Today is Monday 1 August 2022 – five Brevity staff will not be getting out of bed and heading to work today. That’s because Brevity is embarking on a 4 day week pilot and five lucky staff have Monday’s as their gifted day. That’s going to make for a longer day on Tuesday, you might be thinking. But not at all. The team will be paid 100 percent salary for 80 percent of their time – as long as they can maintain 100 percent productivity.

Clients at the centre of our thinking

Over the last two months, the Brevity team has been preparing for the Four Day Week pilot. A big part of this has been determining how to improve productivity so that when the trial begins, all systems are ready to go. Plenty of consideration has also been given to ensuring clients are not impacted by the change of working days.

For starters, each team member’s non-work day is scheduled to ensure the right resource is available in the office each day. There is always a senior engineer rostered on, there is always someone from accounts and there is always someone to answer any client calls in person.

Will Brevity look any different from the outside? Not dramatically. Clients will have the same level of service, projects will be turned around as quickly and the standard of work will not change – and that’s the baseline. However, there may be subtle changes over time that come from the benefits of a four day week. The benefits are set to improve the business, the economy, wellbeing and the climate.

Employee wellness improvements bring wider benefits

Fewer staff sick days mean fewer disruptions to projects. Improved productivity may well improve quality as well as efficiency, and happier, less stressed and more motivated staff will surely translate to better performing staff – and happier clients. This might sound great in theory – but will it pan out in reality? It seems so. The 4 day week movement has plenty of data to back up these findings, particularly the outcomes reported in Perpetual Guardian’s world-first trial (access their white paper here). One of the recommendations for participating in the trial is to

engage outside consultants/academics to evaluate qualitative and quantitative measures of success. As a result, we have put measures in place to track the effectiveness of our trial, and we look forward to sharing these as we go.

Less road traffic offers environmental and economic advantages

Spending one less day in traffic is one of the positive side effects of a four-day-working-week. That’s the equivalent of a 20% reduction in travel, which in turn has a significant impact on how our roads flow – especially when the reductions are primarily around peak travel times. A 2017 report by the NZ Institute for Economic Research shows that removing decongestion in Auckland could add $3.5m in productivity gains each day!

Paying forward the gift of time

There are other social benefits too. How people spend their non-working day will also have knock on effects. The team has committed to using one day per quarter doing volunteer charity work. The additional time at home allows more flexibility for supporting friends, whanau and those in the community and while this is less formalised, it also brings wider benefits. The time gifted by the company can be gifted to people or causes the team wish to support.

If you are interested to hear how the pilot progresses, and how the team improves their productivity, follow Brevity on LinkedIn and you’ll see the updates as they happen.

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