The 4-Day Workweek Revolution: Redefining Productivity and Human Flourishing with Karen Lowe

Welcome to the Flourishing Edge, the podcast where we share weekly tips on making flourishing your competitive edge. I'm Ashish Kothari, your host and each week we'll dive deep with flourishing experts, change makers and executives to share best practices that can help you unlock higher performance through science based interventions. Let's step together into the edge of what's possible and live, work and lead with more joy, health, love and meaning. Karen, I am so excited to have you join us from South Africa for this Happiness Squad podcast on the we are talking about the four Day Work Week.

Thank you and thank you for the invitation. I've been so looking forward to speaking to you.

So Karen, I am curious. In a world which is all about getting more, more, more, more, more, how does somebody start their journey advocating for the four day Work week? And I'm just curious, you know, was there a personal or a professional origin story that really moved you towards truly designing work for humans and yeah, enabling them to be at their best?

Ashish yes, because living in South Africa and the world we live in here in South Africa is a post apartheid a very high percentage of youth and my clients were all very interested in trends that would improve well being. So South Africa overall has a very low well being school. We're not a happy, healthy, flourishing nation by any stretch and we have our struggles. And I was closely following some futurist work in my little nerd geek circle as I call it. And the four day week kept coming up and I thought I wonder if there's any possibility that this might work in South Africa given our absolute disparity between the lower skills and the higher skills, given our level of unemployment. And I really ran it as a non nonprofit initiative and a bit of a passion project, Ashish, because I felt that even if I could turn the needle just slightly on the conversations I was having with my clients and business owners, we were exhausted. We're fatigued where we don't know what to do. It was post Covid, you know, the overwork was normal. Everyone was putting in 15, 16 more hour days and I thought sure, I wonder if this might work and whether we might show some similar results to some of the more westernized first world countries. So I set out to experiment as a passion project and I think everybody was, I think everyone thought I was a little crazy when I first introduced it. But I managed to get the support of quite a few business initiatives, the Chamber of Commerce in Cape Town and Johannesburg. And I just had the most incredible upswell of individuals that got behind me and made it possible. And we ran a trial. We were the fourth pilot in the world. So it was quite exceptional for South Africa to be fourth in the world. And we ran it and it was wonderfully successful. And it just ignited my passion to explore. Explore what shorter work weeks could unlock and what impact it could have in the human flourishing space. Could we change happiness? Could we change disengagement? Could we improve cultures? Could we make space for skills development? So I'm still learning and I'm still exploring, but it's become my full time gig as opposed to a passion.

Yeah, well, you know, I have dedicated the second half of my life to, to the topic of human flourishing. And I'm doing it fundamentally from a place of recognizing that our workplaces are. And I use the work fundamentally broken. And I don't use it just for effect. I don't know what else to call them. When the research from Oxford shows only 20% of people are thriving at work. Right when the numbers are upside down like that, I'm not sure how we say our work needs to be improved. No work needs to be improved. We are at 70% thriving, 60% thriving, 50% thriving. But if only 20% are thriving, we actually need to address and acknowledge that our actually workplaces are fundamentally broken. And since we as humans create them, not just leaders and workers, but we together, we have to find our way out of it. So I have my definition of flourishing, but I'm curious. You talked about flourishing as a nation, you talked about flourishing as leaders, flourishing as organizations. How do you define flourishing? And as you started looking at 4 week, 4 day work week design, how does that contribute to flourishing?

So flourishing for me is understood at both perhaps an individual level and then at a business level. And I think for me it's critical to understand flourishing for myself. What does that mean in my life, in my work? You know what's very interesting about time is how we allocate time and where we put the time and energy. And for me, flourishing is I'm working at my capacity, not beyond it. I am feeling a sense of workability. In other words, I am proud of my performance. I'm able to show up as my best self and I think more importantly as a currency. I see time as a currency, your permissive use of time in activities that give you coins. And my version is a little pac man that collects coins of my age. We used to play that game. And flourishing is about collecting those coins for yourself to use, making sure that you're using your time deliberately and Intentionally at work and at play, at rest with family and being very deliberate as well as permissive about it. So flourishing for me is a state of presenteeism. It's a state of well being, it's a state of. It's felt. I feel I have capacity, I feel energized, I feel connected, I feel happy, I feel like I'm adding and contributing worth. And I think for me there's so much power in the individual flourishing environment that it can manifest as a collective in an organization. So if you work on individual flourishing for me and you find ways to create space and time to purposefully move into that space and organizations are not doing that particularly well, I think you have a collective flourishing as a. As a net result of a lot of individuals working towards that goal and being very clear of it. And secondly, an organization that enables that into the conversation. In the first place, Ashish, because I think flourishing, because it's understood at such a personal level, businesses are yet to attach the commercial value to flourishing and collective flourishing, perhaps, but it's a feeling, it's felt in your mental capacity, your emotional, your spiritual capacity that it's a felt feeling.

