When Liverpool marketing agency Agent was asked by the BBC to test a Nordic-style, six-hour working day for a TV programme it jumped at the chance. In

The perfect number of hours to work every day? Five

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2021-06-15 13:30:04

When Liverpool marketing agency Agent was asked by the BBC to test a Nordic-style, six-hour working day for a TV programme it jumped at the chance. Inspired by reports of six-hour days in Swedish care homes in 2016, the hope was reduced working hours would lead to new ways of looking after staff wellbeing. But the results of the month-long trial, which took place during the same year, were mixed.

“Lots of really good things happened,” says Agent CEO Paul Corcoran. “We looked at tasks in terms of time and said ‘we need 15 minutes to do that, half an hour to do that’ and really focused on delivering in that way. People were missing the worst of the traffic because they were coming in at 9am instead of 8.30am and they were finishing early, so they had the flexibility to do things like pick the kids up.”

But the downsides quickly became evident when staff started focusing too much on how they could condense their work into smaller and smaller time slots. “The idea was to give people more freedom, but we were finding we were going ‘oh fuck, we need to get everything done in those hours’ so it became more stressful,” Corcoran says. In the end, the business settled on a model where everyone works two short days and three long ones.