In this episode of the Big Careers, Small Children podcast, Verena Hefti MBE speaks with Nadia Bunyan MCIPD, Director of People and Impact at Global Witness, and Tatiana Pignon, Associate Director at Autonomy.

They discuss how to implement a 4-day working week in a way that supports both staff wellbeing and organisational performance. Nadia shares lessons from leading a successful 4-day week pilot at Global Witness, while Tatiana brings insights from supporting over 100 organisations through similar transitions.

Together, they explore:

✔️ What organisations get wrong when moving to a shorter week

✔️ How to build trust and ensure leadership models healthy behaviours

✔️ Why co-creating the model with staff matters

✔️ How a shorter week supports working parents

✔️ What to consider when navigating global teams, peak periods, and emergencies

✔️ The mindset shift needed to move away from presenteeism

✔️ Practical steps for organisations starting their 4-day week journey

Whether you're a senior leader or a working parent curious about flexible working, this episode offers practical advice and real-world experience to inspire change.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✔️ How to move to a 4-day week without compromising impact

✔️ Why wellbeing and performance can go hand-in-hand

✔️ The role of culture, leadership, and trust in making it work

✔️ How flexible working can support inclusion and equity

Show Notes:

• Learn more about Global Witness: globalwitness.org
• Learn more about Autonomy: autonomy.work
• Connect with Nadia Bunyan on LinkedIn
• Connect with Tatiana Pignon on LinkedIn
• Learn more about the Leaders Plus: Big Careers, Small Children podcast and explore additional resources at leadersplus.org.
• Follow Leaders Plus on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Bluesky.
• Connect with our CEO, Verena Hefti MBE on LinkedIn.
• Find out more about the work of Leaders Plus by signing up to our Newsletter.

Our multi-award-winning Leaders Plus Fellowships support parents committed to career growth while enjoying family life. Expertly designed to keep parents on the leadership path, our programme tackles gender pay gap issues and empowers parents to thrive. Learn more here: Leaders Plus Fellowship.

More BCSC episodes you might love:

Episode 190: Does the Four Day Week Really Work?

Episode 178: [Future of Work] Lizzie Penny & Alex Hirst – How Workstyle (Rather Than Flexible Working) Could Change the Way You Work Forever

Welcome to the Big Careers Small Children Podcast. My name is Verena Hefti. I believe that no one should have to choose between becoming a CEO and enjoying their young children for much too long.

Amazing people like I'm sure you listening right now have found themselves stuck on the career ladder when they have children and that leads to gender inequality in senior leadership because because those people don't progress to senior leadership and the same stale, often male middle class people leading our organizations.

We must change this together and I hope that many of you listening right now will progress to the most senior leadership roles that you like where you can make the decisions that make our world a better place. Outside of the podcast, I am the CEO and founder of the Social enterprise Leaders Plus.

We exist to help working parents progress their careers to senior leadership in a way that works for you and for your families.

We have free events and resources on leadersplus.org where you can download helpful toolkits such as on returning from maternity leave, share parental leave, securing a promotion, dealing with workload challenges, or managing as a dual career couple.

We also have an award winning fellowship community which is global for working parents who have big dreams for their careers but don't want to sacrifice their family. You'll join an absolutely wonderful group of people, a very tight knit, supportive group of parents who have your back. Together.

You'll explore what your career aspirations are and you'll get advice from senior leaders who are also working parents about how to achieve those aspirations.

You'll get new ideas to combine your hopes for your careers with your hope for your family and you are supported by people who are experiencing what you're experiencing yourself.

I'm really delighted that a larger majority of our fellows have made tangible changes following the program, be that becoming more senior in their roles, working shorter hours, having better flexible working arrangement.

They always impress me so much with the courage that they instill in each other to do what is right for them without apologizing for having a family or apologizing for wanting that top job. Details are on leadersplus.org Fellowship hi.

Today we are chatting about the four day working week with Nadia Bunyan who has led the implementation at Global Witness and Tatiana Pino who is an expert in all things four day Working week and has supported and observed many many organizations do it. They all chat about what has gone well, what mistakes to avoid and unexpected positive consequences.

It will be really helpful for anyone who wants to understand more of the concept or wants to start implementing it. This podcast has actually been live streamed on LinkedIn. So you might hear us making reference to it being a live podcast.

And yeah, I hope you enjoy the conversation. A very warm welcome, everybody, to this first ever live podcast episode of the Big Career Small Children podcast.