Flourishing for me and for you. You talk heavily on the, you know, there's so many things that contribute, right. For you. I think the big area that you've gone really deep is, is, is this notion of time. Do we have the time or do we feel. It's interesting, right? We're called human beings, but if any alien race explored and observed us, I don't think they would call us human beings. They will call us human doings. Not the first one who came up with that. I've heard it from so many others, but it really resonated with me because we don't like to be, we don't like to sit still. I'm also reminded of this how actually, you know, again, something that I feel is. So this is a problem, right? Again, this is not a. Oh yeah, it's interesting, it's a problem. There was this study that was done with people who were asked to just sit in a room without anything to do or they could actually choose to give themselves electrical shocks to keep themselves from not being bored, which were relatively painful. And a big chunk of people chose to do that than just sit still. And this wasn't for multi multiple hours. It was like 15 minutes, right? So this notion of we need to be always doing something somehow has become so deeply ingrained in us, it's been.

Normalized, hasn't it Ashish? And I think that's our problem. The things we normalize become habits. They're ingrained, whether it's at a cultural level. But what we practice ultimately with the use of the time and the limited time we have can point us in a certain direction. So sitting still we've forgotten to do pause. We've forgotten. Permission though, for me is the key to unlocking it. Because flourishing has to be enabled through the systems, our own personal management of time purpose. We need to feel a sense of purpose in what we do. And I think organizations that really have flourishing right have put people. They're not calling them human resources or human capital or human doers. They are human and they contribute towards a purpose that they're all collectively vested in. And the, the flourishing threshold for me therefore goes up overall. But I think these are. Organizations are few and far between and I think they're very. They're rare, they like unicorns these days. And I think given our complete and absolute bewilderment with this uncertainty and perpetual change that we face around us every day, I think as humans we're finding it harder and harder to give ourselves permission to step back. So we don't actually purposefully step back. We just, you know, that would be what everyone's called presenteeism or lying flat or all of those isms that the HR and and sort of broader world love to bring up. But it's not, it's the, this disengagement with exhaustion. It's not deliberate disengagement with pause to re enter. So you can still keep doing, I believe rest is doing. It's not doom scrolling or binge watching Netflix. It's an active state.

It's an act of renewal. It's an act of renewal.

Recovery. Absolutely.

And recovery. Right. So I want to get into some of the research that you did. I want to get into. Talk to me a little bit about the pilot you ran. How many companies and really what did you find around the improvements in flourishing in productivity? Just walk, walk us through a little bit of the details of the study.

So we've done multiple studies as 40 week global, starting in. Right way back in Perpetual Guardian, Pre Covid and then the United Kingdom, Ireland, Scotland and then South Africa. So shish. The results are quite different. Would you like me to focus on South Africa or would you like me to focus on this broad broader research trials that we've done?

Start with broader and then let's really double click on South Africa. And I'm curious about that.

