The concept of a 9-5 makes perfect sense. You come in ready to work at 9, take an hour for lunch, and leave the office at the end of the day. You do that five days a week – Monday to Friday, specifically. You’re compensated for the time you took out of your life to be at work with your salary and any benefits agreed on when you were hired. Simple, right?

Except – as becomes increasingly clear to anyone working in HR for a certain amount of time – nothing is ever that simple.

“Brian has a deadline looming and the project’s not done.” Easy, we’ll pay overtime.

“But Mary finished her project on time, is she supposed to be paid less for Brian’s inefficiency?” Hmm.

“Rami finished all his work by 3pm so he’s just been sitting and staring at the wall for the last two hours.” That doesn’t seem right.

The root issue in these conversations boils down to this: time spent is not the same as work done. We certainly don’t need to tell you that just because someone’s sat at their desk, it doesn’t mean they’re working. Conversely, however, just because someone has to leave a little early, doesn’t mean they’re working any less.

Of course, we’re not recommending you operate your office like a 24-hour gym where people can wander in and out as they please (unless, of course, you work at a 24-hour gym). But, there is a case to be made for shifting our attention from hours worked to, well, our work.

What a Flexible Schedule Can Mean

If you have an exceptionally good memory, you may remember that we spoke briefly about this two years ago. But, we’ll explore the idea more thoroughly now.

Moving away from a rigid structure doesn’t mean throwing it away entirely. We’re not saying people should have the freedom to log in at 11 and clock off at noon after replying to a couple of emails. What we’re advising you to acknowledge is that people’s peak productivity times and their relative workloads on any given day are different. Your business will likely be better off adapting to that than trying to force everyone into the same box.

Flexi-Time

The first thing to think about are those peak times. Some of us are early birds, others are night owls, while the rest are afternoon… pigeons. A great option for flexible work hours is to be able to shift the work day forwards or backwards to be built around the time a person feels the most focused and motivated. That might mean starting a little later because they’ll get more done in the late afternoon than the early morning, or rocking into the office before sunrise because they know they’re useless after lunch.

It's also great for employees with other life commitments – chiefly parents. They can take an hour out of the day to do the school run and get the kids some food, then make up the time later once the little troublemakers are asleep.

The second thing to consider is that, sometimes, a person simply does not have eight hours of work to do in a day. Of course, we’ve all heard (or said) it: There’s always work to do. And, yes, you can always do a bit of figurative sweeping to fill time, but there’s the rub: you’re just filling time. Lots of cool, modern companies (read: start-ups) are now implementing policies along the lines of “I don’t care when you work, as long as the work is done.” It’s a bit of an oversimplification and it requires a heavy dose of trust – trust that must be earned first, of course – but a policy like this communicates a gigantic level of respect to your employees. It gives them the autonomy and responsibility to shape their own schedule, as long as they keep fulfilling their role to an acceptable standard.

This is not to mention that, once they recognise finishing their work quickly is often rewarded with more work, employees tend to stretch their tasks to fill the day. It’s known as Parkinson’s Law.

Core Hours

A great anchor for both the points mentioned above is to implement core hours. This means establishing a period of time in the middle of the day in which everyone must be at their desks. You can then customise from there as to what else you require. For example, you might say that everyone must be at work from 10:30-15:30. Junior employees are then mandated to make up three additional hours either side, while senior employees are granted the right to plan their own days outside the core hours.

Implementing core hours will help you stand out massively in your job ads. The practice fell from 2023 to 2024, going from 33% of job ads mentioning core hours to just 8%.

Currently, only around 13.1% of employees have some kind of Flexi-Time arrangement. This comes despite a 2023 report from the International Labor Organisation found that these arrangements have a whole range of benefits for employees, ranging from higher job satisfaction to a reduction in family conflicts. This marked improvement in wellbeing directly affects general productivity, proving a huge boon to businesses, too.

The Four-Day Work Week

Yes, again, this is something we’ve spoken about before. Things have changed a lot, however, since we first brought it up in August 2022. At that time, the UK’s largest trial of the four-day work week had just gotten underway. So, what were the results?

