More Councils to trial 4 day week for 5 days pay

[mrsm43s]

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/green-party-four-day-working-week-lambeth-council-lewisham-hackney-b1299448.html

So what do you think about this? Apparently in South Cambs, the trial was successful leading to cost savings snd improved staff satisfaction, and is now a permanent arrangement.

Personally, I'm all for it, but must admit it's because I work for a local authority, and the more councils that adopt this, then the more likely I am to benefit from it in the future. That said, as a Council tax payer, I can understand people being upset at ever rising CT bills when staff are being handed a free day off a week.

In my experience people who work for the council do very little already. So after they have made 8 cups of tea, taken 3 breaks and had a chat they head home at 4pm. Now they will hang around doing eff all until 4:30 and take a day off. Marvellous .

Of course this will happen! If someone can do their job easily enough in 4 days then they've been lazy 20% of the working week before

There are public sector studies and international studies as well. There are studies that have endpoints as service provision.

it might not work for every sector but where it does I don’t think it should be assumed that the workers are lazy or aren’t pulling their weight. There are very good reasons why the 4 day weekly 5 days pay works where 4 days but compressed hours doesn’t have the same effect.

Put up council tax by 3 percent and had to use reserves to maintain services because of 'structural funding' issues.
You think all the private sector companies that do this would will be operating at a loss and putting up their prices to pay for days off for their staff. And it is formally designated as a rest day. So they are giving everyone a days holiday. Their housing metrics are horrific. But they blame this on external factors. If you are waiting for housing allocation in this local authority then at least be consoled that the housing staff are happy with their day off a week on full pay.

Ridiculous idea. Of course there is 'staff satisfaction', as if any of them would object. Council employees are already known for taking the piss, and IF they can indeed do 5 days work in 4, then it proves that's correct. So many services have declined since the huge increase in WFH, and this is yet another one, at a time when council services are already hugely lacking.

If the only solution to retaining staff and reducing absence and creating functioning workplaces when you are offering secure, relatively well paid positions with 30 plus paid holidays and bankholidays and high pension contributions and good sick leave and maternity policies, and flexible working, is to give them another day off a week at same pay, I suggest there are more fundamental issues in the workplace.

And if you can't work 35 hour weeks with 30 days off plus bankholidays, flexitime, time in lieu, flexible working, for good rewards and a good pension without excessive absence and need another day off a week to do your job, then you have an issue.

You cannot do five day's work in four days. It is literally impossible. You can do four day's work in four days, or four day's work in five days. If you were doing the latter, it means you were doing at least 20% less work per day than you should be, and you should be put on a performance improvement plan with a view to termination if your productivity does not improve. Not rewarded with a day off every week.

This seems like it should be obvious... but then I've never worked in the public sector.

I don’t believe it will actually result in greater productivity and the same amount of work getting done as before. Councils are hardly known for their efficiency as things stand. Even if all the work does initially get done (which would indicate the bulk of people have been seriously slacking off up till now), I bet it won’t continue that way, people will slip back to their old ways and everything will just get further behind.

Is it good for end users?

How does doing one day less of work magically drive up productivity and have no cost increases

Can't let this one go.
Nearly all public sector endpoint assessment is output driven. They deliberately avoid outcome assessment. How do I know, because I have devised KPIs in the Public Sector. Why do they do this? To avoid true accountability for their Services because they don't even know how to measure outcomes within performance.
They measured 24 metrics and said 21 were fine or improved. But they are all output numbers. No quality control or outcome measurements.
Answered same number of calls in 4 days but nobody has asked if those calls resulted in the same level of actual service. If issues were resolved at the same level. Because that's not what's important. The first thing a private business asks is if it impacted their revenue doing 4 days. PS just don't ask those questions about service outcomes.
They actually said this about the 4 day week:
'If performance variations caused by Covid are discounted every single service monitored either got better or stayed the same'
What are performance variations caused by Covid exactly 4 years on and what impact are they having and why are they being discounted.
Sorry, can't administrate your housing application this week due to variations caused by Covid.
What did they monitor. Outputs of course.
It's BS.