So when we set out to research Please remember that it's self reported data and that's important. It's employees and business owners that are giving their input and that I'm going to circle back to that because it's a very important point when we speak about productivity because it's a hot mess. That word itself is very misunderstood. But globally, the four day week started as a productivity experiment and that's important. So the model is what we call the 180, 100 model. And this is also critical to understand because a lot of people confuse the four day week with perhaps compressed working hours. So we are not trying to cram 40 hours of work into four days. We are saying that the 32 hour work week is optimal and that organizations may not touch, remuneration or leave. They should look to reducing the workweek by 20% regardless of their baseline. So even if it's 60, reduce it. But the real caveat is the employees, in return for that reward of time and time back, they must give 100% output or productivity. So it's through that lens that we set out to research the impact of the four day week. And productivity for me is self reported. So some of the key findings for organizations which were critical, was there any impact on revenue? The answer is no. Most saw up to from revenue stable or up to as high as a 33% improvement in product in productivity and revenue. So we would call them productivity positive and revenue positive trials. We didn't go much further into that detail and a lot of the data is obviously private. So financial revenues, revenue, absolute revenue, obviously a lot of businesses wouldn't give us. Then we went into a layer of hard metrics, absenteeism, you know, number of sick days taken, Was there any attrition in the channel? I mean in your talent pipeline, were you battling to retain and attract a certain kind of talent or were you suffering from severe wellbeing issues? So a lot of our clients did have or a lot of our trial participants had very different reasons for their coming to the four day week. They wanted to measure different impact points. So it could have been well being, it could have been productivity, it could have been work time efficiency. But the results were very consistent across not just global countries, but in South Africa as well. So it wasn't just the west and westernized results. So once the productivity and the revenue and the hard business metrics were laid down, we were able to go into how employees felt about this. And this is where we really saw the gains. So we saw reported dropout in burnout, gains in sleep, gains in exercise, feelings of workability. And that's really important. If I feel that I'm able at work, then my capacity is unlocked. So I always call that the capacity play and the percentages. I mean, if I gave you a synthesized version of it, there was, there were slight differences between different countries. But overall you were seeing incredible productivity gains, I mean wellbeing gains. So the softer metrics which really counted for me was this overall sense that my staff feel better, they're resting better, they're performing better, they were more engaged, they're more loyal, they value the time back over remuneration. So no amount of money in some instances would be enough to get me back to a five day week. So the trials, as they ran and progressed past the 6 month, 12 month, 24 mark, over 95% of the organizations are still maintaining those benefits with a few being an exception to that norm. And we started investigating now how did the four day week actually manifest in organizations? In other words, one of the other misconceptions is well, it's a Friday off and we need to close the whole office on a Friday. That is not the case. It is the preferred day off. And organizations that are able to take that Friday off as a whole business without affecting their service level deliveries would have that. Or Mondays were the second preferred day. So you would get this three day consecutive weekend. But in South Africa that was the fundamental difference in how we differed completely from international studies is we had the preferred day of Wednesday off, the midweek Pause.

How's that?

I think it had a lot to do with perhaps a skew of certain sectors within my trial. So we had a lot of marketing, communication agencies. Obviously that's my background, so I attracted a lot of those. We had quite a few in tech and then we had the aunt that were nonprofit or in 24, 7 service delivery. And I think a Wednesday allowed buddy systems to develop. So we were creating capacity for client coverage. But the way we interpreted it was well, we need to be available either 24, 7 or 9 to 5 because that is the expectation of clients and the workload and deadlines and the way the work load was running, the flows were running, did not enable or make Friday a preferential day off. And then further to that, we had a very high percentage of females in our sample, more so than the international trials. So we were a bit skewed. I think it was about 64% female in the South African trial, a lot of whom were working mothers. And what got really interesting there is their choice of time off. Was not a long weekend, it wasn't a Friday or a Monday. It was time off every day. I would like to go into work later and come home earlier. So the eight hours saving essentially from a 40 to a 30 hour, 32 hour work week came every day. So they were able to fetch their kids or take them to school, watch a sports match. Better redistribution of household labor. So you started seeing this ability to. I don't feel overwhelmed by work and home. I managed to distribute the chores that I need to do. That mental load and fatigue as working women that we often get some. So we saw two half days and time off every day. So South Africans were far more creative in their approach to it. They also battled to get to that 32 hour mark. So they were less successful over a period of time than other international organizations. And we are two years post trial and we still have about 82% of our 30 organizations that have continued but some have lapsed and gone to a four and a half day week and others have kept it for only certain teams. And that drives me slightly nuts because I need it to be inclusive because it's not. If it's not inclusive, it really does tip culture in all of the wrong ways. So I think in summary, really Ashish, the four day week has shown incredible well being benefits whether it's sleep, exercise. Oh, the German, I forgot about the German trial. They went so far as to have a control group where they literally took hair samples and measured, measured the actual stress impact against the reported stress impact. And we saw a physiological increase in number of steps. So they had wearables, the control group and the cortisol levels dropped in the hair samples that were taken. So not only did we have the reported stress, that was the first overlay of scientific evidence that we got to show actually it's reported but it is physiologically apparent we are seeing an extra increase. And what was interesting, I don't know if you've, and I haven't had it for a long time thankfully but a lot of people have that Monday dread on a Sunday that stress starts to ratchet up. I've got another work week. That was something that went right up in the German control group. So they asked, they did some journaling and, and logs. How do you feel about Monday now that you're in a four day week? And that dread disappeared. They were looking forward, they were rested, they had planned ahead. So you know, the trials continue. And from police departments in Denver, Colorado, City of Golden to 24, seven emergency rooms to a manufacturing place In Toowoomba to efficient.