And I'm really thrilled that we managed to bring two previous guests together who actually have worked together to share their experience of the four day working week. So let's start with you, Nadia, if you can introduce yourself and share what you do for work and how you know Tatiana.

Oh, thanks. Hi, Verena. And thanks for asking me back to do another podcast. My. My name's Nadia Bunyan.

I'm the director of People in Impact at Global Witness, which is a not for profit organization working in climate to dismantle the power of big polluters and transfer power to those who have been most impacted by the climate crisis. Tatiana and I met, oh, it must be about 18 months ago now, when Global Witness wanted to explore the feasibility of a shorter working week.

So we've had lots of contact over the last 18 months and it's great that we're here together in the same room.

Wonderful. Welcome.

And Tatiana, would you like to introduce yourself and share what you do practically for work and how you even came across the four day working week?

Absolutely. Thanks very much for having me again and super excited to be here with Nadia. As you mentioned, we've been working together.

So really exciting to talk about that and looking forward to the conversation. My name is Tatiana Pignon. I'm an associate director at the Autonomy Institute.

So we're a research institute mainly and I lead within our work, the Workplace Transformation Unit, which is essentially our workplace research and consultancy work where we specialize on working time reduction. So as part of that work we conduct research, feasibility studies, pilot evaluations, prospective research.

This is all on our website for anyone who's interested.

We also run collective pilots and we also provide bespoke support to organizations such as Global Witness that are interested in exploring a shorter working week. So we've worked with a lot of organizations of sizes, industries that vary a lot across sectors.

And that's something that for me is particular source of pride because prior to my work with Autonomy as well, I've had extensive experience in a variety of workplaces.

I've been with Autonomy for about two years now, but before that I've worked in the French government, in public sector, in consultancy, in the private sector, in a local civil society organization, in academia, research and teaching. So I've seen a lot of different approaches to work culture and working conditions, and in all of them, burnout was a problem in some way or another.

It was really striking to me how much effort had to go not just into working itself but into managing work in one's life. And you know that's a trend that's been going on for a while.

But working time reduction is really one of the most effective ways to address that issue. And it has not gone effects beyond the workplace itself, you know, on our families, our career communities, et cetera.

So it's really, it's a really transformative element that I'm very proud to work on.

Yeah, to an extent it's a no brainer if you don't work on a Friday, that's when you do your weekly shopping which then means you don't always spend time and money with the corner shop which is too expensive and only has unhealthy biscuits in my. Well that's my excuse for eating too many unhealthy biscuits.

Anyways Nadia, when you introduced it at Global Fitness, I mean you're a global organization as the name says in the title, lots of different countries, legal frameworks. Surely if you wanted an easy life you probably didn't have to do that. Why did you introduce the four day working week?

What were we trying to get from it at Global Witness?

I think for us and I think for many, not for profits, you know, Global Witness is working on a really tough mission. We know that there's a narrow window to prevent irreversible climate impact.

We're also working really hard to change, I suppose a super well organized and resourceful opposition that is the big polluters who really want to maintain the status quo.

And this is hard work and it has, you need resilience and there's setbacks and this does have a negative impact on the wellbeing of our staff who do report high levels of stress. So we wanted to see if a move to a shorter working week could improve the wellbeing of our employees. We while maintaining the impact of our mission.

So that was our starting point really.

Thanks for sharing.

And Tatiana, you looked at this from a data researchy perspective and you researched a number of organizations who'd implemented the four day working week. Was there anything that stood out really strongly in terms of the impact and the benefits of it.

So the results in terms of the impact on people's well being are absolutely clear. So it's extremely beneficial to people when you introduce social to working week provided and we'll get back to that, I'm sure that you do it well.

So with adequate Planning to enable people to still do their job well within the hours that they have. But what we see is also a really positive impact on organizations themselves. And I think so that was very striking.

I think that's something that we are always struck by is that yeah, in really 9 out of 10 cases it is a huge success on all accounts. And that's one of the things that also we've done in this case for Global Witness.

And then I'm looking forward to hearing about maybe in a couple of minutes. But we're obviously now three months into the trial and we're going to start the evaluation period.

That's something that we really highlight in our work is kind of defining what will be the way of evaluating impact particularly. And that includes measures on well being, physical health, mental health, but also organizational performance and kind of adaptability as well.

And those are things that you can observe in the short term, but also in the long term.