Sad to see so many people so against this without doing any kind of research into it. This has been implemented with great success in many types of industry across the world.

The success is categorically not down to places being overstaffed or people not working hard enough prior to implementation.

Few question the benefit of weekends off, or annual leave. Without those breaks, people burn out. With them, people perform better. This isn't much different and I do wonder if the opposition is more about jealousy than anything else.

It's highly unlikely to be implemented where I work unfortunately, but I'd love to see it more widespread. Like high quality wfh arrangements, if implemented properly, it has huge potential to be a win win for employees and employers alike.

I'm a Social Worker and I think I can confidently say this will never take off. I would like it too obviously but we have huge waiting lists & a lot of staff coming & going. I just can't see how this will work in Social Care.

Civil Service compressed hours you work the same number of hours as full time but over fewer days. So each day is a longer day.

This is the working four days of the same length as before.

The idea is it cuts down wasted time I think!

Cuts down wasted time and presenteeism I think.

I think the idea is partly that there’s only so much work you can do in a week, and you’re better off doing it in four days rather than sitting about being too tired to do it.

In our local authority, we struggle to recruit social workers and rely far too heavily on a stream of agency staff, which is expensive and ineffcient (and not great for clients either with constant staff changes). Surely improving recruitment and retention and reducing reliance on expensive agency staff would be a really great thing and the service would run better and save money.

I feel similarly when (on MN) lots of people insisting they are so efficient wfh, they can do their days work in 2 or 3 hours. It makes me wonder why it was a ft job, to start with
(Admittedly I am.quite envious!)

I was always very pro a 4 day working week but I live in South Cambs and it's an absolute shambles. I don't know if it's more to do with the fact they are chronically underfunded than the 4 day working week but people were absolutely furious when they decided to make the change permanent because, from a resident perspective, already crappy council services have gotten even worse.

I am well aware of the research as I have shown. There is a fundamental difference between the Public and Private Sector in accountability and objective as an organisation, so the studies can not be transposed between them. There is also a fundamental difference in measuring performance and accountability of performance to see if it is impacting.
There is also a fundamental difference is business objectives and providing demand lead services that are statutory lead.
A very simple example from SCDC.
They say the number of final decisions for planning applications 'within the agreed times' have remained the same. That's the reported metrics.
But what they haven't reported is if 'the agreed times' are of the same length as before. See the issues. Look at the metrics for PS creating 'evidence bases' for shorter weeks on same pay and you will see this type of thing over and over again.
You should not have staff with upwards of 140 days not at work a year and working 7 to 8 hour days 'burning out' and needing another 52 days off a year to be productive.

Just give them a 20 percent pay rise then

It depends, as pp say, if it's compressed hours, or if they worked, say 35 hours, and are now only doing 28. Because how would that affect the part-timers? I know from dealing with council staff about an older relative that some only work one or two days, obviously that's fine, but would they effectively now have to compress work into half a day, in some cases?
We live in a world where some people are desperately looking for a job, and some people are working so many hours they get little time with their kids. Would be nice if it changed.

And this is the definitive answer. Because the Council exists to provide Services.
And your Authority is not cronically underfunded compared to many. Maybe about 3 million from direct grant allocation on budget of 90 million. 3 to 4 percent. This is at the lower end of grant cuts for LAs. There are around 480 employees for 170k people to Serve so higher end of that ratio, but not outrageously over staffed.

This is interesting I work for the LA and work compressed hours so full time hours over 4 days so effectively 9.5 hours three days a week and 8.5 on the forth day and I still struggle to keep up with demand, I can’t see how only working 4 days is a benefit to the company/ tax payer and where the cost saving comes from if still paying the employee for 5 days

As a social worker, I worked way above my alleged 30 something hours per week and so an extra day off would not really have had any effect.
Other than to be really annoying.

There's a 3rd cog here. Service users. You don't mention them do you in your support of all the reasearch you say we haven't read. Both Conservative and Labour Ministers who have all the evidence base available, have advised Local Authorities to not follow this example. Steven Reed as local government Minister wrote to LAs saying it is an 'indication of potential failure' when discussing service provision.