Law At Work will become the latest company in Jersey to move to a four-day working week, following a successful trial last year.
The employment, employee relations and health and safety specialist will move to a more flexible working arrangement between May and September after staff, who will not see a drop in their pay, unanimously supported the move.
Law At Work (LAW) trialled a four-day working pattern between May to September and the 4 weeks before Christmas. It followed similar moves by other businesses and a growing campaign in the UK for a 32-hour working week.
LAW recognised that in modern workplaces, more businesses have adopted new working practices and as an organisation that advises other companies on workplace matters, it should also embrace new ways of working.
Heidi Gibaut (pictured), Group Managing Director of LAW, and her team were keen to see whether it would work, what difficulties would arise and what benefits it would bring.
Heidi said: “There are some compelling reasons for businesses to consider this. In our case, we wanted to create a better work-life balance for our colleagues, we wanted to retain their skills and knowledge and we wanted to attract new staff. But we also wanted to move away from measuring time spent at a desk and instead look at productivity and customer satisfaction.
“Talking to our people, they didn’t want to let our clients down, so we made sure that we had the right systems and technology in place, and we recruited three more members of staff to help with the changes.”
The business tried two different ways of organising it. Firstly, by alternating between Monday to Thursday and then Tuesday to Friday, which gave everyone one long weekend every two weeks. They also trialled random days for each person to take off during the week.
Heidi added: “After trying both, we opted for Monday to Thursday and Tuesday to Friday because the random days were confusing and difficult to manage. For now, we will just be doing this in the summer, but if it continues to work well, then we’ll try it all year round. What really sold it to us was that we hadn’t told our advisory clients that we were trying this and at the end of the year we carried out a client satisfaction survey. They noticed no difference to the services they received.”
