This is the abridged (tidied up) transcript of Episode 80 on the Coffee and Contemplation podcast.
If you’d prefer to listen to the SoundBites (5 minutes) of the audio podcast, I’m sharing the link here for you to find that trailer and also the link to the full 43-minute audio episode on Spotify and my YouTube Podcast.
SOUNDBITES
FULL EPISODE
Susan Dunlop: Welcome to the Coffee and Contemplation podcast with Susan Dunlop. In today’s episode, I’m thrilled to welcome Debbie Bailey, consultant partner at Four Day Week – Global. Debbie is a transformational leader with over 25 years of experience in government, community development, and mental health, and she’s been instrumental in helping organisations shift the way we work for the better.
Passionate about mentoring and helping organisations implement practical changes to create better working environments, Debbie has also led the implementation of the four-day week at her previous organisation. We will dive into the impact of a four-day week on teams, businesses and leaders. I’m interested in exploring how the four-day week model is not just about reducing work hours, but also about cultivating a mindset shift for greater productivity, empowerment, and success.
Welcome, Debbie.
Debbie Bailey: Thank you, Susan. Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
Susan Dunlop: I’ve been waiting for you to come on for quite a while, because I’m very interested in this subject.
Debbie Bailey: Wonderful. Looking forward to sharing some stories.
Susan Dunlop: How did you first get involved in the 4 Day Week initiative, and what was the motivation behind it in your previous organisation?
Debbie Bailey: So look, I’ve always been fascinated and focused on change and transformational change, but also how do you maximise resources and assets? So I’ve worked a lot of my career in the not-for-profit, for-purpose sector: that’s where you’re trying to stretch the dollars as far as you possibly can and maximise those resources.
And at times, it’s really hard to maintain your staffing levels because you don’t have the funds where you can compete with the private enterprise or with government organisations. I was watching the four-day week initiative for quite some time before I implemented it in my last organisation.
I love anywhere that you can look at innovation or look at doing things differently, and I love a good experiment, so I waited until the timing was right and then put it forward to the organisation to see if we could test it and see if we could prove there are better ways of working.
In the mental health sector, as you can imagine, there are great challenges. Staff attraction and retention is hugely difficult. Trying to compete with the wages of the government or the hospitals, trying to reduce burnout or maintain reasonable levels of burnout within this sector is also a challenge. So, I read the reports and saw that the four-day week could help reduce burnout, increase productivity and help you with your staff attraction and retention. To me, it was an absolute no-brainer to give it a try and see if it could have a positive impact on a small not-for-profit.
Susan Dunlop: My work is about the creator mindset versus the drama mindset. So that, to me, is showing that your mind was there, focused on what the better outcome was going to be, rather than staying stuck in that cycle of the drama and all the things that were going wrong.
Debbie Bailey: For sure. And look, I think that comes from the leadership background and my role as a leader was to find the solutions to see if I could guide the organisation to a place of strength, to a better place and also find what other solutions or alternatives are out there. Absolutely, looking at that creator aspect fits really neatly with the way that I work, but also what needs to happen, I think, in the not-for-profit sector, we can get stuck in drama, but the reality is we’ve got to get ourselves out of that drama and move forward.
Susan Dunlop: Yeah, exactly. And did you feel that you could see the ripple effect of change was going to happen quickly or was it going to take some time?
Debbie Bailey: Look, because you’re working with people, I accepted that it would take some time. I know that the research shows that you could get change within six months. I was hopeful we’d get it faster than that, and the reality was we did. Within three months, we started to see some really significant improvements. Staff were talking about how much happier they were, how engaged they were with their work, and how much more productive they were and how many more clients they were able to see.
So there’s a lot of positives that came with that. And we were seeing that in the first few months of doing the experiment.
Susan Dunlop: Oh, fantastic.
Debbie Bailey: Yeah. Even though you’re working with people, and systems and processes, you can still see some great change in the early days.
Susan Dunlop: Okay. And what are some of the key factors that determine whether an organisation is ready for a four-day week trial? And also, we haven’t covered this yet: What is a four-day week exactly?
Debbie Bailey: Yeah, so that’s a great question. So let’s start with what is a four-day week because there are so many variations.
When we think about it, the name’s a bit of a misnomer. People say a four-day week, that means we have every Friday off, doesn’t it? But reality is, the four-day week that we’re talking about is any form of reduced working hours. What we work on is the basis that people maintain 100 percent of their current pay.
If they’re full-time, they keep 100 per cent of their full-time pay. We’re talking about a reduction of hours, so it might be 80 percent or 90 percent on the basis that they maintain 100 percent productivity or their current outputs. It might mean it’s a four-and-a-half-day week where you have half a day off on Friday or half a day off on Monday morning. It might be a nine-day fortnight.