I have so many questions, Karen. I'm so curious. Look, you know, when I started Happiness Squad two and a half, three years ago, and literally one of the things we put in the manifesto, we are nowhere close to that. Don't get me. I'll tell you that as a longer conversation. But I put like, I wanted to design a company that once. When it actually gets to a certain level. Right. Starting a company is really hard, especially if you're bootstrapping it. But once we. And we are kind of bringing in capabilities and building. Right. But I always had this vision of a four plus one where we work four days and the fifth day is really open for people to spend in any way they want. We wanted to attract people who really feel their life's mission is this mission that we have of helping a billion flourish. So hopefully they would be working on that mission. But if they wanted to do that as a recovery day, nature day, invest in their own learning day, spend time with their family day, whatever it is, like, I think we wanted that to be, you know, like really that that needs to be. That's a day. So to your point, it's not that you're not working on that day, but you're actually spending the day based on what you think you want to spend that day on. And if it is on work, I love that because we are really, for me, my work and life are one I really like. This is when I'm not with my son and my wife and working out or, you know, doing something with friends, I work. That's because my work is my life. I read that's the reality, but that was, you know, I think it's a really. That's been kind of. I'm still holding that in my head. So I'm really curious about getting into some of the details because I want to really make that work and I want to figure out a way to hopefully make that work. Even after this conversation going into our last quarter, rather than just think about it and wait for when that happens, then we go do it. So question number one in these groups that you're looking that you looked at, what was the mix of for profit versus not for profit and did it work better in some spaces versus another?

Ashley Shah, I need to get back to you directly on that percentage. But we have and always have attracted social enterprises and non for profits and it is very much a sweet spot for us as an organization. We are a global nonprofit ourselves. And we have worked since all the trials. We continue to work with a lot of non for profits and social enterprises. We've worked with B corp in terms of B lab. So for example B lab Europe has now transitioned to a four day week B lab Canada, US as well. And now Europe is the rest of Europe is following suit. And the point here really for me, and it fascinates me, social enterprises that are purpose driven or nonprofits that have a deep sense of purpose ingrained work is not as a result of trying to create shareholder value. It's mission is about individuals that are passionate and therefore don't know when to stop contributing, to take rest, to recover. So it's ingrained in them. I'm so excited about what I do that when you said you're talking to me on a Friday evening, well, I love this. I, I love what I do. It's not work and where you see the highest burnout risk. And we've seen it in South Africa as well where the non for profits, those guys working for foundations and really doing the hard yards in the trenches. What they get exposed to, whether it's trauma or whether it's overwork and fatigue and burnout, they're at the highest risk of overwork. It's the right overwork to fix. And they're more sensitized to the four day week because they're purpose driven. So for us it's such a pleasure to go and go. It's okay to rest, it's okay to take a step back. You will be more powerful and more productive in your mission if you are able to rest and recover deliberately.

