4 day work week, let's get this party started.

20 Australian companies have recently joined the 4 day work week trial, coordinated by 4-Day Week Global, in partnership with the thinktank Autonomy, the 4 Day Week Campaign, and researchers at Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College.

The idea of the 100:80:100 approach is people receive 100% of pay, work 80% of hours and achieve 100% of goals.

In reality, unless people significantly improve their work practices, remove distractions and increase focus, they are more likely to be working in a compressed model, where they are doing the same amount of hours, compressed into 4 days.

Whilst this might sound a fair deal to some, the compressed model has proven to reduce productivity and increase burn out, particularly amongst women.

You might be wondering how on earth a company can achieve 100% of its productivity goals in 80% of the time. When looking for opportunities to pare back time, start with meetings.

We’ve all sat through underwhelming, poorly run meetings, meetings that could have been emails or phone calls, meetings to prepare for bigger meetings.

Sadly, meetings are one of the biggest time wasters of all.

When you stop and do the math, 6 people in a 30 minute meeting = 3 hours, you might decide to rethink your approach.

The first question - is a meeting really necessary?

Meetings are great for collaboration, decision making, motivating and inspiring, learning and clear information exchange. But when our days are littered with meetings, we have limited opportunities for deep work where we can apply ourselves to our most important tasks without distraction.

Here’s two quick changes you can introduce that will have an immediate positive impact.

P.A.T. - Purpose. Agenda. Timebound

Writing up the Purpose for the meeting together with a clear goal or outcome, helps you decide if a meeting is the best approach.

Agenda gets sent, ideally a day or two before, together with any pre-reading or preparation required.

Timeframe, start and finish time, which takes us to the ON THE DOT rule.

NB No PAT, no meeting

ON THE DOT rule

Research from the Journal of Organizational Behaviour shows meetings that start late can be irritating and rude. They're also significantly less productive than meetings that start on time. But we didn't really need research to tell us that.

Make a commitment to each other that all meetings will start on the dot. Do I hear cheers from all the task oriented people? For all those that like a bit of social chit chat, you might choose to arrive 5 minutes early to a meeting, or schedule time at the end of the meeting for some networking - but put it on the agenda.

If you're keen to overhaul your company's approach to meetings, I recommend you take some time to understand how meetings are impacting everyone's productivity. Ideally, everyone should be allocating their priority tasks to the hours when they are most productive. If people are sitting in meetings during these hours, you are really compromising your work product. Declaring meeting free time bands at least three days a week can boost productivity, satisfaction and happiness.

If you'd like to talk about how a 4 day work week could be achieved, please get in touch.