The key with this, though, is it’s not compressed hours. So it’s not the Bunnings version of four lots of 10-hour days because we don’t believe that you can maintain that high level of productivity across that length of time. So it’s reduced hours for the same level of output and the same level of pay.
Susan Dunlop: You were talking about healthcare earlier on. So when you’re looking at nursing being 12 hour days. What do you think about that in terms of productivity?
Debbie Bailey: So nursing’s a really interesting sector, and it’s part of the culture of nursing that there are 12-hour shifts, and that’s how a lot of the shifts are set up.
There are some really good examples where the four-day week is working in the health sector and particularly in teams with nurse unit managers.
When we talk about the four-day week, we’re not necessarily saying everyone goes down to 30 hours a week or 32 hours a week because reality is many people are working significantly more than the standard 38 or 40 hours a week.
In nursing, as an example, nurse unit managers in the States might be working five shifts a week. But they’re working 12-plus hour shifts. So that’s significantly more than a standard week. There are trials where they’ve implemented the four-day week, where they have gone down to four lots of 10-hour shifts, but they still have that fifth day off now due to doing the four-day week.
So we’re not talking about getting them down to that 30 hours a week, but what we are talking about is reducing the hours that they’re currently working, improving productivity, and improving the person’s well-being. That’s becoming quite successful, and it’s something that they’re deploying in a lot of places to improve staff attraction and retention because burnout rates, as you would know from the nursing sector and the health sector, are significantly high. Particularly post-COVID, there are some organisations where they can’t retain their nurse for 15 to 18 months. And that’s a really big challenge.
Susan Dunlop: That is big change too.
Debbie Bailey: It is big change. So yeah, there are some health services that are leading the way. Generally, they’re in the U. S. where they’re doing it, but there are also some nurse experiments or examples that are happening in South Korea as well.
The other thing with the health sector, aged care is another area where there’s some significant challenges. So there are examples, and again, back to the US, there are some really great examples where nursing homes or aged care facilities have got nurse aides. So those who are helping deliver the care, not the registered nurses themselves, where these nurse aides are working five days a week, but six-hour shifts.
And by doing that, they’re able to retain staff because for some of them, they choose to pick up another job afterwards. That’s a choice because of financial considerations. But for others, it means they’ve got more consistency in care. So they’re paid for 38 hours, but they only have to work 30.
Part of the conditions of being paid that 38 hours is that you don’t call in sick, you don’t shorten your shift, you have a normal lunch break, all of those types of things. So people are prepared to do that and follow the rules if it means they will get paid for those extra eight hours for free.
Susan Dunlop: Regarding the key factors about determining whether an organisation is ready, we didn’t touch on that, sorry. I butted in with a question.
Debbie Bailey: No, that’s alright! I love it. We can go anywhere. Anywhere we want. Some basic key factors that I tend to see:
The first thing is you want to have a good culture. When we say good culture, I’m not talking about eNPS scores of 80; I’m talking about openness, a willingness to experiment, a willingness to try things differently. So if you’ve got high staff turnover or you’ve got absenteeism happening in your organisation, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your culture is not appropriate to try this, but you’ve got to have that openness. The underlying principles – openness and willing to test things out. You also need to be able to think differently or be prepared to do things differently. So if you have an attitude of that’s just the way we’ve always done it, you’re probably not going to cope by going through this process.
So you really want to be open and able to look at what’s happening. Question things and be prepared to change them and test them out differently. Communication is also critical and having good communication. So being open and transparent with your team. The process that we use by going through and helping people adapt or plan and design their trial means that the leadership will actually set the parameters and set the vision and the key measures for success.
But then they hand that across to the teams and get them to design how do they do their work differently, ensuring that they can still meet those KPIs. So it takes a level of trust, but also open communication for leaders to be able to hand that across to their teams and for them to do that work at the grassroots.
Susan Dunlop: Okay. So is it the alignment to the organisation’s vision first and then how does a four-day week fit into that?
Debbie Bailey: The vision is part of it, but it’s more a vision of how your four-day week will be successful. So what’s your vision for the success of the four-day week and how do you align with that?
And so from developing that vision, you figure out what are the key benefits that you’re looking for and how are you going to measure those and stay on track?
Susan Dunlop: Okay. The vision within the vision.
Debbie Bailey: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Why are you doing this thing? What brought you to this point? What’s the driving force, or you could use that term, what’s the burning platform? Why here and why have you actually considered this?
Because it’s not a small transition. We’re talking about a reasonably radical change that people are considering to put in place. So there’s got to be some good, genuine reason behind that and motivation.
Susan Dunlop: It’s something to keep coming back to, to remind them where they’re headed.