I have seen that firsthand. So I serve the U.S. olympic Committee, USA Gymnastics, USA Ski and Snowboard. So I'm very familiar with the movement. You know, we've also spent time with some other not for profits. But really I see it firsthand, right When I see we have a five part model called Pearl which is are the five ingredients of flourishing. 80 to 90% find meaning at work. Most for profit organization, that number is like 15, 20%, right? Many of these organizations 80%. Second question. It's actually our fifth question. But the question on how do you feel you have the ability to manage stress or how often do you feel stressed during the week? That number is like 60, 70, 80%. Only 20% of people feel that their stress is manageable. Right. So here's mission driven. People really showing up. It's not they're doing it for money or personal gain. They're doing it to actually have an impact on the sport. They're doing it to have an impact on the families and the kids and they're just burning themselves out, not recognizing that in that state of depletion, you're not doing your best work, you're not making the best decisions, it's taking you longer to do what you need to do. So I'm really excited about that. I have a second question. This conversation is brought to you by Happiness Squad, where we help leaders build new mindsets, new habits and transform their ways of working to truly flourish. If you're ready to unleash the untapped human potential in your organization and operate at your best, come Visit us@happinesssquad.com and start your journey. Today. You talked about the 32 hours and then 40 hour, you know, five day work week. And you talked about it is not about fitting 40 hours into 32 hours, but I want to just disaggregate even that 38, 32 hours. Like what does that look like in a work, work week? Are we talking about people working from eight to five with an hour of lunch or are we talking about people working 8 to 4 and whatever time they do to recover, recharge? Because I'm a big fan of micro recoveries throughout the day and actually a little bit longer recovery. So I'm just curious about when we talk about 32 hours, what does that actually look like in practice?

Very different organization to organization and often department to department. So it's never a one size fits all model. So we give them the 180, 100 framework and we say, you may not touch pay. You are aiming over a period of time to get that 20% reduction in the work week. It's not something you switch on, it's something you transition towards. And the first step is defining the productivity and outputs. So you start with that. What am I responsible for? What is my workload? What do I need to output? What's the output? Then you go back and say, under what circumstances can I do that in a 20% reduction from my baseline, whatever that is, 40 to 32 or 60.

Whatever hours you're working, whatever hours you're working.

Correct. And we start by eliminating waste. No one is efficient. 8 till 5, 9 till 6. No one is efficient and able to work at full capacity for a full eight hour day. It is impossible. And we have jammed our diaries with back to back meetings, distractions that cost you 23 minutes. Every time you have to reset from a mobile notification or a, you know, a WhatsApp message or whatever it might be, we're unintentional with who we're interacting with, how we're interacting.

Yeah, there's no space for deep work. There's no space for deep work.

And if you don't put it in the diary, and this is what we teach our businesses and our clients, put it in the diary, plan for the rest and recovery. So to circle back to your question, that looks different depending on what outputs are required. The joy of the four day week is it's a bottom up approach. It is not for the leaders nor the managers to decide how that team or individual will deliver those outputs. That agency is transferred to the employee. And through that autonomy and agency that you derive, because I'm consulted, I co create what is possible in a shorter work week. I start with eliminating waste. I start building boundaries around my time. I plan my rest and recovery. That suits me in my own personal capacity with the team, collective outputs in mind if I'm part of a large team. And then it starts getting a little bit more complicated. If you're working in frontline or shift work, et cetera, you might have to increase headcount, but you'll often find that the productivity and throughput will go through the roof. So overall, from a return on investment perspective, even though you've increased your headcount because you've got more rested staff, all of the other markers go up in the right way and ultimately the ecosystem settles into flourishing because that's what happens. So you're giving time agency and you're giving permission to use it wisely. And it drives me mad how few organizations don't allow us to adult. We can adult. We know instinctively where our time is going missing. We know when we've got too many back to back meetings. Even worse, we know when we're in a meeting that we're not even supposed to be in. Why am I being invited to a meeting that I am supposed to passively sit there while I'm in the meeting? My screen is off, I'm busy scrolling through multitudes of other different things. I'm not really focused. Sometimes my camera's off and it's, it's just this ecosystem of waste. And I call it brown behavior because it's just waste. And depending on where you are in the organization, you are always, there's always efficiencies to be had and nobody knows better where those efficiencies are or where the barriers are to removing those distractions, etc. Than the employee themselves that's doing the work. But it's permission and fundamentally that's what Makes the four day week work. It's that permissive culture that goes, I trust you to do your job.

I love that.

Tell me how it's possible in 32 in a 32 hour work week. And they plan it together as a team.

