And so August is well and truly here and we’re over halfway through the summer holidays with its seemingly endless days of sunshine, ice cream, and madly scrambling to ensure holiday clubs are definitely booked for one’s offspring. There’s no question that the long summer holiday can be a stressful – and expensive - experience for parents.

A new trial might just be about to change that. Back in June, the thinktank Autonomy, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and Boston College kicked off a six month pilot scheme. About 70 companies would allow their employees to work a four-day week, but continue to pay staff 100% of their salaries. The idea was that the prospect of an extra day off each week would incentivise their teams to do the same amount of work in 80% of the time. It does sound pretty amazing, doesn’t it? At a time when the cost of living is spiralling, it would reduce employees’ childcare and commuting outgoings, reduce energy costs and emissions, and make staff feel that their hard work was appreciated. The theory was that the uplift in employee happiness should lead to fewer sick days and a lower rate of staff departure, and would attract talented new team members.

We’re now approaching the halfway point of the trial and we’re watching with interest. So far, the feedback seems promising. Many employees are shouting from the rooftops about this new focus on outputs, rather than on hours. A number have said that they no longer spend time scrolling the internet, or chatting to colleagues about non-work-related matters. They’re focussed on getting through their list of tasks without reducing productivity, and making the four-day-week model work for their organisation. This perhaps isn’t a huge surprise. Iceland ran a long-term trial of a four day working week, from 2015 to 2019. They found that productivity and service provision generally stayed the same or improved, that employee stress and burnout reduced, and that the trials remained revenue neutral for organisations taking part. When Microsoft’s teams in Japan trialled a four-day working week in Summer 2019, they found that not only did employees take 25% less time off, but productivity actually increased by an astonishing 40%.

It seems to us that this sort of experimentation can only be a good thing. Over the past two years, we’ve all spent huge amounts of time talking about where we work. Perhaps it’s time we also started thinking about how we work. Of course, it’s still important to carve out enough time for the sort of conversations that make creativity possible, and ideas blossom. Each organisation will want to ensure that the other four working days don’t become so intensive that they cancel out the staff wellbeing benefits that the scheme’s meant to promote. But overall, this still looks like a pretty exciting adventure for both employees and organisations.

We await the results excitedly…