So yeah, in terms of the impact, I think both in terms of HR metrics, attractivity, retention, in terms of people's satisfaction and well being at work, in terms of their satisfaction with their work life balance and the feedback we're getting about how people feel in their personal lives and in terms of performance itself from a more business perspective, which obviously depends from the organization we're talking about, all of those results are generally extremely positive.

And now this organization is obviously a charity. But you mentioned there was a positive impact in that private sector study you did.

I imagine some people, I guess they wouldn't listen because they don't like the topic of the firm they're working with you. But some people will say to our listeners as well, actually, yes, all well and good, you can sit back, relax and enjoy your yoga on a Friday.

But we have a business to run, we have clients to satisfy, we have money to make. In that more private sector element, what would you say to them? Tatiana, a couple of things.

One of them is I can expand a little bit maybe on what that means kind of the impact on the performance and misconceptions we sometimes have about what is driving performance in an organization. And I think that goes towards. There's two sides to this question, really.

One of them is what drives productivity and performance, and the other one is what actually undermines it.

That is also addressed through shorter working hours in many ways, or shorter working hours are a really effective way of addressing some of the causes of underperformance, for example, such as absenteeism, lack of motivation, lack of engagement, and burnout, which are really important drivers, actually, that has negative impacts on the business.

Nadia, I'm interested. I think you're about six months, nine months in, is that right?

We're four months in now.

Oh, okay. Interesting. So when you started, what did you do to get ready for this transition?

We actually spent a good 12 months getting ready for the shorter working week. And it was the best investment of time that we've ever made, I think, into getting a project going.

Autonomy came, and they did some benchmarking for us, and then they really helped us think about the staff engagement. And that's what I've really enjoyed about designing the pilot.

It was a real collective collaborative effort of everyone in the organization coming together and thinking, okay, how is this going to work for me, our partners, and also the organization? And there was real enthusiasm and commitment to getting it right.

I think also having that long period of time to design the pilot enabled us to go through an entire year of an organization cycle. So quite often when you're designing something, you. You might just be thinking about what's in the moment.

But actually it really forced us to think about, okay, this happens at this time of year, this happens at this time of the year. How might we need to design around that? And I think there were unknowns that surface, the things that we just couldn't answer.

And we probably spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out the unknowns. And what if this happened? How would we respond to it? Would it get in our way?

And actually, in the end, we were like, okay, no, we just need to start the pilot now and we need to learn as we go. And that was a bit of a sense of relief, actually thinking, we're not going to have everything figured out before we go in.

But yeah, the bit I enjoyed most was the collaborative coming together to design a framework which was right for Global Witness. It certainly wasn't sort of autonomy coming in and giving Us a framework that we then had to squeeze in around our organization.

And if you're looking back now, is there anything that you wish you would have known about implementing this at the start?

I think about not sweating the small stuff and realising that it does take time and it, you know, and time to do it well, because it's a fundamental change to how people work. So, you know, I've spoken to a couple of people who are sort of thinking about moving to a four day week or reduce working hours.

And my advice is about don't sweat the small stuff. If you can engage an organization like Autonomy who can really help you all the way through it.

And actually the joy and excitement it sparks in staff is quite something.

What were the reactions when you first said that you were, I mean, did you tell staff this was going to happen or did you just say we're thinking about it? What do you think?

What we did was we bought in Joe Ryland from the four day working week campaign and we wanted him to talk to us all together about the four day week and to enable staff to ask lots of questions at that point so we could do a bit of a sense check in terms of how people were feeling about it and some very sort of rational, straightforward questions about, you know, how will you make it work for part time workers? What happens if an emergency happens on a Friday?

I mean those are all great questions. I'm sorry if I'm being very detail oriented but can you answer that? What does happen for part time workers?

Oh yeah. So what we did, so we've moved from, you know, a standard 35 hour week to a 30 hour week, worked over four days with no loss to salary.

So what we did for our part time workers and most of our part time workers are either doing compressed hours or they're doing a four day week. We said, look, you've got two options. You can maintain your current working pattern or you can move to 30 hours and your salary will be uplifted.

And most people chose to move to the 30 hours and have a salary.

Uplift does sound like a nice thing to talk about. And I just remember you telling me about COP coming up and how busy that was and how it was just, you know, very.

You also had to do really practical things, making sure people didn't get lost in Azerbaijan, I think it was. And there's a lot going on in those peak periods. How do you deal with those peak periods? Have you had any of those?

