Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's Blog, page 5

London law firms and the 4-day week

The Times of London has an article asking, “Will law firms embrace the four-day week?”

Of course, as I’ve written about previously, there are firms that have already embraced a 4-day week, like Kromann Reumert and Molt Wengel in Denmark. But by “law firms” the article really means London law firms, and in particular the Magic Circle— the biggest and most profitable of the city’s firms.

However, people are skeptical:

Tony Williams, director of Jomati, a legal profession consultancy, says that it would require “major changes” regarding earnings expectations, billing methods and working practices….

Suzanna Eames, chairwoman of the junior lawyers division of the Law Society, says that it could help address the “endemic problem with burnout” in the legal profession. But shortening the week, she says, would at present mean working longer hours in fewer days to reach the same target of billable hours. For the concept to work, she says, “there needs to be a wholesale reform of the billable hours charging model — which appears to be a long way off yet”.

It’s absolutely the case that billable hours is a gigantic cultural impediment to the 4-day week in the legal profession, and that it’s easier to imagine (I talk about other professional service firms doing this in my book SHORTER.) However, there are other factors that weigh in favor of a 4-day week even at firms that don’t first move to project-based billing.

The experience of Canadian firm YLaw is particularly illustrative. They implemented a 4-day week last year, and started measuring the results a month in. Let’s look in particular at billing and net profits.

Founder Leena Yousefi had been willing to take a 5% hit to billing, but instead, “lawyers billed an average of 13% more working 4 days a week versus 5 days a week,” because they were more focused and productive, motivated to make a 4-day week work, and better-rested after a 3-day weekend.

Second, “net profits grew by 12% working 4 days instead of 5 days a week! I was expecting profits to go down by 5% to 10% but the reverse happened.”

And of course, people were happier, better-rested, had more time for family, etc.

There’s another important source of gains for these firms: lower unwanted turnover. Of course, most law firms are built with the idea that even when times are good, some people are going to leave, and not everyone is going to make partner; but there’s a big difference between losing that associate who decides to go in-house, and a partner who’s your expert in EU regulations around the valuation of intellectual property and intangibles, who works closely with two of your biggest clients, and who would be really hard to replace.

Losing that person can mean pissed-off clients, a drop in your service level, and all the costs associated with having to hire one of the other 14 people in the universe who can do that work— not to mention the irrepressible loss of all the informal knowledge about the client and their issues.

So the benefits of higher retention are nontrivial for firms: it can mean fewer interruptions in service (and no loss of billable hours for the months when someone has left and hasn’t been replaced), better quality of service to clients, and lower costs associated with recruitment.

Edinburgh creative agency Lux adopts a 4-day week

Edinburgh creative agency Lux has mvoed permanently to a 4-day week. They’d run a trial period for two years, and “the agency reports that overall efficiency has increased by 24 per cent year-on-year resulting in a 30 per cent increase in profitability.”

I also noticed this quote from their HR consultant: “Lux is one of the businesses at the forefront of the four-day work week conversation taking place in the UK right now…. With trials of a four-day week set to launch across the world this year, Lux’s success shows businesses can expect to see increased productivity and profitability.”

Standard PR boilerplate, you might think, but it’s another example of how companies are talking differently about the 4-day week now than they did a couple years ago. Before the pandemic, it was still a novelty and not much in the press, and companies had to do a lot of work to explain why they were doing it, and why it hadn’t already killed their companies or driven away clients. Now, though, you can tout a 4-day week as proof that you’re taking “a progressive approach to ways of working,” and are on the leading edge of a movement.

“ After nearly two years, we’ve felt more confident than ever:” The 4-day week at Buffer

One of the objections I sometimes hear about the 4-day week is along the lines of, “Sure it sounds good at first, but aren’t the happiness and productivity gains just the Hawthorne Effect?” The short answer is, no. But it’s always good to see more evidence backing up this claim.

So it was good to see that Buffer has published a piece about how their 4-day week is going. In April 2020 Buffer announced that it would trial a 4-day. It made the shift permanent that June, so it’s now in year 2 of its 4-day week. Some of the highlights:

“91% of our team are happier and more productive working four days a week””Most of our team is only working four days a week”“84% of our team are able to get all of their work done in four days a week”On the other hand, they say, they’re continuing to work on “how connected we feel as a team when you have fewer hours in the workweek.” This a challenge that many companies that shift to a 4-day week are conscious of, and of course one that all companies have to face these days!