So what are some misconceptions or pitfalls that organisations face when they implement the model?
Debbie Bailey: Probably the top thing when we talk about misconceptions is that the four-day week is all about cramming five days worth of work into four. So you’ve just got to jam it all in and then put it into that smaller envelope. The reality is that’s not it. We’re talking about working differently, working smarter, not harder, and having an opportunity to rethink how things operate within an organisation. Look, the other thing that people often say from a misconception perspective is this can’t happen in a client-facing service: ‘We have customers, they come to our front door. This can’t possibly work’. The reality is, it can. So there’s a police service that we worked with in City of Golden in Colorado. A police service, 24 seven, seven days a week type of service who must answer to their taxpayers. They have successfully trialled for 12 months now putting a four-day week in place.
What they have found is that they have not only improved their staff attraction and retention, but they’ve also improved their response times to emergencies and also improved their community connections. So, they’re still doing the same amount of work. They’re just doing it in a different way. They’ve also been able to fill all of their positions that they previously weren’t able to fill. And so that attraction element has been really strong as a result of them doing the four-day week trial.
Susan Dunlop: That just sounds like what you were just saying earlier, that mindset of ‘this is just the way we’ve always done things. This is just how it should be done’, and you’ve just shown that they can reduce the time at work, but be just as effective. Yes. I get the feeling of that. We’ve got this much time. We’ll get the work done in a a different way.
Debbie Bailey: You bet. You bet. And when you give your employees the opportunity to tell you how it could be done differently, because they’re the experts in their own job, they’re the ones that can tell you; they’re the ones that are frustrated because, oh, here we go, yet another meeting, or yet another meeting with no agenda, or here’s another conversation that there’ll never be an outcome from, or hey, this is stuck in this particular bottleneck for the processes yet again, and we still don’t do anything about it.
They know what’s going on. They know what could be done differently, but we’re all so busy that we don’t put the time into correcting it. When you put this motivational piece of, if you can get all of your work done, I’m going to gift you this amount of time back, that motivates me to go, how am I going to do this process differently?How am I going to work with that team over there differently and get these better outcomes?
Susan Dunlop: So I can imagine that you would reduce the amount of time spent on spinning around in circles on matters that don’t need that much attention, but because you’ve got that 38-hour week, you were used to spending more time on it.
Debbie Bailey: Yeah.
Susan Dunlop: Is that the shift that you see?
Debbie Bailey: Yeah, definitely. You’re focused on the work that’s going to produce the results. So, the noise dissipates. It doesn’t mean that your watercooler conversations stop. That can still continue to a point, but people are more focused about it and you’re able to also have more focus time yourself and less interruptions.
So the most important work happens and the noise tends to fall by the wayside.
Susan Dunlop: Wonderful.
So in your experience, how does the mindset shift from working harder to working smarter play a role in the success? And maybe just an example of that if you’ve seen one.
Debbie Bailey: Yeah, for sure. So mindset shift is critical. You cannot do this if you just think you’re going to work harder. If you think that you are going to ignore everyone in your office and just head down, bottom up and just keep ploughing through, it’s not going to work because we’re part of an ecosystem. We’re part of an organisation. We have to work with other people.
It’s critical that you change that mindset.
Some of the things that organisations do? Perpetual Guardian is a New Zealand fund firm and they’re one of the earlier ones who trialled the four-day week. Some of the stuff that they did that helped them move from working harder to working smarter, they got rid of all the unnecessary meetings.
This is a really obvious thing. And we know, of course, any of us can do this. We don’t need a four-day week to do it.
The four-day week gave them the mandate and the motivation to do it. And because it was the whole organisation that went into the four-day week trial, you get a whole of organisational change.
Any meetings that weren’t necessary or that went for too long, they removed them or they reduced the time. Good old Parkinson’s law. If you set a meeting for one hour, sure as eggs, you’re going to take the entire hour to do that content or do that agenda. Whereas if you can reduce the time, you’ll find a way to make it fit.
Some of the other things that they did is they also leveraged technology. So automating tasks where possible so that you’re not relying on people to be there. And also if that person isn’t there on that particular day, because they’re having their gift day or that’s part of their four-day week, how does the workflow continue?
They also made sure that they were really focused on what did success look like.
What were the outcomes that they were looking for? And this was per role, not just for the organisation. When you think about any organisation, when I talk to them, one of the conversations is about how do you know that the work is done.
How do I know I can take that gift day? And so the answer I generally give is, how do you know that you’re being successful in your role? How do you know that you’re completing what’s required? Now, often, we don’t have that clarity in our role descriptions, but we can build it in there. So, what are the key success measures for your role?
