Four-day-week trial proves a hit with Atom Bank

From motor­cy­cling to wild swim­ming, employ­ees at Atom Bank have been mak­ing the most of their extra free time since the com­pa­ny moved to a four-day week. When it made the switch in Novem­ber 2021, the Durham-based busi­ness was the largest UK com­pa­ny to tri­al a short­er work­ing week. Hav­ing deemed the pilot a suc­cess, it intends to make the change per­ma­nent.

“There was always going to be an ele­ment of ner­vous­ness on my part about whether it could work for us,” admits Atom Bank’s chief peo­ple offi­cer, Anne-Marie Lis­ter. “But all our research points to the pos­i­tive impacts it has had on the organ­i­sa­tion.”

Sev­er­al ben­e­fits have accrued from the bank’s new work­place pol­i­cy. Staff sur­veys have revealed that the vast major­i­ty of respon­dents (92%) feel they are work­ing more effi­cient­ly than they were on a five-day week. Employ­ees are 13% more engaged than they were a year ago and they’re also feel­ing more moti­vat­ed, with 92% of staff say­ing that they look for­ward to their work.

The four-day week could also be hav­ing a pos­i­tive effect on employ­ees’ health. Although 2021 should be treat­ed as an out­lier in terms of sick­ness absence, giv­en the ongo­ing impact of Covid that year, it’s still worth not­ing that the bank lost 72 work­ing days to sick­ness this June, com­pared with 230 days in June 2021.

“We want­ed to see an increase in employ­ee well­be­ing and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, aligned to effi­cien­cies that we were find­ing in the ways peo­ple were work­ing,” Lis­ter says. “So it was real­ly pleas­ing to see such a high num­ber of employ­ees report­ing effi­cien­cies so ear­ly in the tri­al.” 

While she accepts that not all of the improve­ments can be attrib­uted to the four-day week alone, it has been “the dri­ver with­in some of the suc­cess”.

A 500% increase in job applications

The bank’s attrac­tive­ness as an employ­er has also soared since it adopt­ed the new work­ing pat­tern, accord­ing to Lis­ter. She reports that there was “a 500% increase in job appli­ca­tions” in the week after it announced the tri­al. Although many of them were spec­u­la­tive, with some appli­cants clear­ly lured only by the prospect of some extra time off, these didn’t out­num­ber the gen­uine ones.

“If peo­ple were attract­ed to the pol­i­cy, and to us as an organ­i­sa­tion as a result, that’s a huge win for us,” she says. “Many can­di­dates we have inter­viewed said that they would love to work for an organ­i­sa­tion that’s so pro­gres­sive and future-focused. That’s awe­some feed­back for us to get.”

It has been impor­tant for the bank to stress to poten­tial recruits that its employ­ment con­tracts still stip­u­late a 37-and-a-half-hour week. All con­tracts will be updat­ed at the start of next year to reflect the per­ma­nent switch to the new pat­tern.

“We’ve had to make it clear to can­di­dates that, although we want to move to a short­er week per­ma­nent­ly, we are still in a tri­al peri­od, so the con­tract that they’d receive would stip­u­late five days a week,” Lis­ter explains. “Some employ­ers in a sim­i­lar posi­tion are strug­gling to com­mu­ni­cate this.”

The importance of persistence

Lis­ter was acute­ly aware that the change would not be an overnight suc­cess. Per­sis­tence has been key to mak­ing the four-day week viable. 

“We’re a com­pa­ny of 480 peo­ple, but that’s rel­a­tive­ly small for a bank,” she says. “We have many small teams and, from an oper­a­tional per­spec­tive, find­ing cov­er while also adapt­ing to a four-day week does become quite dif­fi­cult. It’s not insur­mount­able, but it does require flex­i­bil­i­ty on all sides.”

The com­pa­ny agreed from the out­set that the pilot would be halt­ed if the changes had any neg­a­tive impact on cus­tomers or employ­ees, or if it ran into com­pli­ance prob­lems.

Lis­ter worked close­ly with depart­men­tal heads to esti­mate the poten­tial ram­i­fi­ca­tions of the tri­al before it start­ed. This enabled the bank to assess whether there were any mate­r­i­al risks before approv­ing the project.

The prospect of mov­ing to a four-day week “can be quite con­cern­ing for some peo­ple in the organ­i­sa­tion”, she says, not­ing that this is espe­cial­ly true if they’re already feel­ing pushed for time while work­ing five days a week.

In such cas­es, the onus should be on each team to work out how the changes can best be imple­ment­ed. “It can be a bit of a chal­lenge to bring those peo­ple with you”, Lis­ter says, “but the answers lie with them.”

One of the most com­mon con­cerns that employ­ers have when they adopt a four-day week is that more peo­ple will be need­ed to cov­er the work lost as a result of the reduc­tion in hours. This was a par­tic­u­lar wor­ry for Atom Bank, which employs sev­er­al spe­cial­ists in niche roles. Despite this, Lis­ter reports that there have been no requests for extra staffing relat­ing to the four-day week.

“It shows that peo­ple have been able to find enough effi­cien­cies in how they work to improve their out­put,” she says, point­ing to a sig­nif­i­cant reduc­tion in the amount of time that employ­ees are spend­ing in meet­ings. “I can under­stand some com­pa­nies think­ing that they’ll need to recruit more staff when mov­ing to four days, but they may not be account­ing for the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty ben­e­fits they’re like­ly to see.”

As the com­pa­ny com­mits to a per­ma­nent four-day week, there’s an under­stand­ing in the organ­i­sa­tion that fur­ther adjust­ments may yet be appro­pri­ate.

“We’ve been work­ing five days a week for almost 100 years, so it’s going to take a while to undo that,” Lis­ter says. “My fear is that, if busi­ness­es don’t achieve overnight suc­cess with the four-day week, they might give up on it. We have felt those chal­lenges too, but we’ve over­come them. It absolute­ly does ben­e­fit your busi­ness.”