One year on from trialling a four-day work week, UK agency Radioactive PR has increased its earnings by 70% while retaining its net margin.
Radioactive PR introduced a six week trial of a four-day working week without cutting staff pay in June 2018, and after receiving a positive response from both clients and staff, decided to make the shortened week permanent.
Employees went from working 36 hours per week across five days to 31 hours, working Monday –Thursday, and are paid the same salary. Staff are effectively ‘on call’ on Fridays, should clients, journalists or anybody else need them. The agency says this promise to clients is the fundamental reason they are able to make this change. Lunch hours also went from one hour to 45 minutes and holiday days from 25 to 20.
Staff have gained 44 additional days off work throughout the year because of the change, which is the equivalent of six years over a working lifetime of 50 years, Radioactive says.
One year on from the move, the business has seen a 70% increase in turnover against the same 12-month period prior to implementing the new working regime. The agency has also celebrated a number of new clients across multiple sectors, including start-ups and personal PR clients.
A better work-life balance
Staff and clients have praised the intiative, saying they enjoy a better work-life balance and that they felt “more relaxed at home as a result of the four-day week”.
When staff members were asked ‘do you think you’ve enjoyed a better work-life balance since it was implemented?’ with a scale of 0-10, 0 (not at all) to 10 (definitely), three quarters of the team selected 10 – definitely. The next question was ‘do you think there has been a drop in communication with clients since the four day week began?’ 100% of the team answered 0 – not at all.
Staff sick days, already low at just 1.3 employees per year, has halved, and the number of CVs received per job role advertised has doubled. Staff have also cited the additional day as helping them towards various personal goals, including finishing a Masters degree, volunteering, getting a dog and spending more time with the family.
Rich Leigh, the founder of Radioactive PR, said: “We’re one year into a four-day working week and the results are fantastic. In the last year, I’ve been clear with the team that it’s ours to lose. And it still is – I wouldn’t steer us into an iceberg if it was clear it wasn’t working. Clients have been amazingly supportive, and this is down to us promising that we are still contactable, just as before where if a crisis occurred or they needed us at 10pm on a Saturday night, we’d be there.
“I’ve long-thought that overworking and unrealistic expectations on staff time runs counter to results, especially in an industry where, last year, 60% of people surveyed said they’d experienced mental ill health. I hope it continues to go as well as it has.”
