Momentum Mental Health is a community mental health service. They are a team of 14 staff based in Toowoomba and Chinchilla, servicing the Darling Downs area of Queensland, Australia. Their CEO, Debbie Bailey tells us more:

We are a charitable, for-purpose organisation who deliver psychosocial services and coaching – essentially we deliver on the non-clinical side of mental health. We work in a coaching style and help people to rebuild their self-agency, skills, and confidence and help them reconnect with community and employment. Our goal in working with anyone is that they use our coaches and groups to add skills to their toolkit, so ultimately, they don’t need us anymore. We have been delivering these services for 27 years and our structure is as a company limited by guarantee, registered as a charity and we are governed by a Board of Directors (volunteer) with me leading the team as the CEO.

I’ve been watching the 4 day week movement for a few years and have been waiting for the right organisation and the right team of people to trial it. In early 2022, I found out about the Australia/New Zealand trial starting on 1 August 2022. When I discovered the support and resources that would be available to participants, I knew it was the time to recommend that we enter the trial to my board.

Implementation

There was certainly trepidation in the team and the board when the concept was raised. The team thought it was a great idea (who doesn’t want to work four days and still be paid for five!?) But there was also very healthy skepticism; they couldn’t see how it is feasible to fit five days of work into four.

To our Board’s credit, they are committed to the organisation and upholding our Mission: To challenge and influence the mental health system and show there is a better way. This mission applies to how we work but also to how we treat our staff and operations.

The board understood the staff appetite to try something different and so, had the courage to let us enter the trial.

You’d think, being a mental wellbeing organisation, the driving interest for us around this trial would be about life/work balance, but it wasn’t. For us, trialing a 4 day week was all about productivity. As a not for profit, we work hard to squeeze the value out of every dollar. I’d read the 4 day week was first trialed on the basis of improving productivity and that was the hook for me.

I wanted to see if there was a way we could work smarter, deliver better outcomes and increase our productivity without increasing our cost or decreasing our quality.

My thinking was echoed in the very first webinar we did as part of the preparation for the trial – Andrew Barnes spoke to the basics of the 4 day week model and led with, “this is a productivity exercise first and foremost.”

Challenges

Our biggest challenge with the trial was how to ensure all staff had a base level of understanding on the great resources we were exposed to about how to change our working style and the structure of our day. Staff in our 4 day week project team attended all the available webinars and shared the learnings but other staff had not taken the time to watch the recordings or fully digest the lessons.

This was a big concern for me. I was worried our trial could fail before we’d even started and after years of watching and waiting, I really wanted us to have the best possible chance to make this work.

To mitigate this risk, we decided to mandate a minimum learning level that all staff had to complete. Out of the eight-or-so webinars we attended, we selected four key webinars that all staff had to watch, read the notes and start to practice implementing, as a minimum.

Staff could only sign up to the trial once they had done this learning and started to put these changes into place.

Outcomes

One of the best outcomes for us from the trial is that we developed a suite of productivity measures – something we didn’t have in place. We now measure 27 different areas of productivity that relate to the organisation, our client service and also for our staff. The measures aren’t onerous, they are collected from existing data sources and collated in one spreadsheet on a monthly basis.

Some highlights from our productivity measures show:

• Staff capacity is up 11%; Client hours of service are up 20%; Sick leave is down by 30%; Staff stress levels are down; happiness at work is up; and our employee net promoter score is sitting at 78, which is exceptional!

• We have chosen to extended the trial until 31 July 2023 to give us a full 12 months of data and productivity measures. At this stage, we are exceeding our targets in over 95% of our measures – making a compelling argument to make it a permanent feature at the end of the 12 month trial.

• Staff also are keen to maintain the model, saying the 4 day week is a compelling reason to stay with the organisation, even if they have a competitive offer elsewhere. It just has so many personal and professional benefits.

Words of advice

For anyone considering a 4 day week, here are my top tips:

• Join a trial. I can’t imagine putting this in place without the kind of support 4 Day Week Global provided. The resources, connections and learnings you will have access to as part of a pilot program is essential in giving you every chance of success.

• Mandate some of the learning as a minimum requirement for all participants to sign up to the trial

• Follow the 4 Day Week Global advice and get your team to build how the 4 day week will work in your organisation. And then, when they have a plan, you and your leaders have to make sure you follow it too!

• Rules of engagement are a must. The team develop them, they sign up to them to enter the scheme, and then there is no confusion over what is ok or not. They will uphold them and also hold each other accountable to them. One of the key rules needs to be, if we don’t maintain 100% outputs/outcomes an individual and/or a team can revert back to the 5 day week model.

• Recruit a majority of operational staff into the 4 day week project team. They will do all the training, drive the process and share their learnings across the team. They are the ones that will touch base with all staff, get the real feedback (that they won’t share with the CEO), and help you troubleshoot issues early. They are going to be your pulse check and your eyes and ears on the ground as to how the trial is really going.

• Embrace the issues and fears. Get them down on paper and workshop them. For some, the team will be able to solve them before the trial. For others, they will have to agree to park them and wait and see what happens once the trial is underway.

You can’t afford not to do this. You can improve productivity, improve the bottom line, improve employee wellbeing and improve staff attraction and retention.