I mean again, I think staff have been really, really good about accepting that there may be Fridays that they need to work, you know, because we couldn't just sort of say, okay, we can't. We're going to ignore that COP is happening on this Friday. But staff can take that time back.

And I think just because, again, that's something that was very clear before we went into the pilot. Everyone's been more than happy because they know they're not always going to be working every Friday. And typically they will have a Friday off.

The one thing that we spent a huge amount of time talking about and we ended up deciding to just learn within the pilot was emergency cover. And I think where we ended up is like, emergencies don't just happen on a Friday.

They can happen at midnight on a Tuesday, they can happen over a Sunday. We will always need cover for media. You know, our comm staff already are on call or have a rota to be on call on a Saturday and Sunday.

And I think just reassuring staff that they could get that time back has been the key. But also what we did in the end, Verena, is like Because we couldn't quite get to agreement for what emergency meant, is that the senior leadership team said, you know what, for the first month, we'll be the emergency cover. And that will give us an idea of what's coming in and what's not coming in. And nothing came in.

And also, we are really well equipped to deal with emergencies.

You know, it's no different dealing with an emergency on a Friday than it is to dealing with one in the middle of the night, another time of the week. So that anxiety that staff had hasn't really come to fruition, which is great.

Fantastic. And Tatiana, we just talked about the preparation for all of this.

Is there any advice that you've given to Nadia and her team that you're really glad they implemented it?

That's a good question.

Also, to come back on what Nadia was just saying, just to say, I think that's such an important point, which is people often think, you know, the for the week is going to make everything more difficult.

And oftentimes it's actually the things that you're already having to manage in your job and in your work, you will actually get an opportunity to be more intentional about how that happens. But oftentimes you're already equipped for that because it's part of the core work that you do. So it's just about reimagining that.

And I think, yeah, Global Witness has been really exemplary also on two things. On kind of that idea of being flexible about it and learning as we go, which is so important.

And I know it's something that we've talked about with Nadia before in terms of preparation is so important, but then there's a time at which you have to start and see how it goes. And there's only so much you can learn before you actually get in. Right.

So being well prepared is all about getting to that place where you feel confident starting. But you do have to at some point get it launched and be willing to tweak and adapt.

And that's why having a trial period, I think is really important because it gives you that kind of buffer time where you can adjust, you can tweak, you can learn from your staff, from your stakeholders externally as well, and you can then make any adjustments that are needed.

And when you decide, if you do decide to make it a permanent condition of work at some point, then you're very confident that this is going to be sustainable for you from all aspects. And the other thing that I think Global Witness really did particularly well and that is so important is role modeling.

So Nadia just mentioned that the leadership team was taking on that kind of emergency out of hours cover for the beginning of the period. And that's so important in what we've seen those few unsuccessful examples. In many cases there is skepticism at the top.

And that goes a long way to actually making the policy not that efficient across the organization because it does require change. And in any organization there is an element of hierarchy. And obviously what leadership is initiating will have no kind effect at all levels.

So if you want everyone to be engaged and be willing to make this a success, you really have to role model at every level, but particularly kind of at the top. And I think what the Global Witness leadership team has done from that perspective is really inspiring.

Well, thanks, Tatiana.

There's some nice feedback for you, Nadia. So I get the point about it being really important to engage senior leadership.

And obviously Nadia's leading on people on IMTAC is the senior leadership, but then above that are the trustees. And in some organizations even the members, often trustees, are older, perhaps have been brought up in a world where everyone was working full time.

Have you seen any absolute gold nuggets of how organizations have engaged trustees, Tatiana? Or directors for that matter, board of directors.

So that's something that definitely needs to happen at some point. There are very different ways in which people do it.

So some organizations decide to go, I was going to say public, not necessarily public, but be really transparent from the start, even at the, you know, what we Sometimes call the business case period.

But when you're kind of just exploring it in this initial exploratory phase, already engaging their trustees, their members, their key stakeholders, their boards in those initial discussions and kind of. Yeah, exploring that with them from the start.

Others, in some cases, when they can actually try to develop a more robust business case first and do a lot of the work in terms of identifying what will be feasible and coming up with strong evidence, actually, and an evidence base to make that case, and that can also be really successful.

So there's a lot that depends, of course, on kind of what the working culture is and what those relationships are, and also a little bit on availability and kind of willingness to engage. Of course, because these are discussions that can take a lot of time and raise a lot of questions. So of course, that's a factor as well.

