Early in our 2018 experience with the 4 day week in our business Perpetual Guardian, we came across the problem which a lot of you also find. We can’t all take Fridays off; or, we don’t want to.

What do we do with people who are already working four days or less, or those who are working more than 40 hours?

I sat down with our team and we came up with our 100-80-100™ principle. This is:

100% pay, working 80% time, giving 100% productivity.

By using this mathematical formula, we are able to help people reduce work time in a meaningful way, while having a conversation about the productivity needed by the business to ensure that pay is unchanged.

Andrew Barnes often says that the journey to reducing work time is a compact between a business and its people — focus on improving productivity, so we can reduce work time.

But it is so much more than that too!

What we find when a business pilots some form of reduced-hours work is that team engagement improves. I have so many leaders tell me that it is the best team building exercise they have ever run. People enjoy work more and they are happier at work. The extra time for their personal lives means they are happier outside of work. We see the evidence of this in the reduced stress, fatigue and insomnia levels in our research. When people enjoy their work, they bring a happier person home; when they are happier at home, they bring a happier person to work. There is a delicious circle of ever improving life scores for all.

The businesses that take an active approach to team engagement with the reduced hours mission find they get continuous improvement and happiness scores remain high for all staff.

So I ask you to remember – As business leaders, we borrow our people from their lives and it is our responsibility to ensure that work facilitates a proper balance between the professional and the personal.