Overview

A UK trial of the four-day work week took place from June to December 2022. It involved 61 companies and over 2,900 employees, spanning a wide range of industries and company sizes and structures. The trial began with a round of workshops and seminars from experts helping businesses to shape their policies before jumping right in. It’s important to note that the tested policy wasn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. The only requirements for the trial were that pay remained at 100% while employees experienced a meaningful reduction in work hours.

Types of Policy

The version of a four-day work week everyone first thinks of is simple: everyone gets Fridays off, and keeps their pay. While some companies did implement this, there were other options:

• Fifth day stoppage: The whole company gets the same day off. “The office is closed on Fridays.”
• Staggered: Staff take different days off, making an effort to balance their absence. “Half the Sales team are off on Mondays while the other half are off on Fridays, so there are always some salespeople in.”
• Decentralised: Departments/teams have different working patterns. “Marketing don’t come in on Tuesdays while Finance don’t come in on Fridays.”
• Annualised: Staff work an average of 32 hours a week, extended over a year. “In our busy period we do 5 days a week, and when it’s quieter we do 3 days.”
• Conditional: Access to a four-day week is dependent on performance. “If you don’t hit your KPIs, you have to come in five days a week until you’re back on track.”

The Results

The trial was a resounding success – surprisingly so, in fact. Of the 61 companies that took part, 56 chose to extend their four-day policies while 18 quickly confirmed they were making the change permanent. Not only did employees report lower stress and burnout levels and better work/life balance, on average revenue actually increased by 1.4%, weighted by company size. Least surprising, of course, was the reduction in employee turnover, which fell a staggering 57%, with 15% of employees claiming no amount of money could convince them to move back to a business with a five-day model.

It's a Huge Change (but it doesn’t have to be)

Even when presented with the positive evidence, it’s tough to make a commitment and lop off 20% of your working week. Well, what if we said you don’t have to do it all at once?

The idea of the four-day work week, really, is to recognise that we don’t have to spend so much of our time at work. It’s about reducing those hours to allow for a bit more balance. There are plenty of ways you can dip a toe into the idea and monitor the effects little by little.

• Early-Finish Fridays: Who’s really doing their best work on a Friday afternoon anyway? Why not close up shop at 15:30 and let people get an early start on their weekend?
• 9-Day Fortnight: A four-day work week, but only every other week. You could go even further and just call it the last Friday of every month – that way it’s always something to look forward to when pay day approaches!
• Summer Hours: During the months of June-August, the workday starts half an hour later and finishes half an hour earlier. It lets people take a bit more advantage of the sunshine (of course, if winter is your quieter period, you could always do it then!)
• 40 Custom Hours: People still have to work their 40-hour work week, but they have more control over when those hours are. Someone might choose to work four 10-hour days so they can get a whole day off, or shift a couple of hours around so they get a lie in a couple times a week.

Any of the above options are infinitely customisable; you have so many options in front of you that can be stretched and shifted as you get feedback from your team and data from your experiments. If it works, you can reduce hours even more. If it doesn’t, you can pull things back.

Conclusion

Flexibility in the way we work has slowly shifted from a nice-to-have, to a dealbreaker. As of writing, an article in the Times published last week reported about 80,000 Scots have left jobs since January 2024 due to their employers denying them flexibility in the form of back-to-office mandates and stricter schedules.

Yes, it’s about work-life balance and yes, it’s about trust. But at its core, it’s about identity. Allowing some flexibility shows your employees you acknowledge and respect them as individuals. People are upset when flexibility is taken away as it makes them feel they’re being treated as revenue machines instead of humans. They feel they’re being told that, no, they can’t be trusted to know how they work best, the same solution will work for everyone, because that’s the way it’s always been done.

It's a similar argument for reducing working hours. We live in a far more individualistic society than we did when the 40-hour work week was invented. People are beginning to decide that the ratio of time spent working for someone else versus the time spent being by and for themselves is simply too imbalanced. Giving your employees a bit more freedom lets them know you value their lives outside the office, not just the time they spend at their desk.

When employees feel respected, they stick around. When they feel valued, they bring that value back tenfold.

P.S. Another way to offer your employees a little more freedom is with Unlimited PTO. We’ve all heard the odd company shout about it, and it always sounds slightly insane. So take a look at the article we wrote about it last year to see if there’s a chance it could make sense for your business after all.