Alright for some...

And so another bank holiday comes around - the second of three this month - which means yet another four-day week for those who nominally work 9 to 5, to use a patently anachronistic term. For some, however, today means the start of a three-day week. No, we haven’t suddenly returned to the industrial chaos of the 1970s, but the progressive shortening of the working week - for some - and intended to make life sweeter for those who benefit from a bit more free time. Alright for some, then, and of no benefit to those who earn by the hour...

In many workplaces, a relaxation of the five-day grindstone has been happening in one form or another for a number of years. When I moved to Amsterdam in 1999 the company I joined had established a ‘Dress Down Friday’, which basically meant male Dutch executives exchanged their dull grey suits and ties for button-down Oxford shirts and those ridiculous red (or orange) spongebag trousers popular amongst Faragists. From one perspective it marked a truncation of the working week, but the reality was that in many other parts of industry, it had always been common for men - and it was always men - to slip off to an 18-hole meeting room for an afternoon of essential “networking”, while those of us non-golfist drones from Sector 7G carried on the toil.

To some extent, and in some professions, the idea of a working ‘week’ has long been amorphous. In all the years I’ve worked in corporate communications, mobile phones and e-mail have meant 24/7 connectivity. News and crises rarely respect the conventions of a weekend. The creep of working from home - a digitally-enabled capability available long before Covid came along - has, though, changed the patterns of working days previously dictated to my office hours and commuting. 

When we emerged from lockdowns we started to witness the emergence of the ‘TWAT’ - people who only went into the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. This resulted in pubs and bars near offices thronging on the third of those three days, in the way that Friday nights used to be. But not for all. Even with the World Health Organisation last week declaring the Covid “global health emergency” officially over, 44% of the UK’s workforce is still classed as WFH for all or part of the time, according to the Office for National Statistics. 

The move from office desk to kitchen table has been a boon for many, liberating them from the relentless slog, frustrations and expense of commuting. A godsend, in particular, for family life, especially those with childcare responsibilities. However, it has also been a boon for the leisure sector. Golf courses have seen a notable increase in weekday afternoon usage. A Stanford University study in the US last August found that, with the use of mobile phone geolocation data near 3,400 golf courses, there were almost 300% more people at 4pm on a Wednesday afternoon than three years before. Data in this country has also suggested a more leisurely approach to working hours: contactless payments company SumUp reported that midweek spending on hair and beauty treatments grew last year by 5% - and notably 10% higher in Liverpool, for reasons not explained. Gyms have also reported being busier during the middle of the day, rather than at the traditional peak times of early evenings and weekends.

So does this suggest The Great Shirk at work?  Not necessarily. There is no doubt that companies are taking a more relaxed approach to working hours - something that was impossible to police, realistically, during lockdown (despite dystopian talk of firms installing keystroke-tracking software on corporate laptops to see monitor home working productivity).

As, currently, a man of enforced leisure, thanks to being made redundant at the end of March, it’s been noticeable in many of the discussions I’ve had with potential employers that the topic of work-life-balance is high on their list of selling points. At my last company I was contracted to work between 8.30am and 5.30pm Monday to Thursday, with an hour off on Friday afternoons, but such was the nature of what I did that I rarely worked those hours - sometimes less, sometimes considerably more. I had a boss who took the progressive view that the most important thing was for the work to get done, and done to everyone’s satisfaction. When you’re responsible for the reputation of a Eur 44 billion company, you can’t afford to be slack. But there was an acknowledgement that we weren’t in a workhouse.

Picture: Microsoft

If anything, working without being conditioned by ‘office hours’ has made people more efficient in how they structure their working day. That, though, hasn’t stopped some companies becoming increasingly insistent on returning to in-office attendance, with chief executives like Amazon’s Andy Jassy stating that in-person working enhances engagement. Others, like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, have complained that performance and productivity has not been the same since before the pandemic due to WFH.

Some have taken drastic action: insurance giant Aviva’s CEO Amanda Blanc has made getting staff back into the office part of her senior managers’ bonuses (a less pass-ag version of that Victorian pencil, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and his one-man crusade when Cabinet Office minister, leaving official notes on desks inscribed: “Sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon. With every good wish, Rt Hon Jacob Rees-Mogg MP”). Blanc’s approach may have worked - with most employees back in Aviva’s offices for at least part of the week.