So, yes, there are different ways to go about it. That's true, actually, in terms of going public as well. Organizations take different approaches or engaging with clients.

For those who have clients, for example, members, do you say that you're reducing working hours and then seek feedback, or do you not say and then see if there's any change? If people are not prompted to know, you know, that there was a particular element that changed.

What did you do, Nadia? Were you really open? I mean, I presume you're also dependent on funders, on really important stakeholders.

Did you promote that you were shifting or you shifted quietly and let them see?

No, we were quite upfront with our donors and our partners. And actually the reaction we've had from donors is that they want to talk to us about a shorter working week. So that's been really, really positive.

On reflection, I think it would have been good for us to engage our board earlier, rather that we'd got quite far before we started talking to our board about it. So, yeah, doing it differently, we would have done earlier engagement.

When would you advise you should?

Right at the start.

Right to start. So even when you're thinking about it.

Yeah, because I think now as well, I mean, maybe when we started talking about the possibility of moving to a shorter working week, there wasn't as many organizations that were doing it or were interested in doing it, but now it would be much easier because there are other people's experiences, you know, people like Global Witness, that we can say, oh, this organization's doing it and they've made it work. Whereas I don't think we had had as much of that.

And therefore, I think that's why we should have started talking to our our board earlier and we could have designed it together a bit more. And I know some organizations have. I mean, we engaged our union very early. And I know lots of organizations that are doing that.

They're sort of know, doing the business case with their union, which is really, really positive for that relationship. I think you don't always get the opportunity for unions and the organization to be working on something that's. That's when you're not in conflict.

So it's great, it's brilliant.

I can see that the enthusiasm shines through, which is fantastic. And you alluded to working cultures. Tatiana and Nadia, you've implemented it across locations.

I think you've got stuff in mainland China, you've got stuff in. In Brussels, I think in Latin America as well. I can't quite remember. But it is. It is global.

If someone's listening to this and is thinking of implementing it in a global organization, is there anything you've learned they should know?

Yeah, no, you're right. Varina. We've got.

We've got DC office, we've got a Brussels office, we've got China and we've got Brazil and then we've got other people based in, you know, there's one person in other places around the world. The majority of our staff are in London.

Much as I don't like to think of COVID in a positive way, Covid and the overnight shift to remote working actually really helped more than we probably would have thought in terms of how we manage this. I think some of the challenges that we are working through and we thought about our access to space where all staff come together.

And Tatiana, I know this isn't like.

We've probably had to introduce a few more meetings, which we're trying to strip out meetings, but we've had to put more in just to make sure that certain parts of the organization aren't getting lost and we're making better use of technology.

So, yeah, I mean, all staff events, it's becoming the typical that you hit transcribe this meeting now so people can see what's happened in a meeting.

And then what I also really liked about the designing the pilot is teams, you know, teams are made up of, you know, there's some teams which have got people from all over the world. There's others which have just got people based in London and they're developing a plan which is going to work for them as well.

And, you know, they have to examine and ask themselves about how they work and is how they were currently working the most inclusive way possible. And it's really forced people to take a bit of step back and reflect on that.

Just to add to that, that's such an important point as well. What you mentioned in terms of introducing more meetings in some cases, that's kind of counterintuitive in some ways.

But we see this in a lot of organizations where actually so particularly when there's remote working and teams are in different places, but even when that's not the case, we're actually more teamwork, more collaborative time that's intentionally designed and spaces made for that can be really supportive and actually help save time in a lot of tasks in a lot of ways. So that's something that is a really important point that I'm really glad you mentioned.

And in terms of also just feedback on kind of implementing this on a global scale, I think one of the questions that comes up which is less cultural is kind of the conditions. So contractual conditions, that's always a concern, which is just what are you starting from? In some cases you have different contractual conditions.

In some cases it can be globalized and unified. So that's the main element.

But then as Nadia mentioned, it's really that element of co design, which is really the driving force really of our approach to designing short working week is kind of engaging people at all levels, including the teams themselves, to design what is going to work for them. And that's also a great way to make people own it and kind of have a stake in the implementation of the transition and in the success of it as well.

But it's the key condition to make sure that the way it will be implemented, people believe in it and they think it's going to actually support them. So that's really, really key.

Interesting. And I mean, I'm quite surprised in how it sounds like it makes you more intentional. Like you actually think about how we interact now.

And Tatiana, how do you even start with being intentional about the way an organization interacts internally? When you start working with clients and you've done all the should we do the working week? How do we measure it?