I love that. So what I'm taking away is number one, you know, social enterprises, not for profits, right? Naturally, right places to start. You have to start somewhere, you have to build the case and then everybody starts to kind of see it and they say, by the way, why does it apply only to them? It can apply to all sorts of. So I love that. The second is, what you're saying is this is not an artificially constructed, here's the eight hours and you start from there. You're saying, start from where you are, look at what you produce, look at the hours you work and just start by saying, how can I do that in 20% less? So if it is 60, you work. Everybody has 60 hours a week. You work usually from let's say 8 to 6 and you're doing some work afterwards, which is the normalcy unfortunately for many people. 9 to 10, 10, 30 people will log in, do things, take that as a given and now see if you can do it by 20% less. But as you set that aspiration, start by thinking about the sources of loss, places where you can gain efficiency. Maybe you commute two hours every day and you're like, hey, if two days, if I actually didn't commute, I could actually get that work done. So really think about all sources of efficiency and effectiveness where they're lost. Three, I am a big believer. So all of the flourishing work, right? I talked about this in my TEDx talk that came out this week. I love when you said autonomy and flexibility and giving the teams the choice and individuals the ability to actually self manage their work and be at their best is so, so powerful. I love that because I think when we do, I do talk about assets as people, as human assets. And my joke, somebody got really upset at me, Karen, and one of the HR individuals and they said, I find you disgusting, really, that you talk about people as assets and machines. Because I talk about we should manage people like we manage machines. And he's like, that's terrible. I said, well hear me out. If we treated people as assets, trust me, it's one step further than treating people as asses or donkeys. Because today we use carrots and sticks, fear and reward, promotion or fighting as the predominant way to motivate. And we don't believe that unless it's egged on by a carrot or hit on the back by a stick. They're not going to get there. So if you start treating them like Assets, what does that mean? You will never run a machine down to the ground. You would do preventative maintenance. You would only schedule for 80% of the time. You would think about under what conditions is it operating. Because humans don't come with a gauge that says, needs maintenance, needs fuel change, engine is overheated. We just keep running, assuming people are going to do it, but in an environment where they don't feel safe, they don't till they burn out. And so my point was, you should. I think Assets is actually a step further. And then we can go about thinking about them as unbelievable sources of innovation. Because unlike assets, people have the ability to grow. So if somebody can do something over time, they can grow to do even more. Physical machines don't have that. If this produces 100 units, that's what is designed, that's what it will. But humans are not like that. We can learn. What I can do today versus what I could do 10 years ago is order of magnitude higher. It's not even a linear growth. But here's where I am curious, Karen. So I love that notion of autumn and flexibility, but I also hear and I also wrestle with this. I think there are four or five ingredients that I think need to be in place. And I want to test that with you because you've actually researched this. And I'm curious how many of these elements were actually present in those organizations? Because implicit in this is, if I give you autonomy and flexibility, in what conditions will you actually show up and do your best work versus basically say, oh, my God, that's great. I am actually going to focus on my life, not my work. That's the real. That's the real doubt in many people's mind, do I trust Karen if I give her four days that she will actually do the work, you know, that the way it's designed to be, or, you know, Karen's only working 30, 40% of the time anyway. Now, if I. Since she did 40 hours, at least I got 28 hours and I give her 32 hours, now I'm going to get even less, right? And I think these ingredients can ensure it. And maybe the social enterprises have more of this. I think it's. It's important that you're doing your life's work. If people don't find meaning in what they're doing, and as managers, we don't create it, I'M not. People would say, yeah, my life matters more than work. That's not the case for me. And so I work all the time. But I think this notion of purpose and helping people find meaning in what they're doing, I think is an important foundational step. I think the second is do people feel energized showing up to work? Right. Have we taught them how to have better conflicts? Have we taught them how to be recognized and valued? Or do they just feel like a cog in the wheel? If you feel like a cog in the wheel, then you act like a cog in the wheel. You don't take initiative, you do what you have to do and that's it. Are you put in an environment that allows you to continuously learn or are you just stuck and you're like, look, if I do stuff versus I don't do stuff, I'm stuck. So why do I do more? I feel trusted and I trust. That's where flexibility, autonomy comes. It's such a core foundation of relational fabric between us. Right. And then, yeah, I am upskilled. And as an organization we stack hands to put some of the organizational things around. Hey, what that means is if we have to do 40 hours of work in 32, we get better. Good at prioritization. Right? So how do you think about these skills as a foundation before you can go to a four day work week versus something that you consciously measure as you evolve towards getting to a four day work week? How does that resonate with you?

Ashish, all your points spark with me because they're all embedded in what we coach at the four day week. Organizations that mandate top down will not succeed.

Yep.

