Can flexible hours and 4-day work weeks boost your team’s performance?

What do you want for Christmas? If your answer is “just longer winter holidays,” you might need to restructure your work schedule asap. While extended vacation or a flexible work routine is hardly an effective remedy for people who already have reached a burnout, it might be a good way to prevent it for those on the verge of it.

Corporate and business life is changing rapidly, and rules that looked sane 20 years ago come as an anachronism today. We no longer need to be present in the office to join a meeting (viva la Zoom), we can brainstorm ideas using digital whiteboards (hello, Miro), and run an advertising campaign (Facebook Ads Manager rules). 

➡️ Mind maps, Spreadsheets, Notes: 7 top tools to structure your ideas

Tasks now require much less of our time—but we apparently need more time to recharge.

Let’s overview the most common (still not yet widespread) ways to rearrange a team’s workload and thus make your employees even more productive. Remember to share this article with those posing the same questions as you!

Why reducing work hours is smart

It might sound like a thesis to undermine the whole philosophy of the corporate world. Still, a flexible work schedule might be a better solution for your business than a rigid one, especially for creative departments or with Gen Z representatives. Giving your team more freedom in choosing when to perform their work might result in higher productivity. 

Have you heard of presenteeism?

Being present at work doesn’t mean working—it might sound weird, but it’s a fact. Nowadays, business is experiencing an epidemic of presenteeism. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, this phenomenon refers to “the act of staying at work longer than usual, or going to work when you are ill, to show that you work hard and are important to your employer.” 

The reasons for presenteeism are pretty diverse: 

• chronic health conditions (like allergies, asthma, etc.)
• a fear of losing your job and forced corporate loyalty
• lack of paid sick leave or paid time off
• poor or inadequate workplace standards
• inadequate workloads and deadlines

According to PubMed.gov, US companies lose more than $150 bln yearly due to presenteeism. This money is the cost of lost productivity, which derives from depression and anxiety, and arises from challenges in managing daily workday tasks. An inadequate work schedule is not the primary reason for presenteeism—still, it’s one factor that can be managed successfully.

So, even if employers are at the office, it doesn’t always mean they spend their time productively. But if people find ways to optimize their workload without compromising 

 in results, there’s little sense in keeping them glued to a previous schedule. If teams are still forced to do so, their productivity eventually becomes lower than expected—just because they feel their time and effort are not valued. 

Five formats of reducing work hours for more effectiveness

The formula of business effectiveness is quite simple: the more high-quality products you produce and sell, the better. But this equation doesn’t imply that you are expected to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. With the result in focus, the timeframe doesn’t matter. Even if you make your team work 12 hours a week, it might result in better productivity in the short term, but will negatively impact the team in the long run.

Flexibility in working schedules can help your team find the right balance. This has been one of the major HR trends over the recent years, while also remaining more of a dream than a reality for most teams. With 2023 just around the corner, that might be part of your new team management strategy. So, let’s look at the pros and cons of the five most common “less work, more productivity” formats successfully adopted by leading companies across the globe.

Flexible hours

With flexible hours, it’s up to the employees to decide whether they want to stick to the traditional work day and week schedule, or have their own. For instance, if the work day lasts eight hours, one employee could start at 8 a.m., finish at 5 p.m. (lunch included), and have the weekends, while another employee could start at 11 a.m., finish at 7 p.m., and have weekends on Wednesday and Sunday.

Cons. When team members have different schedules, connecting with them and feeling a bond becomes difficult. It also blurs the line between work and personal life, so it might be even more challenging to focus on your work performance. 

Pros. People who work flexible hours feel happier because they feel less pressure and more autonomy. According to the Gartner 2021 Digital Worker Experience Survey, 43% of surveyed people reported that flexibility in working hours helped them to be more productive. When you have time to drive kids to school, avoid traffic jams, and adapt your work schedule to your own activity pattern, you feel happier. As to the disconnection with the team, proper communication and planning meetings when your schedules overlap might help a lot.

Design a fun or formal work schedule for your team in VistaCreate

Tips. To make sure this approach is used for pumping productivity, not nurturing absenteeism:

1. Announce the daily quota of hours. If you expect your employees to work 40 hours a week, please, communicate this—and let them decide when exactly they will work these hours.

2. Communicate working schedules across the team. It should not be a surprise that one employee comes in at 11 a.m. and the other arrives three hours earlier. Ask team members to choose the best-fitting working schedules—and coordinate the team through them.

4-day work week

The traditional duration of the work week is five days, but even today many people work six days a week. Still, the world is entering the era of a 4-day work week—a schedule that boosts productivity. 

Cons. Having long weekends each week can result in losing focus. To put it briefly, employees can “forget” the details of projects they were working on, and it would require a longer time to refocus. If a person needs more money, the extra leisure time can be spent on some other job—this means that after three days of “rest”, one will be even more tired than after two of them.

