The 4 Day-Workweeks and the Mental Health Crisis at Work

Let me start by saying I’ve built a new destination for members-only content. It’s on Patreon and it is the next level after this. I will, of course, keep writing in these newsletters but I’ll reserve the juicy bit, the controversial parts and most of my boiling indignation for there. Expect “No one gets fired for buying IBM but they should” T-shirts or “Agile from the heart, not consultancy PowerPoint” mugs and all the other things I said that caused a fuss, in between a flurry of straight-shooting content from videos to blogs. No filter, no punches pulled, no wooden language, no lip service and no impression management. The real of the business world with topics from big tech to the cases of HumanDebt that are straight-up abusive and any other ideas we’ve been waltzing around here from business ghosting to bullying cultures and their endless examples to honest discussion about remuneration, how broken performance metrics are and how people may appear lazy when burned out. Could we talk about all this here? We can and have done but not in the same way and the time for pleasantries has passed, if we want to get ahead of this public health emergency in the workplace and to remain competitive we have to call a spade a spade. It’s not free but it’s worth it. Join me on there in an exclusive community where we’re keeping it unprecedentedly real.

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This week I’ll gleefully admit we have had one big win in the world of work which is the amazing news of the success of the 4 days weeks experiment that went so very well that 100 other companies will moves straight to that model. Not that the employees will suffer no pay drop as a consequence as their hours are reduced. As I understand it, all the participants in the scheme managed to do one simple thing that albeit seemingly obvious has been missed as a step by many a bigger enterprise: explore what outcomes truly mean within their particular business and then communicate clear expectations to their employees.

By doing this, they have ensured that the exact timing of work becomes less relevant than accomplishing the work itself and in the instances where this is possible, the ability to complete that work in whatever timeframe best suits the worker.

A focus on performance and outcomes is what would have been an incredible secret weapon in anyone’s arsenal if only most enterprises would have framed an open, blue-sky, tabula rasa discussion about the future of work and the true definition of flexibility from the beginning but here we are, years “after the pandemic” and covered in new work policies of all kinds while most organisation have never undertaken this all-important co-creation mechanism.