And focus on those rather than being the person that’s there for 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week, that’s not the outcome you’re looking for. You’re looking for the outputs.
Susan Dunlop: So it’s important for them to understand the importance of their role in the bigger picture. Rather than it being let’s just look at the vision and working towards that. But if they can see each baby step that they take is towards them delivering on what was expected of them, I can imagine that would make them feel better to walk away to give themselves that gifted day.
Debbie Bailey: Absolutely, and look this is just good business.
You know, if I know what my role is within the organisation and the work that I’m doing contributes to what my team is trying to do, which contributes to the overall objectives of the organisation, then we’re all pulling in the same direction. That’s when our productivity increases. We’ve got a greater chance of achieving those outputs and those outcomes that we’re aiming for and ticking off our KPIs or our OKRs.
So it’s just good business, but that’s one of the great things about the four-day week. I often tell people it’s the Trojan horse for business process improvement. We’ve got the carrot, the motivating factor where people are going to be gifted time back if they rethink how they do things. But the benefit is that we’re having a critical look at our workflows, our processes, our job descriptions, things like that, and we can improve them for the betterment of us as individuals, but also the organisation.
Susan Dunlop: I can see how the flow of all of that goes together. I think so many organisations got a chance to break the mold during COVID that they never expected would be an opportunity for their organisation to go through. And did they slip back into the old ways or get to rethink it like you’re doing now?
Would now be the right time, post C19 time, for people to be looking at this model?
Debbie Bailey: Yeah, potentially, and look, I think the work that we do with people when they prepare to do a four-day week, it’s not just about the four-day week. It’s just good for their organisation and good for their workforce and businesses.
It’s something you can do at any time. One of the challenges, though, is that I work with companies, and they say, look, we’ve told our staff they can redesign their job. We’ve given them that opportunity. Here it is on a platter, but they’re too busy and they don’t do anything about it. The difference is the motivating factor, and with the four-day week or a four-and-a-half-day week or a nine-day fortnight with those reduction of hours, there’s the motivation. I will gift you this time back if you can do your work differently and we can still meet our organisational goals.
Susan Dunlop: You shared some success stories. So we’ve got the police force and then you’ve got the organisation in New Zealand.
Debbie Bailey: Yeah.
Susan Dunlop: Can we just have a talk around the positive impact from shifting from a problem focus to the outcome focus? I’m thinking employees working in empowered teams with a shared vision are being more productive or what have you seen otherwise?
Debbie Bailey: Yeah, look, there are so many examples of productivity going up, of staff attraction and retention going up. So I work with some local governments and, most recently I’m working with a local government in British Columbia. And so what they’re finding is that the well-being of their staff has increased quite significantly as a result of having a better, more balanced work-life balance but also because processes are becoming more efficient.
When you think about staff attraction and retention, there’s another really great example of a local government in the UK called South Cambridgeshire local government. Now, they were one of the first local governments in the UK to trial the four-day week. What they found in their very initial trial period is they were able to attract people to hard-to-attract roles, even though they were still testing it out.
Planners and engineers are roles that local governments regularly have problems filling those roles, and they have long-term vacancies in those roles, but as a result of just doing the trial, people actually moved during the trial period to fill those roles because they were so enamoured with the idea and the culture of the organisation that they were prepared to do this.
So there are some really significant outcomes and very strong messages that you can send as an organisation when it comes to staff attraction and also that retention aspect.
Susan Dunlop: How many years has the four-day week been available? When did it start?
Debbie Bailey: Look it’s been around for quite some time in various ways.
So the bulk of the movements probably happened in the last four or five years. However, there are examples of organisations, for example, in the European Union that have been doing the four-day week since 2002. There’s a Toyota service centre over there that service vehicles and they’ve been doing a form of the four-day week or reduced hours working since then and quite successfully.
There’s quite a lot of longevity, but it’s pockets of it. Now what we’re seeing is that growing movement where more sectors are taking it up and trialling it.
Susan Dunlop: Okay. Is a model a licensed model or are you talking about people just picking up a book and going, Oh, I’m going to do that.
Debbie Bailey: Yeah, look, it’s quite a mixed bag. So it might be organisations working with an organisation like Four-Day Week Global or another consultancy. It might be reading a book or some of them simply go, that’s a great idea. Let me try it. Hopefully with a bit more preparation than that, because that’s when we start to see that things fail, but yes it is quite a mixed bag.
Generally speaking, the four-day week is a concept that does come with a level of risk or perceived risk from organisations. So, there’s a level of concern about trying it without some support. I generally find that organisations will work with a consultant, a partner, or an organisation that’s done that before just to give them some assurances that they can be guided along the pathway.
Susan Dunlop: The way you’ve just shared in this country and in that town.
Debbie Bailey: Yeah.