The other reason to avoid shifting to a 4-day work week is that it can increase costs. If the team doesn’t fit into the new schedule quickly, the company will have to cover extra hours or hire new employees.

Pros. A 4-day work week without compensation cut-offs can be part of the new age of work culture. A range of countries, including Belgium, Germany, and Scotland, to name just a few, have adopted this scheme with positive results. If your team shares your company’s productive philosophy, focuses on work-life balance, and your clients are okay with this format, this scheme might be your future. 

A 30-hour work week might be a blessing to teams that have intensive work and need more time to recharge. It also nurtures the spirit of innovation, and having pet projects offers employees some time and space for their hobbies. The number of working days doesn’t matter if everything is done and you have enough energy to continue. 

Having a quality rest will result in a more energized pace during the work week, driving better results for your business. But, if you as a manager notice that your employees are systematically tired and unmotivated even after a three-day rest, it might be a good point to discuss. Maybe they are burnt out and longer weekends aren’t helping them recover.

Tips. Before you introduce a 4-day work week, don’t forget to do this:

1. Consider introducing 6-hour work days. Try cutting work time while preserving the 5-day work week—just to see how your team’s productivity changes. Maybe, it will be even better than a shorter week.

2. Results-only work environment. Judge your employees only based on the results of their work, not the number of hours they spend in the office or on your project online. 

Limitless vacations

Many companies, including Google, Netflix, IBM, and LinkedIn, offer their teams as many days off as they want. It is not a common practice so far, but it might become a strong trend in the coming years. People want a limitless vacation (or paid time off—PTO). When asked what work perks they wanted, 72% of respondents in the MetLife 2019 benefits study chose unlimited paid vacations. But does it benefit a business?

Cons. It’s quite hard to understand if a worker will abuse the policy of limitless vacations. Without proper control, a company might end up sponsoring people who just don’t want to work at all. Just imagine this: your company is having a busy period, but half of your team is on a limitless vacation.

Pros. People tend to take fewer paid days off than they can. According to various studies, around one-third of people don’t ever use most of their free days, so it is hardly possible that they will abuse this right. At the same time, this opportunity makes them happy. 

A study by Joblist in the USA revealed that unlimited PTO correlates with employees reporting high job satisfaction (58.3%) and healthy work-life balance (61.9%).

PTO also paves the way for transparent and honest communication—workers feel trusted and valued. It also minimizes the chance of burnout because it helps with breaking out of the typical work routine and reducing work stress. If they want to have a relaxing vacation, let them (allow their palm tree Zoom background to become a reality).

Tips. To secure your company from overuse of paid free days, follow these steps:

1. Create clear and transparent guidelines that will set the balance within your company. It also includes a rule of notifying your manager and team, being absent for no longer than ten days in a row, etc.

2. Analyze an employee’s productivity. If a person is off for a month every season and their work results are mediocre, you should discuss this. However, if your worker is an excellent performer that works long hours, but wants a week to recharge every month, let them have it.

Sabbatical

A sabbatical leave is a scholar tradition—originally, sabbaticals were given to professors as a pause from teaching. Sabbaticals don’t have a set duration, it can last from a month to several years and be used for mental or physical restoration, pursuing a graduate degree, or volunteering. This extended leave can be both paid and unpaid.

Cons. If the sabbatical is paid, you might just lose money—because you can never know if an employee will join your team again. Moreover, you have to get the person’s duties performed by someone else, and pay them too. So, this type of leave should only be offered to workers who are extremely loyal.

Pros. You can’t have people tied to your company forever. If you don’t want to lose an employee, it’s better to let them rest for a longer time and welcome them back recharged. Your goal is to drive your team to new heights, not exhaustion, right? 

Moreover, you don’t have to pay them 100% of their salary—you can negotiate and find the proper compensation for the time of the leave. You can also discuss the duration and purpose of the leave. 3-to-6-month sabbaticals are more common than year-long ones.

Tips. Before you grant your employee a sabbatical:

1. Check how long they have worked for your business. Most companies believe that five years of work can be proof of a person being loyal.

2. Ask them to draft a proposal for a sabbatical. It’s not a formal paper, but an outline of how an employee will spend the sabbatical time (for example, for upskilling).

Summing up

There’s no ultimate answer to whether a flexible work schedule, 4-day work weeks, or sabbatical can boost your team’s performance. But it seems that it might be a great option for those who want to experiment with work routines and make their schedules more flexible. 

With the world changing so fast, it makes much more sense to adapt to all the different areas. Because the average person will spend 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime, it’s wise to adapt to the needs of the contemporary workforce in a way that is fair and just to all the different needs..