Adopting a four-day week offers clear advantages for employees in terms of work-life balance. But there's a bonus for bosses too: staff actually get more done

You get to the office just after 9am, make yourself tea and have a chat with a colleague before you sit down to do some work. First though, you check the news headlines, and maybe social media, and by the time you focus on doing some actual work, someone taps you on the shoulder for a chat, or you get called into a meeting you don’t really need to be in.

So the day goes on. Calls to the boiler man, maybe a little summer holiday planning. Over the course of the day you perhaps get two-and-a-half hours of properly productive work done. Sound familiar?

Surveys have shown that in the UK we are productive for only one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours of a typical eight-hour day. Yet we persist with 9-5, five days a week.

Many companies have embraced flexible hours and working from home, but successful entrepreneur Andrew Barnes believes we’re in need of something more radical. A shake-up of the way we all work.

In 2018, his company, Perpetual Guardian, New Zealand’s largest corporate trustee company, made headlines around the world when he trialled a four-day week for his employees.

Reading the statistics on productivity had led him to wonder: how would the offer of a day off change the behaviour in each of those other four working days? How might employees adapt in order to not forfeit that precious free time?

Barnes’ trial was a success. He reported a 20 per cent rise in productivity, while an independent study by the Auckland University of Technology found stress levels among his 240-person workforce decreased seven per cent across the board, and overall life satisfaction ­increased by five per cent.