In June this year around 60 businesses across the UK will take part in a six-month experiment to see what happens when more than 3,000 staff are given an extra day off work, with no reduction in pay. For some, the five-day working week introduced by Henry Ford in 1926, which has since become the global norm, is about to become a four-day working week.
Some argue the experience of the pandemic will make firms more likely to adopt a four-day working week. But Bristol-based, RIBA award-winning practice Barefoot Architects made the change just before Covid struck.
“We went down to four days on January 1, 2020,” says the firm’s founder Sam Goss. “It was bad timing, but it stood us in good stead for what was to come,” he recalls. “We adapted surprisingly quickly and with fortunate ease.”
Goss and co-director Rob Hankey had been looking at ways to improve the work-life balance for the team for a number of years.
“We are a young practice,” Goss explains. Not only was Barefoot only founded six years ago, but its team is comparatively young, too. “Most are 40 or under. They have families.”
Goss had come across an analysis of Ford’s argument that fewer working hours meant a more productive workforce. “We wanted to find out if that could work for a business like ours.”
But there were also personal reasons. Before he set up Barefoot, he was working for Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios in Bath, the firm behind Ballymore’s Embassy Gardens in Nine Elms, SW8, and Three Chamberlain Square in Birmingham. “They were a good employer,” he says. They cared about their staff but there was a problem with the culture. “Architecture as a profession has a culture of extremely long hours,” he adds. He and his colleagues often worked late into the night and at weekends. “When you look at it clearly, that culture is exploitative, and it is inefficient.”
Creating a change
By his early 30s, Goss says he had become “pretty fatigued”.
The need for a change became clear late one night. “I was driving home and I thought: If ‘m not careful, I’m going to die. I am going to fall asleep and die while driving home.”
Goss left the firm and set up on his own, determined to cultivate a very different culture.
“It’s about the work-life balance. Working terrible hours for little remuneration just leads to unproductive staff who are desperate to leave,” he says. “You have to trust your people. When you trust people you empower them. And most of the time you will be rewarded for that.”
Barefoot is a fairly small firm, based in the South West. The majority of its work is residential, split between multi-unit schemes, community housing, eco-homes and individual projects.
“We have always had pretty strict working hours,” he says. When the firm was set up back in 2014, a 9 to 6 routine was quickly established and enforced, to stop work creeping into the night and spilling into weekends. And that has been retained, even though the firm has technically lost a day.
When Goss proposed moving to a four-day week, it was his intention that the pay would remain the same – 100% of the pay for 80% of the hours.
But talking to his team showed that a number were not comfortable with that. “We had a vote on pay structure,” he recalls. They still wanted the day off, but they wanted less money. “Some thought that paying the same amount for four days would put too much pressure on them to deliver more.” They saw the much-lauded “productivity dividend” as a potentially unachievable target.
After a few more chats, Goss settled on a compromise. The team would get 80% of the pay for 80% of the hours. The extra 20% would be treated as a performance-related bonus. If the firm met its targets that quarter, the cash would be dished out.
Read more: Will a four-day working week catch on?
So far it has paid the extra 20% in every quarter except one. “That was the summer of 2021,” he says, “the summer everybody went on holiday.” Turnover was massively affected, but not because his team wasn’t being productive. “It was simply because there wasn’t the work for us to be doing.”
When Goss shifted to a four-day week he expected issues. He expected pushback from contractors and concerns from clients. “But that simply wasn’t the case. Not a single client or contractor has had any concerns that we are shut on Friday. In fact, most of the contractors think it’s a brilliant idea. They are quite envious.”
Since adopting the four-day week, the team has grown by two people. One was attracted by the four-day week. The other was anxious about 20% of the salary being a bonus, so they opted to work five days a week instead. “They wanted the security, and we were happy to provide that,” Goss says, adding that he thinks they will go down to four days before long.
But they aren’t on their own on Fridays. While most of his team uses the extra day off to be with their families, unwind or brush up on new skills, Goss and Hankey use the time – at least half a day each week – for business development. “It is amazing how much we are able to get done when there aren’t all the other distractions in the office,” he says.
Perhaps, Goss acknowledges, the workaholic tendency is hard to shift. “My wife will attest to the fact that I don’t work four days a week,” he laughs. “It’s a bit of a bone of contention!”
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