Susan Dunlop: It sounds like it’s quite global that you’re involved with them from here in Australia as well.
Debbie Bailey: Yeah, I’m very lucky. If only I were traveling to all these beautiful places, but I’m very lucky. I get to work with organisations all over the world.
I’ve worked with clients in Poland, the UK. I’ve got colleagues in South Africa, New Zealand. I’ve got Canadian clients and in Maine, USA. I’ve finished working with a client in Japan. I’m very lucky that this work has given me connections to a lot of different organisations across a huge number of different sectors.
And all following that same formula of, how do we implement this, how do we implement it safely with the greatest chance of success and helping them navigate through that design plan and implementation process.
Susan Dunlop: I think it’s just amazing, Debbie, that, when you think about who are the people in your neighbourhood and, you’re living in country Queensland.
Debbie Bailey: Yes.
Susan Dunlop: And you’re doing this global work, helping all these people have a better life.
Debbie Bailey: Absolutely. Look, my neighbours think it’s hilarious because if they look out their window and they see a light on, it’s not unusual for me to be crawling out of bed from the house and walking over to my office in the shed at one o’clock in the morning because I’m connecting with my Maine client or there’s an early start because I’m connecting with Canadian clients or a late finish because we’re talking to the UK.
So it is pretty cool to be connecting across the world. But yes, it’s great that we have this ability where we can share these stories and ideas and these lessons and also build the connections, with my Australian clients, but also with the global ones and connect them as well.
Susan Dunlop: Yeah, it just blows me away. When I think of all the people I meet, because you and I met through the WIRE program, and just listening to what each woman was coming to the screen saying, Oh, I’m just doing this. And I’m just doing that. Oh my God, there are all these people working across Queensland in these global organisations.
It’s amazing.
Debbie Bailey: It is amazing. And it’s that beauty of just asking the questions and having those conversations with people. It’s when you scratch the surface, gosh, there’s some remarkable people out there.
Susan Dunlop: As I said, I’ve always been interested in this four-day week. So I just couldn’t believe that you showed up on my screen when we had to have a little breakout.
Debbie Bailey: like, it was meant to happen?
Susan Dunlop: I’ve got to talk to her.
So we’re going to keep on going with some leadership questions. When it comes to leadership, I thought we’d maybe take an opportunity to discuss the role of leaders as being the creators and seeing their employees as being creators.
You know, it’s that trust in other people to be able to step up and do what they do? They can do it without being rescued. So, can we maybe touch on that in terms of how a leader can support their team during the transition and ongoing in that way?
Debbie Bailey: So for me, the number one thing, a leader needs to be prepared to lead by example.
So, any leaders that I work with will do some work separately with the leadership team, but yhey absolutely need to be practising the four-day week. Do the reduced hours work themselves. I totally understand that some leaders are currently working 60 or 70 hours a week, and I’m not asking them to get down to 30 hours, but I am asking them to reduce their hours because they need to feel the discomfort and the challenges that their teams are feeling.
And so leading by example is absolutely critical. Now, when it comes to being open for your teams to become the creators themselves, I think it’s really important that, as part of the process, you want to make sure that you set up some parameters and boundaries. So, what are the non-negotiables as an organisation that you’re prepared to accept or not accept?
We don’t want to increase our staffing budget. We have to maintain our customer service levels. We need to maintain our current opening hours.
So if those are non-negotiables set those parameters and boundaries but share them with the team and then be open and allow them to come up with creative solutions so that they can change the way they work but still meet those requirements.
As a leader, being transparent about the fact that I’ve not done this before, I’m not sure it’s going to work, I’m sceptical, these are the reasons I’m sceptical, but I’m open to trying it and testing it and seeing how we can make it work. And then, it flows onto the ability to allow your teams to test it.
And be prepared that sometimes some things are going to fail, but you want to fail fast. You want to iterate and then try again. It’s not a case of something goes wrong, then we stop. It’s a case of this isn’t going so well, let’s figure out why, do it slightly differently and have another go.
Susan Dunlop: Have you observed any resistance from employees when implementing it and how did you address it?
Debbie Bailey: Yeah. So surprisingly, one of the areas of resistance comes because of generations. And when I say that, I’m talking about Gen X and older. So, Gen X and older, we’ve been taught to just get on and do the work. This is your job. These are the hours. This is the pay. Just make it happen.
Generations below us have a different mindset. That’s not the approach.
The resistance in some cases, so for example, the City of Golden Police, their Gen X’s and older struggled to get their head around this. They didn’t understand why this would be important, why it would be necessary, and why should we even try it?