How do you then start the process of figuring it out how people need to interact?

Part of it is actually just asking the question. So when you are asking could we do a shorter working week, those are the questions that you ask, right?

So how efficient do you think you are at the moment at your team level, in your own personal work, at the organizational level, what are the elements that you think could be improved? Are there any opportunities?

And you know, we have quite a big catalog Now I think of best practice or areas of potential change that different organizations have implemented. So we can have some input on that and kind of just some prompts to help people think about, you know, time management.

Obviously meeting culture is a big one, but also the way work is organized, distributed roles and responsibilities, like kind of how clear or not, how to find or not they are. And there's no right or wrong way to do it. Because a lot of that has to do with the working culture and how people prefer to work.

In some organizations it has to be very clear, very, you know, like strict rules that people can refer to. In other organizations, it's much more flexible and that works really well for people. And it's more cultural. And so that really depends.

It's not better or worse, it's just what works for you. But yeah, so there's a number of different things.

A big one is kind of strategy and prioritization as well, which we've touched on a little bit already.

So when we ask essentially those feasibility assessments that we often do at the beginning of a journey towards shorter working hours, that already starts the conversation, that starts the thinking. I think in people's minds, one of the big elements for us is to do this in a collective manner. So create spaces.

And so we always have qualitative engagements as well.

So we have quantitative ways of gathering ideas and feedback, including on organizational efficiency and working culture through surveys and things like that. But we also always want to have actual conversations and workshops with people.

And that can be done in cross team environments, that can be done at the team level, again, depending what's most suitable for an organization. But it's really important that this is something that people work on collaboratively.

It's much more efficient because people have ideas that then obviously build into one another and kind of help broaden the thinking. People have examples as well.

And that's also where we can help because we have examples from other organizations that we can bring in, but people have examples from other workplaces, from how it works in their team, et cetera, that also demonstrate.

So it's like evidencing the fact that it is possible to do things maybe a little differently than you've done them so far, or to think about different ways of approaching it. And it's really through those conversations, I think in terms of where you would start, that's definitely where you start.

And then there is an element of workshopping. And we did this at Global Witness in particular. It was great because it was an all staff day.

So we got to meet everyone in person as well, which was really lovely.

But yeah, it's that element of then how do you turn those suggestions and ideas and that brainstorming phase, how do you turn that into an actual plan? You decide what you're going to be committing to and you turn those into tangible actions that you then decide to implement.

And just looking at the actual reality of how all this planned out now, you're now four months in. I know you set out with this to improve the well being, I'm sure, hopefully having some positive impact on other staff measures.

Have you had any sense yet of impact or even anecdotal things that have changed or it's too early to evaluate?

No, I don't think it's too early at all, Verena. I think anecdotally, the conversations that I've had with people and the emails that I've received, everyone is really enjoying it.

And in terms of a sense of, you know, because I've been with the organization quite a long time, so I have quite a good sense of how it functions. Productivity is not impacted at all. We've had no feedback from donors and we've managed some high activity work really well.

We're keeping an eye on time off in lieu accrued and you know, so we're looking at that monthly and we're looking at sickness monthly and there's nothing there that can't be talked, you know. Oh, that's why we've got this figure. Yeah. Time off in loo hasn't suddenly shot off through the roof. So, so far so good.

And Tatiana, you're coming in very soon, aren't you, to do the midpoint review?

Absolutely. Starting next week.

Yeah. Oh, next week. Brilliant. We're really hoping to see because our staff reported quite high level stress when we did the sort of, the feasibility.

I would love to see a small reduction in that and I'd love to see an increase in the score around managing that professional and personal. But what we are going to do is we're going to start to capture stories of what people are doing on their Fridays.

I have to say I've spent most of my time at the dentist, but.

You know, better times will come.

That's important.

Yeah, exactly. But you know, again, it's not a massive time out of my day. I can make the appointment for the middle of the day.

I'm not stressing about it, but yeah, I think last appointment tomorrow.

Wonderful. That's something to look forward to. And Tatiana, from what you've seen, sorry to do This a live evaluation of Global Witnesses approach.

But what, from what you've seen so far, what are the things that Global Witness have done really well that you wish other organizations were implementing the four day working week, or perhaps just limited to one thing, like one thing that they have done really well that you wish other organizations who are implementing the four day workweek would also do?

The main thing that I always say that Global Witness did do really well, I think is really engaging everyone and getting the appropriate amount of feedback and input in order to design what they would need in the most appropriate way.

