. Everyone wants a three day weekend. Obviously, that that couldn't happen. And we figured out along the way which days were our heavier days with programs and just the trends of people coming in for support around mental health and wellbeing. It tended to be quite heavy on a Friday and so along the way we found
ourselves quite lean on a few Fridays. And so, yeah, there certainly was moments where we were like, Oh, this isn't working, this isn't working, having four people having their gift day on a Friday. So we adjusted and pivoted and then as an organization all kind of figured out that other days would work. And it's funny, we've got quite a large number of people opting for Tuesdays and Wednesdays now because they've just seen how it works. And
particularly with those of us who've got little kids. Often a midweek appointment is an easy thing to get. If you've got speech things and reading groups and all the plethora of things that that children require, a midweek appointment is an easier one to get. So we've found that quite a few of our crew have just naturally now fallen happily on a Tuesday, and they don't mind at all that one day on a Monday to get things sorted and then they have their Tuesday off and then
they power through the rest of their week. Another thing we also did was no meetings happen unless we have an agenda now, like we really worked on cutting the fat out of that watercooler chat that can go on for hours and we put in purposeful team lunches. So we make sure that that that impromptu catch up still happens.
But truly, we didn't realize how much time we were actually wasting and just those quick conversations in the hallway and not having an agenda for a meeting or even just turning up a couple of minutes late to a meeting. It's amazing how much your productivity goes down with those tiny little incidences. So it's been great for us. We extended our trial for another six months actually, just to
make sure we had a full year of data. Next month we'll be at our 12 month mark and with productivity up 20%, like there's no way we won't be recommending that we move forward with this permanently. So that's exciting.
That was Wendy Green from Momentum Mental Health. And there's going to be another Australasian trial which is kicking off in a few weeks time. They're recruiting right now. So if you're thinking this is something you'd like to tell your boss about, or maybe you are the boss and you want to give it a go, you can register right now over at four day week. Listener.