However, they were open and prepared to give it a go and have seen the benefits and the outcome. So that’s probably one of the main areas of resistance. And the other thing is that people get fearful that their workload is just going to increase. You’re just going to try and get me to jam everything into four-days instead of five.
They’re worried about compressed hours, which this is not, we’re not talking about longer days. We’re talking about same number of hours per day, but actually doing the work differently. And then there tends to be concern around the fact that this might be a gimmick. This is a short-term thing. We’ll try it but management won’t keep it. And that becomes an issue for them around the sustainability side of things.
You will sometimes get people who say, look, I’m already busy. I’m really busy. I’m working long days. How on earth am I going to add this to my list of things to try and do?
And so that can be the resistance, and where you want to have those conversations is around how could that work be done differently.
Ultimately, as employers, we want our staff to feel great. We want them to be creative. We want them to be rested because they will produce the best possible work for us if they do that.
So, in a way, this is a selfish motivation. Because if our staff are more rested, we’re actually going to get more out of them. If we’ve got staff working really long days now, we’re not getting the best from them. So, we want to help them figure out how do we reduce those hours? How do they do their job differently?
Do we have to reassess workloads in order for something like this to work?
Susan Dunlop: Going back, you said the modelling of the leaders and also, I think, I would see there’d be a fear if there’s been a lack of trust in an organisation before if this is the next gimmick that they’ve tried this and they’ve tried that and they’ve tried everything else.
So there’s the fear, there’s lack of understanding. And even, if people see that their hours can be reduced, do they feel that you’re saying that their job’s not as necessary as it was in the first place?
Debbie Bailey: Yeah, look, those can be some of the responses or is this a trick? You’re saying this because it’s going to look good for the organisation, but you actually don’t really mean it. You still want me to work the hours that I have to work to make all of this happen.
So those are definitely concerns. And look, if there’s a level of mistrust within the organisation, depending on that level of mistrust, this may not be a good solution for the organisation. So that goes back to those earlier conversations around culture.
And when I work with an organisation, if I pick up that there might be some things happening internally or culturally, they’re not ready for this, I’m really clear and I’ll let them know that I think you’ve got some work to do first.
Because this is a change process and all change processes come with a level of stress and frustration. And this is on top of your day job.
We need to be really mindful that if we’re going to do something like this, you need to have some of those core ingredients in place. And culture is one of those critical ones. Openness and communication are the other aspects. If any of those are missing or they’re not quite as clear or as positive as they could be, it might be a case where it is better to be paused to do some of your prep work but don’t start it until you get to start to see some changes in that.
And some organisations, you may not see the change because you might culturally have some significant issues, which might come from leadership or particular departments. And those are the things you need to work on before you look at getting better productivity from your team. Because no amount of change in the way that you work is going to improve that really poor culture.
Susan Dunlop: Okay, and have you seen examples of how Leaders, who are in the midst of it though, not having not started it, and how they did help the employees to continue to take the steps forward and see the change as an opportunity?
Debbie Bailey: Yeah, for sure. where leaders are continuously checking in with their teams to see how they’re going. So you’ve got these measures, and how those measures relate to your team. You’re able to track to see how your team’s performing. You make it part of your cultural one-on-ones. So if you’re meeting once a month or once a fortnight, it’s a standing agenda item, but it’s not a lip service agenda item.
It’s tell me how you’re going with this. How are you going with meeting your key success measures? How are you coping with this? We also make sure that when you do the four-day week, you’re also measuring sentiment. You’re doing regular sentiment surveys about how people are feeling. What are the stress levels? How much sleep are they getting? Do they feel like they’re able to complete the work that they need to do? Those types of questions.
That gives direct information to the organisation so they can start to tweak or have conversations with particular departments to improve that. So yeah, some good managers who are in the thick of this, they’re already feeling the pain themselves. They have encouraged their staff to hold them accountable. For example, I might set a meeting. But I forgot to send out an agenda, but we’ve got a meeting protocol that says if you don’t get an agenda, you’re allowed to decline the meeting. So hopefully you’ve got staff who are brave enough to decline. And I look at the invites and see that people aren’t coming and then realise that’s on me. They’re holding me accountable.
So when you’ve got that kind of culture or you can build that kind of culture, that’s when you start to see that leaders are helping staff, but also the teams are helping the leaders as well.
Susan Dunlop: To try and find the balance of creating something new, but to lean in and value your people and how they’re feeling in their core, it is that sort of juggle. And some people may not be able to do that, but if it’s an organisation who’s approaching this with an outcome focus, I could imagine that, yeah, you’ll be able to just stitch it all together somehow as you go along.
Debbie Bailey: Most definitely. And it takes time and effort and energy. So it is an extra thing that you need to do.