Other businesses have taken a more incentivised approach. PwC has been luring staff back to the office with one-off £1,000 bonuses, while others have introduced Silicon Valley-style perks like free food and snacks. There is also evidence that more companies are urging a return to in-office working for at least part of the week to get collaboration and engagement going. Some bosses have even expressed the view that home working can harm career development. I can see that: I joined my last company at the start of the 2020 lockdown, and didn’t see the inside of the office until August 2021. It would not be until last year before people were returning in significant numbers, which meant that my internal network development was done through virtual means - e-mail and video calls, mainly, when they could be scheduled. 

It does, of course, depend on what industry you’re in. Bank CEOs have, in particular, been the most vocal about encouraging - or instructing - staff back into the offices (at Canary Wharf, the eastern annexe to the City of London, commuter traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels). In other sectors, however, WFH continues, albeit in many places as a “hybrid” model, a somewhat loose concept in which there’s no prescription as to when you come into the office. One company I recently interviewed with adopted a “flexible-hybrid working model” at the beginning of last year, applying what it said was lessons learned from remote working during the pandemic, while impressing upon its employees the need for collaboration through both co-location and remote working. “We’ve better understood the benefits that remote working can bring - improved work/life balance, less time spent commuting, greater inclusivity and involvement” for its people, its head of HR has said, calling out the benefit of giving staff more focused time free from distractions.

But with the pandemic well behind us, many companies are still trying to work out the best approach. It has meant a complete rethink of property portfolios, with corporates downsizing office space and moving to smaller headquarters, leveraging the cost efficiencies that come from discarding gargantuan corporate citadels. For many, though, its providing a more ‘optional’ approach to providing venues for collaboration when it is needed, and enabling solitude when that is best for concentration.

Picture: WeWork

However, some companies appear to be ripping up the rule books of the working week altogether. Another benefit of the pandemic, and the somewhat apocryphal ‘Great Resign’ (as people supposedly reassessed their lives), is that companies have had to rethink how they attract and retain talent. In the tech industry it was the offer of free snacks and lunches to keep engineers tied to their coding stations, and all those other Silicon Valley cliches of playrooms and ‘fun’ distractions to take the edge of the intensity of software development. 

The latest thing is the four-day week. With the summer approaching (as indicated by the relentless rain), employers are introducing significantly shorter Fridays, with some cancelling afternoon working altogether. “Pressure for a four-day week has been building and it’s resulting in companies looking at different ways of doing business,” Joe Ryle, director of the 4 Day Week Campaign, recently told The Times. ‘Summer hours’, he said, were being applied as a means of raising morale (probably essential with pay rises in short supply amid the cost of living crisis). “Seasonal hours give companies the opportunity to experiment with shorter working hours in a much smaller time period so workers can adjust and get used to it,” Ryle added.

According to The Times, L’Oréal allows staff to knock-off at 3pm on a Friday, with full half-days available at brands like Cadbury and Nike. It’s not new, though: Kellogg’s have been offering summer hours for 20 years, saying that they believe it allows staff to “recharge and unwind”, benefitting mental and physical wellbeing, as well as productivity and motivation.

Have we, then, become entitled since being given “permission” to work in our trackies from sofas, with no requirement to endure overcrowded, expensive trains, transport strikes and congested streets? Possibly, but there’s no denying that almost instantly Covid transformed the accepted norms of working (it would be horrendously arrogant to lump into that statement the key workers who went into their workplaces throughout lockdown or, simply because of the nature of their jobs, had no choice to work from home).

Certainly, the world of work has changed out of all recognition to that in which I started out in 37 years ago. WFH for me has been a convenience, but not my preference. I actually like getting out of the house for the day, and work infinitely better when in a traditional environment. During lockdowns I even experienced commute envy as my wife, a primary school teacher, was going out every day. Even if her commute only lasted 15 minutes, she was getting to see more than the hedge outside our front window that was my vista while I perched on the sofa doing Teams meetings. But I don’t share the more draconian views of WFH-sceptic CEOs.

That said, at this stage of my unemployment, I’d be happy to have any job, regardless of its mandated hours or where it is conducted. And if any employers are reading this, I’ve managed to make it to the midst of middle age without yet swinging a golf stick in anger. And have no intention of doing so, either.