No going back on our four-day week

My team is one of the handful in the legal profession experimenting with four-day working weeks. Our family team of four fee-earners began working this way in November and, to be honest, I can’t see us going back. 

You may well have seen that the initial dispatches from the frontline of the four-day working week trial have been overwhelmingly positive. Of those who participated in the official trial, the vast majority are planning to continue and have reported lower rates of absenteeism and improved productivity. However, broadly the consensus is that a four-day week would not suit the legal profession. Recently it was reported that cultural norms in the legal profession are acting as a block to the four-day working week – with concerns that the very nature of lawyers’ work and the entrenched culture of billable hours mean removing a day per week would not work.

I certainly understand these hesitations and misgivings. Just a year ago, the co-founder of my firm IMD wrote a piece in this very publication voicing his concerns that a four-day working week would not be a panacea to burnout and arguing that genuine flexible working is a better option.

In this piece, Marcin Durlak spoke about the anxiety a four-day working week could cause for busy lawyers who tried to force a busy five-day to-do list into a truncated one. These are all very valid concerns, which I completely agreed with. Nevertheless, as 2022 came to an end I decided I wanted to try out a four-day week in my team, and interrogate the results. Reading about the trial and how it had worked for other companies, I was keen to see if we could help improve our lawyers’ work-life balance.

We have been big champions of flexible working for a long time, and reaped the rewards – attracting quality talent, for example, and being able to support parents returning to work. However, inevitably, we do not see people choosing to take a full day off from work a week – flexible working tends to instead cover the odd afternoon for a parents’ evening or a later start to do an exercise class.

We work in high-pressure cross-border divorce and family cases which can be very intense, complex and emotionally draining. You are often supporting a client through the most high-stakes, upsetting and stressful time of their lives. It can be hard to find time to decompress and I thought an extra day off would really help decrease burnout and improve productivity – especially when lots of our clients are based overseas, so we are often navigating different time zones too. I know my team so well, I was confident we would see positive results.

As a small team, it is relatively easy to organise. We all chose which day we would like to not work, and we make sure these don’t overlap. We are also realistic – if an urgent court date comes up, the partner involved will just switch their non-working day if there is a clash. Removing a day from the working week obviously requires a high level of organisation, diary management and keeping a close eye on priorities. But this is just best practice anyway.

As a result we have seen increased productivity, regularly outperforming KPIs since the change. And clients have not noticed the change – the level of service has remained consistent.

Of course, relatively speaking it is much more straightforward for us to experiment with our work days than it would be for a huge corporate team, for example. But it was still a leap into the relative unknown for us. I had bought into the idea, but it required work to bring my team along with me.

Ahead of writing this piece, I asked my lawyers for their opinion on the switch to four days. I am pleased to report it was all positive, but some team members were certainly concerned initially that the change would add unwelcome pressure. But thankfully, they said they have actually experienced the opposite and they have enjoyed experiencing a better work-life balance. Inspired by this success, we are considering rolling the four-day working week to other teams.

I understand how the legal profession does not naturally lend itself to a shorter working week, but I would advise others to keep an open mind.

The working week as we know it began when Henry Ford made changes in 1926 – cutting the 100-plus hours that many were working in factories to just 40 hours, with no drop in pay, and we have never looked back from that. And who knows? The same may happen with the five-day working week.

Iwona Durlak is a partner and co-founder of IMD Solicitors, Manchester