The 4 Day Week could herald one of the biggest revolutions in the workplace since Covid and the results coming out of employers piloting it are impressive (see this profile interview with the 4 Day Week Foundation here).
If it’s not on your radar as an employer, it should be. It is definitely on Maud Santamaria’s radar, Global Workplace and Corporate Real Estate Director at GWI (pictured above). While she acknowledges that there are big challenges to overcome to make it work, she’s determined to explore the possibility and potential benefits.
That’s why her insight – as an employer viewing the 4 Day Week with an open mind and looking to the data to make decisions – is going to be valuable at The Watercooler’s new ‘Office’ stream, where she is talking about the advantages and how to measure them.
You can hear Maud speak at the new ‘Office’ stream at The Watercooler Event, on 7th and 8th May 2025at ExCeL in London, which is Europe’s leading trade show, with free-to-attend content, dedicated to creating workplaces that empower both people and business to thrive.
Now in its fourth year, it’s two days of cutting-edge employee health, wellbeing, workplace culture, networking and product discovery – celebrating the future of work. Co-located with The Office Event for the full 360 degree workplace experience.
You can find out more and register to attend here.
Her perspective is also unique because she’s a facility manager which requires she be a ‘master of all trades’ including wellbeing, alongside sustainability, real estate and culture in the office. In this interview she talks us through the challenges, her approach and her experience of putting together a business case without doing a full trial of the 4 Day Week (yet).
What are you most looking forward to at The Watercooler?
The things that draw me to The Watercooler most are the panel expertise and the case studies. I mean, who doesn’t love a good case study?
It’s great to hear people tell you how they got from A to B, almost like a recipe. And maybe that exact recipe won’t work for my company, but perhaps if I add some cinnamon instead of cardamon, it will!
You go along, you listen and you see what works for you.
I like panels in particular because I feel they give me information that I can’t find easily by myself online.
You’re speaking at The Watercooler about the 4 Day Week in a session entitled ‘Why work a 5-day week when you can work a 4-day week?’. Why do you feel strongly about the 4 Day Week?
My pet peeve is the way people currently talk about productivity. Like when people tell me they’ve been ‘so productive’ that they worked until 11pm! That’s the opposite of productivity! That’s taking so much more time to do your job than you should.
What interests me most about the 4 Day Week is how it supports people to balance their lives, whether they have kids, or are carers for elderly relatives, for example. It should open jobs to many neuro diverse people too.
But it’s not just carers who benefit from this. It gives everyone vital breathing space. Unlike at the moment where we are all so stretched. At the moment, as a working parent for instance, I have to cram my dentist into any slot I have and often that is physically not possible!
The 4 Day Week would allow us to do ‘life’ things like this and this will make us more productive in the four days we work.
What do you see as the main challenges with the 4 Day Week?
It’s more challenging when you are a business that is customer-facing because you have to serve them 24/7. In order to do that you may have to employ more people. That’s a big jump for some businesses.
Where is your company with the 4 Day Week? Have you done a trial? Pushing for a trial?
I’m pushing for a trial.
But the question I always get back, which is fair is, ‘but what about our customers who work five days a week?’. This is when I make the case that we don’t need to have the same people working the same four day week, people can work different hours.
So you’re currently going through the process of arguing the case for the 4 Day Week?
Yes. The main issue we’re having at the moment is every department can see how it could work for them except sales. But it doesn’t work unless everyone is bought in; it’s got to be everyone, or no-one.
However, the business is already seeing that giving people more time can pay off. Already, this summer all employees were given Friday afternoons off in June, July and August, in addition to their annual leave. We are using that sort of like a pilot to analyse effect on productivity and client satisfaction.
Any advice on putting forward a business case for the 4 Day Week?
It’s all about measurement. I’ll be using the data from this Friday afternoon experiment for the business case. You need data to take to the board and executive. You can’t just say ‘let’s give it a go!’, you have to be able to say ‘the data shows this strategy is working when we do X, Y and Z’.
Anything else that is helping look at the business case?
Yes – while I don’t like the jargon – the ‘visioning session’ with the executive team has been really important.
This ensures that you all, as a business, understand how you are measuring success and what success looks like. Equally, you need to know what failure looks like, too. And you have to be able to put a time frame on all this as well. You also need to be open to the possibility of failure without judgment.
How can you encourage people to be more open to failure?
That’s where good communication comes in. You need to be clear with people that it’s a trial which means that there are criteria that we’ll be looking at to assess whether it’s working.
What questions do you recommend asking to gauge success/failure of the 4 Day Week?
I’ll take the questions I’m looking at after the Friday afternoon experiment we did in the summer.:
What’s the impact?
Have you lost employees as a result?
Are people coming to work at your company as a result, because you offer this flexibility?
Has it had an effect on sickness rates?
What results have you found so far that you can tell us about?
What I can say is that, in terms of the way we classify productivity which is based on sales, that hasn’t gone down. There has been no difference in attrition rate. And job satisfaction has increased.
Any other general advice about giving employees extra flexibility and time like this?
Yes. Our team leaders explained that we were giving this extra afternoon off but said it was expected that they did something with it. That doesn’t necessarily mean an achievement focus – they could choose to binge watch Netflix if they wanted – but it has to be a conscious use of that extra time which is of value to them.
For me, personally, I’ve set the target of doing more reading because I haven’t been able to fit in time for this due to being so busy, and then falling asleep immediately as soon as I get into bed! I managed to read 5 books over the summer, which I was delighted about.
The extra time also saved me money in after school nursery fees, has given me more time with my kids and enabled me to do more cooking from scratch. These are all life enhancing benefits.
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