The Guysborough 4-day week two years on

In 2020, the Nova Scotia Municipality of the District of Guysborough introduced a 4-day workweek, which featured a combination of a shorter week and hybrid in-office and remote work (like what I proposed in my Atlantic article). Last week, Public Sector Executive published an article about how it’s going.

The most surprise thing is that there’s a lot of public support for it. In a recent survey,

“80-90% of the people who responded [were positive about the changes], which is very unusual in any form of government, in particular local government.“We thought when we would survey the public, they would see it as employees getting perks and they wouldn’t support it.“They’ve seen it in the big picture, what it means for young families, what it means for people that have day care, have kids and all that sort of stuff. So, we’re very surprised and happy to see the public response.”

My appearance on Cheddar TV

I talked with Cheddar TV about the mental health benefits of the 4-day week late last week. And yes, it was cold in my garage office, hence the turtleneck and down vest!

Talking about the 4-day week on “Where We Live”

This morning I was on Connecticut Public Radio’s “Where We Live” with Lucy Nalpathanchil, talking about the 4-day week and the future of work. Mike Melillo, founder and CEO of the Wanderlust Group, shared his story of how his company moved to a 4-day week in 2020, and how it’s benefitted them.

The pace of media appearances has quickened recently, partly on the back of the UK trial, and partly because organic interest in the 4-day week is going up, as people come to realize that the future of work has got to be different, and it could be better.

Flexibility should be a right, not a license

Last week I was talking to a journalist about the 4-day week, and we got on the subject of flexibility. Of course, flexible work is all the rage now, and lots of workers (and some politicians or policymakers) want to see it become a mandatory option for everyone.

I’ve had reservations about this, and I finally figured out why.

For one thing, there’s a great literature on the real-world downsides of flexible work policies. Getting control over your own schedule benefits men more than women. The “flexibility stigma” slows down women’s careers. Men and women are rewarded differently for using flexible programs (or crafting the appearance of overwork). A study of work-home interference found that flexible schedules raised “expectation that you’ll do a great job juggling family and work,” and that the person with the flexible schedule becomes the default parent who’s expected to pick up kids or fill the gaps when something unexpected happens. While flexibility has logistical benefits, routines are also really good for us. And of course, you can make various arguments about how flexible work creates additional labor for everyone: just keeping track of everyone’s schedules, figuring out how to properly route information, etc., becomes harder than it is when everyone is in the office on more predictable schedules.

This suggests to me that even in well-meaning companies, flexible work is hard to do right, and that alternatives like a 4-day week seem to do a better job of rebalancing the needs of people, families, and employers. (Though I should note that the study of work-home interference also noted that work-family interference increased when people shorted their working hours.) There’s no suspicion that the person leaving work the early afternoon is creating extra work for the rest of the team when everyone leaves work early: turning this into policy creates incentives for everyone to cooperate around the goal of having a shorter workweek, rather than competing around the goal of having a shorter workweek.

But in the course of this conversation I put my finger on something else that bothers me about our discussions of flexibility.

When we talk about flexibility, we talk about it as if every day can be a make-your-own-adventure. The problem is that flexibility becomes a resource that the rest of the world can use to solve its scheduling problems. Rather than being something that makes your life better, it becomes a buffer that the world can count on when schedules crash, when someone gets stuck in a meeting and can’t do carpool, or a client demands last-minute changes in a deliverable.

Flexibility sounds like it should good for you, but it’s really another way for your employers to offload work onto you. Flexibility is a lot like mobility. We imagined that carrying our offices around in our pockets would let us break work into multiple sessions that would fit our lives, but in today’s 24/7 always-on world, it’s instead ground work into a liquid that seeps into our entire day.

So what’s the solution?

I think we should think of flexibility as a right, not a daily practice.

“Flexible work” should be like freedom of movement, or the right to marry who we want: it’s an ability that we can exercise in order to design and live more satisfactory lives. But just as freedom of movement doesn’t translate into us moving into new houses every day, and the freedom to marry who we want is something we ideally exercise once, flexibility should not be a license for everyone else to behave like chaos monkeys, or something that you should be expected to use to compensate for your manager’s inability to make resilient plans or your client’s inability to make up their mind.

So yes, let’s go for flexibility. But let’s think about how to use it to make our lives better, rather than just… more flexible.