Organizations that hand over autonomy and allow teams and individuals to be a part of the process co create an environment that then an individual feels responsible and obligated to see their part of the bargain through. We don't call it a contract between an employer and employee. It's a pact. So we don't even put a policy and procedure manual on it. There are rules of engagement, but one of the fundamental things that you see change is the interaction in the teams. Because your time off is not just your time off. If your productivity drops, and as a result the collective of your team productivity drops, everyone loses the time off. So you're not just paying for your time off, you're paying for your peers. You're playing to ensure that everybody gets that inclusive state. And by doing that, you're upweighting this one insight into the other team and colleagues, how they value Time you get a deeper sense of understanding of what drives them, what motivates them, what gets in their way. You have conversations around meeting protocols, you have conversations around what you can say no to. And again, I go back to that word, permissive state. It's around the leadership. Companies that come to us are either very much in a confused window, shopping not really too sure, or they come to us almost fully socialized. And some of them don't even want to experiment. They just want to transition to a four day week and they want to get the implementation plan, how to do it. And we always go through a little bit of adoption readiness, like where are you? And we sense check exactly that. Are your employees to make? Are your employees able to make decisions for themselves? Will you walk the talk? In other words, as a leader, will you too be taking a four day week or are you going to be sitting there 60 hours while your staff are working? A 32 hour work week doesn't work if the whole organization does not work together to make this happen. You speak about energy and capacity. The four day week is one of the most powerful capacity builders I have ever encountered. And it's individual capacity and it becomes collective capacity. Because in removing waste and in giving permission to rest and putting you into a problem, constant problem solving mode because you're going to encounter issues, it's a change management process. It doesn't just work in a linear fashion. You're going to have problems to solve. Don't solve it up there. Get together as a team, go. We found this problem. Our time off is collectively dependent on how do we fix it. Go up to your line manager and go, we've encountered this problem, this is how we're going to fix it. We adjust a few things. Everyone's on the same page, so communication is absolutely key. But the collective capacity grows as the transition moves along. So you'll see in month three the guilt associated with doing the four day week, which is very evident in all of the organizations. People feel guilty about taking their time off because it's not normal. It hasn't been normalized. So it takes a while for that normalization of that new culture to entrench itself. The high performers stand out and have difficulty detaching from work because they're so ingrained as part of who they are as individuals. And your low performers, my word, does the spotlight get shone on them. But the beauty happens is the team members pull those low performers in or they leave. So you get this flywheel that starts turning and every now and then Someone will stick us, you know, spoke in the wheel and it'll stutter a bit and bad habits creep back in. They certainly do. So you need to be intentional about. Don't let the meeting protocols overrun. We've agreed on this. But the biggest value is being able to say no. And in saying no, without it affecting my succession, my mobility in that organization, without it having any consequence to my colleagues or my superiors, I am finally able to then make a decision on what time agency I have outside of work. And if I choose to re enter and do more work, it's because it's the joy or the purpose or the mission or whatever it is or a new skill or social work or spending time with family or caregiving whatever it is. So I think all of those ingredients, but it starts with agency and autonomy. And it's like an honesty jar, Ashish. It's like a little honesty box at a coffee machine. It unlocks that basic respect for one's time and the value that an individual places on it which may be different to yours. So this conscious awareness of time use and permissive time use is just raised and it unlocks everything around.