And it doesn’t come easily for everybody. The first three weeks when you start to do the transition most organisations and most people are sitting there scratching their head going, I don’t think this is going to work. I’m not getting all my work done. I’m supposed to have Friday off, but I’m nowhere near finished.
And it’s that level of discomfort because we’re asking for behaviour change, but that takes time. But once you get past that three-week mark, you start to get into a better routine. You start to put in those good practices. People around you are putting in those good practices and you start to see some positive changes.
Yeah, and it’s month four or five, you might start to see some complacency coming in where people say I’m just entitled to this day off, even if the work’s not done. And so it’s this continual process that you need to be working at as we should any time when we have a business. But it’s this continual process where we need to be mindful about this is a gift. It’s not an entitlement and the work needs to happen.
Susan Dunlop: Yeah. Do you connect much to the Gallup reports that come through about the employee engagement and the people who’ve quietly quit and the loud quitters. Do you touch on any of that?
Debbie Bailey: Look, not so much in the content because generally speaking when people come to us, they’re already, they’ve identified an opportunity. And they’ve identified a challenge. The opportunity is that they’re open to things. The challenge might be we’re struggling to retain our staff, whether it’s that quiet, or not so much the quiet quitting, but the louder quitting, the actual quitting, that generally tends to be, or they might see a lack of engagement.
They might have sentiment surveys and they’re seeing that their existing staff, they’ve got a lack of engagement. Or they might have high levels of absenteeism. So people taking sick leave, mental health days, that sort of thing, which then, as a result, slows the workflow processes and makes it very hard to have that continuity of service for your customers and your clients.
Susan Dunlop: I was listening to a Gallup webinar last week. That’s why I was thinking about your work. It does feel to me like it would be connected to it, but they were talking about how there’s this thing called, on Mondays, it’s bare minimum Mondays, that people are doing the least they have to do so that they can just spend the next four-days being busy. But then they said they’re also now making Friday become bare minimum Friday. So there’s a whole lot of shifting around workforces at the moment.
Debbie Bailey: I think Friday, particularly Friday afternoons, has always been a fairly bare minimum period for a standard Monday to Friday operation. So what I’ve seen in the past is that, and there’s lots of research around it, Friday afternoons are highly unproductive for organisations. And that’s why some of the organisations have already before the four-day week trial, moved to summer Fridays. The UK and the US have been doing that for a little while now where people finish work at 12 o’clock on the Friday or at one o’clock, and then, they have that half day and they get to enjoy their summertime.
So yeah, it’s been around for a while, but there’s certain days of the week that are highly unproductive already. And so what we’re aiming to do is help businesses and organisations be productive in that full four-days or that full nine day fortnight that they’re working so that they don’t have those times.
Susan Dunlop: And you yourself, I know I’ve seen on your email signature that you practice a four-day week. So as a leader, because you’re a leader in your organisation, how do you manage your own wellbeing and prevent burnout, especially when managing all these large scale transitions or you’re coordinating these with all these clients?
Debbie Bailey: Yeah. So you’re absolutely right. I practice a four-day week. Do I get it right all the time? No, I’m human. I’m human. So there are times that I will end up working a five day week and I’ll get to the end of my fourth day and think, What have I done wrong? Why do I feel like I haven’t quite achieved what I need to?
And generally speaking, I’ll go back and reflect and I’ve dropped some of my good practices. I haven’t got my focus time in there. I haven’t fully blocked out my diary. I’m not looking after myself and going for a walk first thing in the morning. So I’ve generally slipped back into bad behaviours.
So that’s the reality. The other reality is the four-day week’s not every week. There are some times in an organisation where you’ve got a peak period. End of financial year for some organisations, Christmas and New Year for others and those of us who are knowledge workers, it can be peaks and troughs throughout the year.
There are some times where it’s all hands on deck and you need to accept that we’re not talking about 52 free Fridays. As part of the four-day week, it depends on what the business can allow because the business still needs to be successful. So it might be 26 or 20 if you’re doing a nine day fortnight, or it might be 30 or so if you’re doing a four-day week, but it’s still always whatever’s best for the business. And if the business needs all hands on deck, that’s what happens.
But back to your question about what do I do? Boundaries are really critical. And this is not me coming from a mental health background. This is me coming from a worker’s background.
But there’s lots of crossovers, I think. We as humans are our own worst enemy when it comes to trying to manage our work day and our work week. We have our emails on our phones, WhatsApp, we don’t separate home and work as well as we can. And so the boundaries are critical.
So for me, I don’t have my work emails on my phone. I actually separate those out, making sure, unless I’ve had a flexible day where I’ve had the morning off and I’m working into the evening, making sure that I’m not responding to emails outside of hours and sticking to making sure that there are those designated non-working days off. I know I’m a better worker and a better person if I actually have those three days of rest.