#4dayweekly: January 24 2022

A couple days late this time, my apologies!

The news on the 4-day week was dominated by the announcement of the UK 4-day week trial sponsored by 4 Day Week Global. The program itself was covered in The Times, The Times again, City AM, Huffington Post, and elsewhere. It also generated a whole bunch of  broader“Is the 4-day week an idea whose time has come?”-style articles in The Drum, The Org, The Business Desk,

New company announcements

Landmark London announced it would trial a 4-day week for its chefs.Two Yorkshire restaurants likewise are implementing 4-day weeks for staff.Flexioffices, an online marketplace for serviced offices, started writing about its 4-day week trial.Bristol digital design firm Pixelfish announced it would shift a 4.5-day workweek.Empire Digital Marketing began a trial on January 17th.Tunbridge Wells-based digital marketing and design agency Patch posted about implementing a 4.5 day workweek in May 2021.A small Utah software company Previ announced it’s just implemented a 4-day week.Eastern Daily Press wrote about Norwich companies working 4-day weeks. For some reason, Norwich has emerged as one of the hotspots for 4-day week activity.

Opinion pieces and other writing

The Indiana Chamber of Commerce wants you to know that the Hoosier State has companies doing 4-day weeks.The Wall Street Journal talked at length with Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow about the 4-day week.Business Insider profiled Mark Takano, the California congressman who’s pushing for a 32-hour workweek in the US.Financial Times columnist Pilitia Clark says we should “Get ready for the 4-day working week.”In The Guardian, Gene Marks argues that “It’s time for US small businesses to offer a 4-day workweek.”Finally, filed under “hey, they’re talking about my book,” Rupert Hawksley argued in The Independent that “We can no longer ignore the benefits of a four-day working week.” He writes: “Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, argues that a four-day week leads to “increased productivity and creativity; improved recruitment and retention; less burnout for founders and leaders; and more balanced and sustainable lives for workers”.

Flexioffices’ 4-day week

London office real estate company Flexioffices, a marketplace for serviced office space, recently began trialing a 4-day week, and has been writing about it.

The account has aplenty of detail about the challenges they faced, which I think is great: knowing how these things actually work, what kinds of speed bump people encounter, and how problems get solved, is essential for making the 4-day week seem like something that other companies can actually implement with confidence.

It’s also interesting because they are both a 4-day week and flexible company, and figuring out how to make that work is a challenge.

Despite its name, it’s also not a company with an awful lot of flexibility in terms of deadlines and client communication:

Flexioffices generates a lot of inbound enquiries [about 2000 a month]. Our job, to put simply, is to engage with the client, understand their needs, then assist them through a range of flexible space choices so that they can occupy an office which will help their people and business thrive….

Lots of leads means we needed enough people to handle them every day and to give people sufficient time to deal with the volume effectively. We also split the teams into ‘tiers’ responsible for different enquiry size bands. So, on any given day we would need to make sure that appropriate levels of experience were present to engage with the full range of possible customers.

We also saw scope to cover a broader range of hours whilst still reducing the total weekly hours and giving people flexibility with how to allocate them. Historically, we utilised ‘golden hours’ after 5.30pm to successfully reach out to clients, and many have always been in the office early to effectively manage admin etc.

So you can imagine how figuring out how to do this in four days, at the same levels of responsiveness and customer satisfaction, could be an issue.

The whole thing is well worth a read.

Yorkshire restaurants moving to a 4-day week for staff

Two restaurants in East Yorkshire, the Triton Inn in Brantingham and The Fox and Coney in South Cave, have announced that they’re moving to 4-day weeks for staff, while staying open seven days a week.

John Garton, the restaurants’ area manager, said: “Staff won’t see a cut in their pay – so they will still see the same salary working four days a week as they would have done five days.”

He added: “The decision wasn’t taken lightly, but hospitality is a busy sector and we’d much prefer having happy and engaged staff. If this means having the restaurants closed some days, we will.”

Even though both eateries are recruiting, Garton said the plan is still to have enough staff rotating so that the restaurants can open seven days a week, but still allow employees to only work four-day weeks. He added that employees would also have alternative weekends off.

This used to be something that only elite restaurants like Maaemo and Attica could do, but more and more, this is a practice that’s seeping down into nice restaurants: both the Triton and the Fox and Coney are the kinds of very nice pubs that I can’t resist stopping at, not Michelin-starred restaurants with international reputations that I can’t afford!