There’s a surefire way to make yourself an employer of choice for top talent.

According to this latest study from Robert Walters, the #4DayWeek is the single most attractive perk for employees, with 44% selecting it as the most enticing incentive (ahead of 38% choosing the ability to work from anywhere).

Post pandemic, employees value time over any other benefit. Only 16% of the 2,000 workers sampled in this survey would opt for a pay rise instead of a four-day week.

Work from home and flexible working arrangements are increasingly common.

Pay rises that keep pace with inflation and the cost of living are often a standard expectation.

But the shorter working week, while steadily growing in popularity, remains niche enough in most industries to offer a substantial differentiator and competitive edge.

If you’re a dynamic CEO or people professional that sees this as an opportunity to get ahead of the curve and want to learn more about how it works in practice, I’d love to hear from you and have the opportunity to share how Work Time Reduction can support you on this ambitious journey.

Post-pandemic, we are still figuring out how we design our workplaces and workweeks to optimize organizational performance and employee happiness.

In my opinion, the most successful work models of the future will offer both flexibility and structure.

The founding father of the continuous quality improvement philosophy, W. Edwards Deming, wrote that 94% of issues in today’s workplaces are systemic, with only 6% attributable to individuals.

Those organizations that focus solely on discretionary benefits at an individual level, will likely engender an individualized behavioral response which focuses on the 6%.

That’s why, when we at Work Time Reduction work with organizations to help them adopt reduced-hour work models, we focus on the collective.

Offering a benefit that is equitable and universal, and using this as a collective incentive to drive structural, systemic change in how your teams and processes function, is the golden ticket to a more productive, efficient workforce.

In the groove or stuck in a rut?

We talk a lot about flow states in our work at Work Time Reduction, and sometimes it is easier said than done. 🤔

So, I’m sharing a productivity tip from Amantha Imber in her latest for Fast Company which I think many of you in my network might find useful. ✅

The concept she introduces here is known as ‘The Hemingway Trick’, based on an old adage from the decorated writer Ernest Hemingway – “when you are going good, stop writing”.

Effectively, it argues that by leaving a task incomplete at the end of the work day, your brain finds it easier to switch on the next day by picking up where you left off than starting from scratch. 💡

“Our brain continues to think about the unfinished task and when we come back to it, our brain is primed to easily pick up where it left off”.

This is also linked to ‘The Zeigarnik Effect’, based on a famous 1926 experiment that demonstrates that our brains hate unfinished business so much, they retain the information until closure is achieved! 🧠

You can try this out for yourself by finishing your work day midway through a sentence, slide, line of code, or whatever work you’re doing. If you do, let me know how it works for you in the comments!