So it’s important for me to maintain those boundaries wherever possible.
Also making sure that you schedule your own life. There’s a great organisation in the UK called Diary Detox. And they talk about scheduling your life first in your calendar before you schedule your work stuff.
So those are the things like I like to swim. I like to go and play with the kids. I like to ride horses in the paddock. So whatever those really important things are, they get built out into your calendar first. Then, of course, you’ve got your standard work hours, and that’s when you start building that in.
But the deal with the Foundation Week or your own personal stuff is that you can move it, but you cannot cancel it because those are the things that make you a great person. Those are essential for you to have that balance. And you start to set some boundaries around that as well. Having that reflection and that ability to pause and also be a bit kind to yourself.
We lose the plot sometimes. We think we’re on the right track. Things get busy. It’s okay. I’ll just get this worked on or we promise something and it doesn’t quite fit with the deadlines that we can possibly manage and we’re working extra hours. That’s okay because we’re not going to get it right every time.
But making sure that we have that ability to reset is really important for me.
Susan Dunlop: And it sounds like reflection is quite a big piece to this, that you can reshift your focus to what’s important on a regular basis.
Debbie Bailey: Definitely. Yeah. The ability to stop and review. So whether it’s in the personal life or how you do your work or how workflows and processes happen, you always want to be doing, especially when you’re doing a change project like this, you want to do your after-action reviews.
So if something happens or goes wrong, What happened? Why did that happen? It’s not about the people, but it’s about the processes. Dig into it, figure out what could be done differently, and then test that different way of doing it and see if you get a better outcome.
Susan Dunlop: In terms of implementation of the four-day week, do you provide frameworks, a dashboard, and tools? What do they get that is different to them than a normal office environment?
Debbie Bailey: Yeah, when they work with us, we take them through the framework that we’ve established, which has been successful for 400 plus organisations around the world. So tried and proven. They have the ability to participate in the research that we lead as well. They are given lots of examples of other organisations, and they get expert coaches like myself, who’ve been through the process themselves but also who have connections and knowledge. Lots of other entities that have gone through the process, the things that have worked for them, the things that haven’t.
So it’s that knowledge base that they really get to access, but also taking them through the framework at a pace that works for them and we guide them on that. You could go through the design plan and implementation process within six weeks if you had to, but it’s not ideal. And I would always suggest an organisation takes a little bit longer because you need these ideas to percolate. You need to sit with them. You want the sceptics to come out of the woodwork and put the challenges on the table so you can start to work through those before you even start. So there are lots of tips that you get by working with an organisation that’s been here and done this before.
Susan Dunlop: Yeah, and I think that’s powerful. And even that, as you said, the pacing of it is so important to not say, here’s your six-week program. Let’s do it. I always feel like for a six-week program, you need 12 weeks, just to be able to do the reflection and the observation in between and take those moments of learnings in the quiet times, I think, is so important.
Debbie Bailey: It is. And also, you’re not putting a pause on your normal work. So we’re asking you to do this in addition to that. So we need to be a little bit realistic about the incremental change you’re asking people to do, but giving them the time for that to happen.
Susan Dunlop: Yeah. Do you know what? We’ve made it to the end, Debbie. And I can’t believe that we’ve done that in the time that we have. Amazing. We’re on fire, just like you always are!
Debbie Bailey: We’re good! Talented women. That’s what we are.
Susan Dunlop: Keep it within the time. We’re good. We’re not going to do 60 minutes. We will do 45 minutes.
Debbie Bailey: Absolutely. Parkinson’s law. There you go.
Susan Dunlop: So Debbie, thank you so much for sharing your incredible insights with us today.Your experience, your expertise in leading teams and the four-day week transitions. So incredibly valuable to bring to the world.
Debbie Bailey: Thank you, Susan. I’ve loved chatting with you. I love your questions. I’m very happy to share my stories and happy to chat again anytime or for anyone to reach out. I’m all ears and would be pleased to connect with people and talk them through the process.
Susan Dunlop: Wonderful. I will provide how to contact you in the show notes and on the posts wherever I share them on LinkedIn and whatnot, in case anyone wants to contact you over the phone through this Christmas period as they’re listening to this, thinking about what’s 2025 going to look like.
Debbie Bailey: Absolutely. Sounds like a wonderful plan.
Susan Dunlop: Listeners, if there’s one takeaway from today’s episode, and you could jot it down and consider how you might apply it to your life, what would it be? If you’ve got any questions, feel free to contact me at [email protected]. You’ll also find me on LinkedIn or Instagram.
Thank you for joining us.
Trust that you are blessed even when you forget that you are blessed. Take care of yourself and I look forward to being back with you soon.
Bye for now.