And I think that was really, really well done in terms of targeting particular groups of people, targeting particular teams that we knew there would be specific issues with in terms of having specific constraints, having to react to emergencies, et cetera.

But also thinking about, for example, we did a workshop specifically for people who had caring responsibilities, because that was also a question in terms of how you implement the shorter working week, what the model was going to look like and what kind of impact that can have on how your life outside of work is organized as well. So how flexible it would be, et cetera.

And I think in terms of that openness and that flexibility in the approach to it, yeah, Global Witness did that really particularly well, I would say.

Looking at the implementation now, is there anything else that you haven't shared yet that if someone is starting to process Nadia, or of thinking about this four day working week, that they really, really should do differently or perhaps even mistakes? If you're willing to share, you don't have to, but anything that you would tell a friend who is just about to start this whole process, I mean.

I think I sort of referenced it, but just stay with it. You know, it's like when you're getting to the nine months, oh my God, we're still designing the pilot. Just stay with it.

It's really worth that design phase before implementation.

And I think, you know, the lessons learned are around making sure you're engaging all of your stakeholders and not making assumptions that everyone will be as excited about the shorter working week as you are in hindsight.

What do you think would have gone wrong practically if you didn't do all this huge design work? Because I know myself, I would want to just jump into doing it tomorrow.

I think we would have continued to work in the way that we were working and then become a bit unstuck, you know, because all of us, and probably particularly at Global Witness, we have too many meetings. If you're working an extra half an hour or 45 minutes, you don't really think about that.

But actually to sort of be sat down and confronted with, okay, we're going from, you're working an extra hour a day, you're working extra hour and a quarter a day, and you're suddenly overnight going to go to. To 30 hours. What needs to change is really important.

And I have to say, as an individual, that's been my massive learning is that I, you know, as well as adjusting my own rhythms of how I work, I also need others to adjust how they work with me as well. So I think that's why the length of the pilot was really needed. And it just got people ready for it.

So it was almost like, you know, we all went home one Friday, came back on the Monday, and there was, you know, apart from saying happy, shorter working week, everyone, it was like nothing had changed.

Interesting. So you change behaviors before you change the working days.

Yeah, that's a really good way of looking at it, actually. Verena, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write that one down.

Did you want to jump in, Tatiana?

Yeah, I would echo that. And that goes towards what you were saying, Verena, earlier, about really being intentional about it.

I think for me as well, having worked five day week jobs, if not more sometimes before, when I joined the tunemy and started working a four day week, that was obviously transformational in many ways for me. But I think for me as well, the main thing was changing the approach to working time.

And that's where really that constraint that you're putting on it, which is you have less time available for this, and you're getting so much more time available for a lot of other things that are also extremely productive in many other ways as well. But the fact that you have less time available for this, actually there is an element, and that was one of the big focuses at Global Witness.

And as Nadia just said around, are you just going to do anything that needs to get done as it comes along, or are you going to have an intentional and kind of more strategic approach at what you need to do? And how are you going to organize yourself to get that done within the time you have? And obviously that's a bit.

I think probably a lot of people can relate to that feeling of you just do things as they come along and it kind of never ends in a way. There's no point at which your boss will say, actually, you don't have to do that. You know what? You should go, right?

So it's also about changing and modeling that behavior at all. Levels and changing your relationship to that is a really big change actually, even in terms of your mindset. Right.

So that's probably the most important thing. And I think, yeah, as Nadia said, it's a collective element to it because you need to have accountability on it.

If some people around you are not doing it or are not enabling you to do it, it will be very difficult to stick with it. So there needs to be kind of collective accountability around it.

And that's where probably that's one of the most beneficial things of the design and preparation process, is that once you get to it, it has had time to sink in and you can just then get on with it. That being said, design phases can be shorter. Just to reassure as well.

Lovely. What do the two of you think now about how work could look like in the future across society?

Has this work with the short working week changed your thinking about the future of work?

Always, I'm always thinking about the future of work, as I'm sure Tatiana is as well. One thing that has really emerged for me is, is that we probably need to think a little bit more about the design of roles.

I know we were talking about this earlier in the week, weren't we, Verena?

And you know, I think over the next 12 months to three years, senior leadership team line managers will increasingly be asking for tools and skills to design a role in a way which focuses on outcomes rather than a list of tasks.

