In 2018, Andrew Barnes, founder of trust company Perpetual Guardian, proved that working fewer hours boosts productivity. He tells Idealog how the four-day week came about.
Andrew Barnes was mid-air when he had a revolutionary idea about work.
The New Zealand-based entrepreneur was on flight in 2018, flipping through The Economist. A survey result caught his eye: people are productive for just two and a half hours a day.
The Perpetual Guardian founder and non-executive director couldn’t help but wonder: was that true in his own business?
“That survey got me thinking about what the real issue around productivity is,” he says. “Business leaders often assume that the number of hours worked equals productivity. But if the research is right, people are only productive for small chunks of time, which suggests that much of the workday is spent just filling time.”
The findings rang true for him personally: “Well, think about it. How many meetings do you go into that are unstructured, could be dealt with in five minutes, but pull in a cast of thousands and drag on forever?”
He began questioning the belief that longer hours produce better results.
“I thought, what if I challenged the workforce to figure out how they could do their jobs in four days instead of five? If they can deliver the same output in less time, the reward is time off.”
By the time he got off the plane, he had already emailed Perpetual Guardian’s head of HR, saying: “I’ve got a great idea – we’re going to try a four-day week.”
Small fix, big results
Not long after, Barnes developed the 100:80:100 model.
“I pay you 100%, you work 80% of the time, but I still need to get 100% productivity,” says Barnes.
He launched a trial at Perpetual Guardian in February that year.
New employees start by working five days to understand the expected output. If they switch to four days but fail to meet the agreed benchmark, they return to five.
“It’s not a free lunch.”
During the trial, Barnes found workers were interrupted every 11 minutes on average and took 22 minutes to return to full productivity.
Drawing on Dr Glenn Wilson’s 2005 study on the effect of constant workplace distractions, he says: “If you’re working in an open-plan office, that’s the equivalent of having a 10-point drop in your IQ or operating under the influence of marijuana. Massive impact.”
He incorporated a small experiment.
“We gave people a quiet hour, put a flag in a pot or something, and you couldn’t be interrupted. That hour now generates the equivalent of about three hours of normal productivity across the board.
“If you do that every day – if you’re normally productive for only two and a half hours – then by adding a quiet hour, you’re already increasing output simply by changing a couple of things,” says Barnes.
Bottom-up transformation
Besides introducing quiet hours, Barnes restructured the business around the 100:80:100 framework.
“I’ve done enough restructuring in businesses in my time to know that there are often useless processes that no one questions – simply because they’ve always been there.
“If you think about it, in a conventional restructure, someone might say, ‘Well, if I tell you about that, maybe part of my job is gone, or maybe you’re going to give me something else to do.’
“This model changes that. When the incentive is ‘I’ll get time off,’ people start eliminating things they’d otherwise leave in place,” he says.
By trading time-filling tasks for time off, the trial saw a significant drop in the time workers spent on the internet.
“People want the time off, so they change their behaviours, their business process as well as their environment.
“What people don’t understand about a four-day week is that it’s really about bottom-up processes and business re-engineering. This creates the opportunity to give people more time off without costing the business,” Barnes explains.
Better home life, stronger work drive
Barnes ran the trial for eight weeks, with results suggesting it was beneficial for the business and employees.
“Our research shows people value the time off. So they’ve got a strong incentive to make it work,” says Barnes.
“As a result, they have more time at home, they’re better rested, their home life improves and they become more engaged at work.
“And if they’ve got more time off, that’s theirs – they don’t need to use work hours for things like hospital visits or doctor appointments. So you end up seeing sick days go down by about 60%.”
Among other benefits, Barnes says recruiting is easier and employee turnover has dropped significantly.
Beyond work-life balance
By the end of 2018, Perpetual Guardian made the four-day week permanent, with 80% of staff taking part.
“We ask people, ‘What time off do you want?’ Some want to take a full day, others prefer two half days. Some working parents might want to work five days but with compressed hours. And then there are those who say, ‘I just want to work the normal five days a week.’ Fine, knock yourself out,” says Barnes.
“Nobody gets paid more. It’s simply output-driven, and it forces you to work out what output is and how to measure it.”
It’s more than just work-life balance, he adds, it’s an opportunity to reshape thinking.
“This is really about being honest as a business leader, knowing what’s really happening in your business. Not just making a glib argument like, ‘I pay people for 38 hours a week, so I should get 38 hours of productivity.’ No, you don’t.”
Instead of taking a financial hit, the trial helped the company perform twice as well per capita as its biggest competitor.
The success quickly gained global traction. In 2019, Barnes and his wife Charlotte Lockhart launched 4 Day Week Global, a programme helping companies run trials worldwide.