You know, I'll tell you I came into this conversation a believer and a doubter. My life over the last several years has been a life of playing with polarities. I think our world lives in polarities. And I think the answer I'm convinced I had this conversation with my wife earlier today. I think I'm leaning more into there is always a middle way. It's not either and or so like that's what I say today. Like I came into it a believer, 100% believer. Why? Because in my last five years at McKinsey I worked 70% I was on part time program. And in those five years, especially in the last two years which were the COVID years in my 30% time, I wrote a book, my first book called Hardwired for happiness. After reading 450 different books. My productivity at work in my 70%, all my metrics around client impact, team impact, knowledge contribution were the same as they were earlier. Actually my client impact went up. People were like oh my God, when you're here you're really present, you know. And the best part, everybody respected those days. I didn't work, I didn't work. I worked Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Now my and I love this also because it's putting this to me. Many people laughed at me. I did work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I worked 40 hours Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Then I did about four hours on Monday and Friday, and they were reserved only for client calls. If a client needed me, I was there. But I also told my clients I work 70% of the time. So most clients actually respected that boundary. And unless it was really important, they were like, hey, all good, right? I know you're really here Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and I can reach you at any time. I was good. Many people laughed at me and said, dude, how is 40 hours a 70% job? But I'm like, to your point, it doesn't matter. Four day work week does not mean you go to 32 hours. I work 60 hours. I thought it was a privilege for the job that I was doing as a partner at one of the leading firms. So for Me, you know, 80, 70% was 42 hours. I was happy with that. And I saw these. So I came in a believer. I also came in a doubter because I'm like, I also know that unlike machines, which I know how many units it can produce and every machine of that kind can produces that. And I can measure it when it comes to humans leading 25 years, leading teams, I know even a basic staff, as an Excel model, somebody can do it in 30 minutes. Somebody might take two hours or three hours. It depends on their strengths. It depends on their experience. And so, you know, as a leader, as you're thinking about designing work, as you're thinking about how do you allocate capacity, how do you even do that when you don't actually know the full skills of everyone? And so how do you even go do that? But I think you've given me the answer because even in that model, I was still thinking top down that as a leader I should think about how much work people are doing versus letting people actually think about, based on their capacity, where they are, what they can do. And I think that is the solve, which it goes back to kind of trust. And as a job of me as a leader to find and give them meaning in what they're doing, support them, encourage them, value them, but then trust that they will show up and live their end of the bargain. I think if we don't change our own mindsets and hearts around that level of trust and believing in the good. I don't think we're four day work weeks work. So I think it requires a deep sense of surrender and belief.

It does.

I'm reminded of this Ted Lasso believe. I think I'm gonna put a believe on my. All offices should have believe on their. A poster of believe on their four.

Day work weeks it's been a wonderful privilege working in this space because I have seen organizations transform. If you have time, I would love to tell you a very special story about one of my clients. So in South Africa we have 21, 22 universities. And in South Africa the aspiration to go to university is very high for our young population. So we have 680 odd thousand kids wanting to go into tertiary education and only space for about 202,000. So that's the structure or that's the context. Within that we have a melting pot of race, gender, poor backgrounds, very wealthy backgrounds. And we have many issues. So we have many, many issues in South Africa. Every university will have a student counseling center and they provide support to the student body. That's all psychosocial services. So whether it's trauma counseling, psychology therapy sessions, social work, learning and disability support. And at the start of the academic year, we have a housing crisis at all the universities around the country. Too many students, not enough housing, student loans, not processed. They are protest action. These centers are severely depleted. And Stellenbosch University, one of our prestigious universities, put their hand up and said we want to do a trial. He did it without permission, Shaul Davits. And he will acknowledge that now, but he is stuck with it. What was absolutely phenomenal to see was this group of 66 psychotherapists, social workers, et cetera. Every year, the intake, we have four terms in South Africa, not three. In February, students come to campus and it's crazy for a month until everything settles down. In the year before the trial, there were 51 days of absenteeism logged in March post onboarding for the academic year. The year of the trial, there were four.

Wow.

And this has persisted. And not only that, because there were no burnout, because they had rested, because they had planned ahead for the capacity that was required of there, they were able to manifest it the following year and they wouldn't. They didn't have to go outside of the university confines to hire in private practitioners to cover the load that the student center was not able to handle. So they saved millions in rands, millions. Not having to outsource to private sector. And their wait time for student access to actually be able to access counseling services dropped from three months to three weeks, which is better than private sector access in South Africa. Six months, that's all it took was to change that ecosystem. And now they have a flourishing, not burnt out student or a student center that is able to deliver on the needs of the student body without any change other than they reduced their work week.

Karen, I love that story and I'm actually meeting a dean of a local university later today for lunch. If you wouldn't mind sending me that case study if that's written up and others like that. I want to print a copy of that in give that My friend, thank you for this conversation. I've learned so much and I hope it's not just one conversation but we now in our ecosystems and I wish and hope to learn a lot from you. I think we're going to use August as a month of August and September as a month of planning and maybe I'll set up some more calls with you but I would love to see, I would love to see how we move as Happiness Squad to a four day, four day work week company.

I would be delighted to assist you with and thank you so much for your time. You've given me coins and you filled my cup speaking to you today. So I'm very grateful for your time as well. It's been an absolute privilege.

Thank you. Have an amazing weekend.

And you Ashish, I'll send you the case study now.

Awesome. Bye Karen.

Okay, bye.

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