I also think that those sort of processes, people, processes in organizations that have become a bit of an industry, like an annual appraisal, don't sit with a shorter working week because you know, again, it's an example of where you need to find different ways of doing things because a shorter working week does not allow the entire organization to slow down around one process.

So one thing that we're piloting is a continuous learning framework so that people are having more regular, quicker check ins with their line managers.

There's a quarterly thing on, you know, on your wellbeing, what you've done over the last quarter and what you're going to do over the next quarter and that's it.

And I, I don't see how organizations can't move to a shorter working week without adjusting some of these processes that have been around when we all used to work five days a week.

That's so interesting. That's one of the things that I was going to mention as well.

I think in terms of kind of defining what we think success is, performance, you know, whatever you want to call it.

But generally what we are trying to achieve and just more generally having a more holistic approach to this is something that a lot of organizations say, not many actually walk the walk, but some do, which is great.

But in terms of that definition of performance for us as a society, for us as human beings, but for organizations as well, absolutely has to include measures of health and well being and sustainability. Generally speaking, it makes absolutely no sense to think that anything can be successful if it's destroying its own conditions of existence. Right.

Whether that's the planet, the people.

But it's very often the case and I'm not saying anything particularly new here, but it's so striking and that's something that can be modeled that company level and we see that happen through shorter working week processes. And the other thing I would say is a more general reflection, I think.

But just in terms of the place of work in general in society and in life and what we define as such, the question as well, of again I was mentioning when we hear feedback about people who are benefiting from shorter working hours, sometimes we hear in some media, for example, example, that there's a little bit of backlash on the idea in some cases. And people say this is for lazy people who just don't want to work that hard.

What we are hearing is actually people doing a lot of things outside of work that again can be defined as incredibly productive in many cases. You could say add more social value than what they are doing in their jobs, depending what their job is.

But the huge amount of care labor that people are doing outside of work, and this is a thing that we ask about when we engage with organizations in terms of whether people feel that their current working hours enable them to take care of their families or their loved ones.

And we've got about 40% generally on average of people who say no to that, 43amongst women, which is quite a high number and a significant concern when you think about it, because it's so important for us to be able to do that right as a society.

So I think there's also really a big question around what kind of activities qualify as work, kind of activities are worthy of social recognition, financial compensation potentially, and how those different spheres of activity interact.

And this is absolutely not to say that we should stop working and just do that, but the kind of balance between the different realms of human activity really I think is a big question and something that we hear a lot about in our conversations with people as well and definitely since the pandemic. Share your thoughts, Nadia.

I'm not seeing that as a very positive element overall at all, but definitely led to some reprioritization in some cases of those different spheres of life.

Wonderful.

We're coming towards the end of our podcast, so if you want to share one thing that someone who's listening to this now and perhaps is in a leadership role who wants to start the process of exploring the four day working week, one thing they can do this week that takes less than five minutes.

I would say take time off, even if it's very little time. Because again, it's that intentional approach to protecting time and working with the time that you have.

So whatever you think is feasible, whether it's half an hour, whether it's half a day, depending, but just take that time for yourself and think about what you'd like to do with your time.

Thank you so much, Tatiana. How about you, Nadia? Do you have something to share?

I was going to say something similar, but I think to sort of build a little bit on what Tatiana is saying is that, yeah, I mean, start to just be a bit more mindful of how you work.

If you want to start having the conversations in your organization or you might need to develop a business case, start thinking about what you can change now without the shorter working week and become a bit of an advocate for it before maybe mentioning it.

If I can just add this very quickly.

But I think something that you shared many times, Verena, that I'm also really convinced about, maybe talk to a working parent and see how they organize our time. Because people who have constraints outside of work find ways of doing that.

We see that amongst part time workers, for example, they're often much more intentional and efficient with how they use their time. So that can be one way to do that as well.

That's an excellent practical tip and very on message, Tatiana. Thank you. Tatiana. Where can people find out about autonomy and about you? Where should they head?

To their website. So our website, sorry. So www.autonomy.work. everything's on there.

Lovely, Nadia.

If people want to find out more about you, stalk you online, stalk Global Witness, make a massive, very big donation to Global Witness to change the world and stop the climate crisis. Where should they head?

Www.globalwitness.org and if anyone has heard anything that I've said today that they want to chat more about, they can Find me on LinkedIn.

Lovely. Thank you so much both. It's been a pleasure to chat you.

Oh, thank you, Verena, for inviting us.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate you listening. Thank you so much. And I always love to hear from our listeners.

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