Since May, Leapwise have been working a nine-day fortnight – you might have even caught our previous blog from when we started trialing it on a six-month basis. It’s undoubtedly been a big change and one that we think others might be interested to learn more about.
We want to take you behind-the-scenes to hear from the person who probably did the most at Leapwise to advocate for this new way of working. So, here’s Amber – one of our Directors – to share her view on why a nine-day fortnight works for us and could work for your organisation too.
Why a nine-day fortnight really can work
I’ve often found a lot of the ‘future of work’ debate to be pretty frustrating. On one side, there are people who, even after the pandemic showed some of the strengths of flexible working, simply won’t accept that you can be productive outside of an office. This incident comes to mind!
Equally though, others seem determined to ignore the very real benefits that office working provides – creativity, sharing of ideas, upskilling each other – and go too far the other way. For me, like with everything we do at Leapwise, I’m interested in what the evidence tells us about the most sensible model. How can you balance business demands with staff needs?
That’s where my interest in the nine-day fortnight came about. In 2022, the UK hosted a huge trial of a four-day week. It involved 3,000 workers across 61 companies, ranging from consultancies like us to retailers, creative industries, and even a fish-and-chip shop. Crucially, it showed tangible benefits: 60% of people said they could better manage work and care responsibilities, 40% slept better, 39% were less stressed, and more than two-thirds reported feeling less burnt out.
That last finding particularly struck me. I love what I do and so I’ve always had a tendency to work myself really hard. It’s left me being hugely productive in quite intense bursts, but eventually getting sick every few months or so from burnout. For me, I thought that a four-day week (or something similar, like a nine-day fortnight) might help me be more consistent in my work over the long-term. More rest, less burn out, higher sustained productivity.
Very few consultancies have tried any reduced days model of working, and I had always assumed that being in consulting would limit my options around this way of working. But I know that all my colleagues work really hard too. We have highly motivated people who really care about making things better in the public sector, but our projects are also demanding and the work can be intense. The question for me was: could a nine-day fortnight work for both our clients and ourselves at the same time?
Trialing a new way of working
After some advocating from me and a colleague, Leapwise decided to trial the nine-day fortnight model for six months. We wanted to do something different but, transparently, we were worried that a four-day week could be challenging for a small, growing business and wanted to make sure no client work would be disrupted. 10% fewer working days was a major change.
And to be honest, it didn’t go perfectly in the early stages. For the first month, some team members reported feeling uncertain about how to use the non-working time and even argued that we’d jumped into this new approach a little too quickly. I think we all recognised that some of that was instinctive, that classic resistance to change, but we kept track of those views in weekly team surveys.
On the positive side, framing it as an experiment / trial, allowed us to have open and honest conversations about how we could collectively make this work, and focus on our ways of working as a team. Views gradually changed as we got closer to the six-month point in September. There were still hiccups – personally I think our productivity actually did dip slightly in parts of the summer – but overall, wellbeing increased, and productivity had generally done the same. After a further brief trial extension (taking us up to November), the team’s perceptions were much more strongly in favour of this new way of working.
When we made the final decision to keep the nine-day fortnight as our new permanent model, we involved the whole staff. We looked at the data on wellbeing, sickness, and productivity; we shared our perspectives openly within the group. For many of us, our perceptions had shifted drastically. For me, I suppose it did do what I’d expected – I felt more rested and better able to deliver the work I care about for our clients.
Vitally, clients received major benefits. Like most consultancies, our clients are billed for the days of work we do. So our customers aren’t paying for our non-working Fridays and get major benefits from our new model; with a more refreshed and healthy workforce, every day that we do work for our clients is now even more productive. On the odd occasion, if client need is high, we might take a Friday meeting to make sure we deliver quickly. But ultimately, the new model has meant more work-life balance and more effective performance for those we serve. It’s not a zero-sum game.
My four tips for experimenting with new ways of working
If it’s not clear enough from the above, making that change happen wasn’t easy. So, here are our four key tips for making your journey to a whole new way of working.
- Establish a clear, visible advocate for change. This is true for any type of major change, but you need to have someone driving your new way of working forward – explaining the benefits, responding to concerns, adjusting ways of working, helping measure what’s going well (or badly.) A clear identifiable ‘change agent’ is essential to help overcome inertia and try something different.
- Don’t assume what people will think. It’s important to keep an open mind about how everyone else – from senior leaders to junior staff – will feel about the experience. My expectation was that senior staff would be strongly opposed to a nine-day fortnight and more junior colleagues would be hugely supportive. But it was actually much more nuanced than that. Listening, capturing, and responding to those emerging concerns through psychologically safe forums (e.g. 1:1s; anonymous surveys etc.) was important as the trial rolled out, and allowed us to better tailor our comms & messaging – especially as people’s views changed as things progressed.
- You don’t need all the answers, lean into experimenting. The nine-day trial was a huge change and change often comes with feelings of anxiety. For us, branding our initial trial as an experiment, without all the answers, we were able to safely open up a bigger conversation about our ways of working and honestly discuss some of these anxieties. We discussed what goes into productivity at an individual and organisation level, when people work at their best, and how we could collectively make the trial work. This allowed us to design a new working pattern that got the best from everyone, and that everyone had had a part in creating. Even if we hadn’t continued with a nine-day fortnight after the trial period, having those conversations was invaluable in and of itself.
- Engagement is essential. It goes without saying that you need to bring people along with you and engage your teams. We took a very consultative approach, that brought all team members close to the decision-making process. This included individual consultations, whole team workshops to set the success criteria, weekly surveys to measure against this criteria, and regular conversations on ways of working (see above). We deliberately made sure everyone had a voice – because changing a working pattern affects everyone in different ways.
A new approach
For Leapwise, the nine-day fortnight is now the model we’re sticking with permanently. We’ve found that our clients are still happy with our work, our pay scales haven’t changed, and our projects keep moving as successfully as they did before.
Above all, what’s different – for me and for my colleagues – is that there’s a bit more balance to our weeks. That benefits staff, clients, and the business alike. But we’re always open to new views and perspectives on what else can be done differently.
Please contact us if you want to learn more or if you’re trying out your own new way of working.
