How to make the four-day week work for accountants: Test, gather data, and adapt

Unilever is almost seven months into its four-day work week pilot. Grant Thorton began a six-month trial of the shortened week in March. That same month, Oxfam Australia reduced working hours for full-time employees to 30 hours per week without cutting pay.

So could the four-day work week work for accountants?

Swinburne University researchers recently surveyed senior managers across a range of industries and business sizes that are trialling a 100:80:100 model, which delivers 100% pay for 80% of the working time, aiming to maintain 100% productivity. They found that productivity had indeed been maintained, with three out of 10 businesses reporting no dip in productivity and the other seven reporting an increase.

The greatest payoff? Six of the companies named recruitment and retention.

Shaye Thyer, who’s spent nearly 15 years in public practice, including as National Director at BDO and Head of Accounting at Intuit, believes a shortened week would go a long way in improving talent attraction and retention in the accounting profession. She’s firmly in the ‘yes’ camp for the four-day working week.

“It’s no secret that our industry is in a talent crisis. We have no shortage of clients, which is fantastic, but there aren’t enough accountants to service them. This shortage exists in remote and offshore teams, as well as in face-to-face ones,” says Thyer.

“I don’t think we have the luxury as a profession to discard any ideas that could attract and retain talent, so I think we need to have courage to experiment, to think outside the box and to do things very differently from the way we’ve always done them.”

Reaping productivity gains

Fear that output and productivity could wane is one of the biggest factors holding organisations back, but that assumption is based on an oversimplified application of a formula – accounting is definitely a profession that can do better on this point.

“The basic maths shows that if we drop one day and accountants are working 7.6 hours a day, then there’ll be a loss of revenue,” Thyer says. “But it doesn't have to be that way.”

People who work four days a week are more likely to sleep more and experience improved physical and mental health, which may go some way to explaining the productivity gains experienced by the Australian businesses in the Swinburne study.

When New Zealand’s Perpetual Guardian adopted the four-day work week in 2018, chief executive Andrew Barnes told the Australian Financial Review that companies with a four-day work week model that applied the 100:80:100 principle experienced an average productivity increase of 25-50%.

“Isn’t that exactly what we all want?” says Thyer. “Higher productivity in our profession could also counteract the fact that we just can’t get enough accountants at the moment.”

To support employees to work fewer hours, many companies are rolling out automation tools and the option to decline some meetings. If employees can reduce their manual, repetitive tasks that chew up time, and get productive hours back into their working days, a four-day work week without a loss in output becomes more feasible.

Redefining value

“Employees should absolutely be expected to work to at least 100% of their productivity level on full-time hours. I think that’s a no brainer,” Thyer says.

The challenge is changing the perceived value of the employee – from their presence and toil for a set number of hours, to the tasks they can complete and the impact they can deliver.

Many accounting firms charge on an hourly basis, so this shift towards charging by output could present a challenge.

Thyer believes a pricing model that hinges on hours is “our greatest limitation as a profession”. A model that charges by output could be step one in the shift towards a four-day week.

“We should always be billing on the value of work we’re delivering, not on the time it takes us. Firms I’ve spoken to that have done this will say it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. They say it’s liberating and empowering, and benefits their practice enormously,” says Thyer.

“If an accountant is really focused and productive, and can get through as much work in four days as they can in five, the value of the work they’re delivering stays the same. So why can’t they charge the same amount and work fewer hours?”

Responding to clients’ needs

A shortened work week could elicit a range of responses from clients, some of whom may expect their accountant to be available during traditional business hours, if not beyond.

But Thyer views this objection as a speed bump, rather than a roadblock.

“There’s an art to setting respectful boundaries in professional services. Clients will expect us to be available 24/7 if we allow those boundaries,” she says. “This has long been a challenge for people working part-time.”

Thyer has seen client expectations – or a lack of respectful boundary-setting – wielded as an argument against workers returning from parental leave into part-time roles: ‘Clients might need them on a Friday’.

“In reality, a really good client manager will manage those boundaries with their clients,” she says.

Those without really good client managers, or with other reasons to make staff available throughout the week, can take a lesson from industries that face the public around the clock. Doctors and nurses staff emergency rooms in shifts; call centre staffing ‘follows the sun’ with teams around the world working local business hours to assist global customers in the wee hours.

Thyer sees examples of local firms already responding to clients with varied schedules.

“I know firms that have a big percentage of clients in the hospitality industry, so they’ll have a rolling roster to support hospitality businesses that are often working every single day of the week,” Thyer says.

Practices that need an accountant available to service their clients five days a week may stagger that four-day week and assign each staff member a buddy. That way, each pair works three common days and, on the fourth day, each covers the other’s clients’ urgent needs.

Prioritise what works

A four-day work week may have little impact on productivity while boosting retention and easing recruitment. A change in fee structures and clear expectations about availability may influence which aspects of an accounting firm’s services clients ascribe the greatest value to.

But none of this works in isolation or as a blanket rule. Implementing a four-day work week in a way that’s tailored to each employee, the company and its clients is likely to result in better outcomes.

“I would absolutely encourage firms to run an experiment, see how the trial goes and if the four-day work week could apply to the whole firm. If the outcomes are there, then it should be something that’s accessible to people more widely,” Thyer says.

And she goes a step further, arguing that utopia is flexibility on an individual level – not a strict four-day week but each person having the autonomy to determine how and when they work best.

“For some people that might be going to the gym at lunch but working five days. That’s what they need to be most productive. For others it might be that they work four days and prefer a whole day off as a clean brain break. Parents might want to start later and finish earlier when they’re juggling family commitments.”

The key then is experimentation – talking to staff about their priorities outside of work and patterns of productivity at work, working out how the two can best support each other, testing, gathering data and learning.