Our chief executive’s suggestion led to Inventium running a six-month experiment where the team all worked four days per week and had Friday off. Like all good experiments, we collected data to test what impact the initiative had.

Employee engagement at Inventium was already very high prior to the FDW experiment. They were in the top 10 per cent for our industry, management consulting. At the end of the experiment, engagement had risen to the top 1 per cent, along with job satisfaction increasing by 12 per cent and energy levels increasing by 21 per cent.

Stress levels reduced by 18 per cent, which was impressive, given the majority of the team spent most of the last half of 2020 in lockdown.

Financial targets were met two months ahead of schedule, which was a huge success given Melbourne spent the better part of last year in lockdown.

Finally, in order to fit five days’ worth of work into four, our already high levels of productivity needed to increase. We all worked hard at this and saw a 26 per cent uplift in productivity among the team.

It was a unanimous success without a single downside. And thanks to the stellar results, the FDW has become a permanent fixture at Inventium.

A common question people have asked is: how did we manage to fit five days’ worth of work into four? This was an interesting challenge because Inventium works with organisations all around the world training them how to work more productively and as a result, the team’s productivity was already incredibly high.

VIEW ALL

However, we doubled down on several strategies to further improve productivity.

Be mindful about meetings

Meeting minimisation was a big focus. We used a strategy called PAO (purpose, agenda, outcomes) and no one was able to schedule a meeting unless it had a PAO.

As a result, fewer meetings were set because oftentimes, the person who was about to set the meeting decided an email would suffice.

In addition, we deliberately defaulted to asynchronous communication as a team that also eliminated a lot of unnecessary time spent in meetings. And when we did meet, everyone was fully engaged, present, and prepared, meaning we used our time wisely.

Break down your goals

During the experiment, staff were given the choice as to whether they took Fridays off every week (on average, staff took the Friday off 70 per cent of the time).

An effective strategy that many of the team undertook was to break down their six-monthly OKRs (or goals) into quarterly, weekly and daily goals. This made it easy for them to decide whether they could take the Friday off guilt-free, based on how they were tracking.

Prioritise deep work

As a team, we had already learnt to prioritise our most important projects for the morning, given we are mostly a team of “morning people”.

It is rare to schedule meetings for before lunch as people were keen to protect their time to do deep, focused work.

During the FDW experiment, the team doubled down on protecting their mornings. Most people blocked it out in the diaries and then used timeboxing, whereby they would schedule meetings with themselves as to the “Deep Work” tasks they were focused on doing. This meant that the most important work was always done.

If your organisation is planning on trialling an FDW, be proactive in helping staff be more productive – don’t expect it to simply happen naturally.

Investigate training options for the team, such as what we did at Inventium. Without the 26 per cent uplift in productivity that we saw over the course of the experiment, it is likely that an FDW would have caused more stress than freedom.

Dr Amantha Imber is the founder of Inventium and the host of the How I Work podcast.