Marketing agency introduces 4.5-day work week in bid to boost employee wellbeing

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Marketing agency introduces 4.5-day work week in bid to boost employee wellbeing

UK based digital marketing agency Patch has completed its trial period and made the transition to a 4.5 day working week for its full team of employees. 

On 1st May 2021, following consultations with staff and clients, its team entered a trial period working four and a half day weeks for full salary. The trial has now concluded and has been adopted as company policy. The new working week at Patch runs from Monday until Friday lunchtime, with Friday afternoons off. The move is a result of a culmination of research performed by the company over the last 12 months, including how a reduction in working hours each week has had little to no measurable impact on overall output and results. 

Notably, this change comes without a reduction in the team’s pay – so whilst working hours have been reduced by 10%, Patch will keep each staff member’s salary at 100% of their full-time pay. Both lunch break durations and annual leave allowances also remain consistent with their previous five-day week. This evolution is intended to boost the wellbeing of team members by giving them back more free time without compromising on wages, helping to raise overall ‘quality of life’ for its employees and subsequently improve employee satisfaction.

One of the biggest factors for spurring on this change has been covid. With the introduction of lockdown as well as broad reductions in client budgets in March 2020, the team was moved onto a 4-day week with 4-day salaries to match. During this period, Patch saw the benefits of having a better rested team who were more fulfilled in their personal lives. The company only saw a 4% reduction in total output compared to five-day weeks, despite time at work being reduced by 20%. The only problem was the reduction in employee salaries which was, in turn, impacting overall happiness and lifestyles.

Jackson Clark, founder at Patch, said: “Since 2017, we have worked off the system that every employee was allocated 30 hours of fee-earning work for each 37.5-hour week which is quite typical for digital marketing and SEO Agencies. We recognise that once you factor in time for admin and simply being human each day, there are only about six hours of the working day to be genuinely productive in.”

“Behind the scenes, we had been considering the four-day working week for quite some time. One of our clients Congress Centre London are part of the Trades Union Congress that advocate reduced working time in the UK. Seeing what they were doing encouraged us to seek out advice.”

“What held us back was trying to establish a fair way to allocate fee-earning hours to the team whilst accounting for wastage and admin which took up the other seven and a half hours every week. When we worked a four-day week during the pandemic we found the team made less mistakes and were more succinct in the communications, this alone reduced admin and wastage time in half, which made it possible to reduce the working week by half a day.” 

“We also found non-time related improvements such as fewer missed deadlines, fewer client complaints, improved punctuality, more accurate record keeping, and we even had an employee that returned to Patch after leaving for another job during the pandemic.” 

“Ultimately, we concluded that if every team member had fewer hours in the office, they would be more efficient and there would be less time wasted making and correcting mistakes. That’s why I’m delighted to be able to say that we’ve adopted it as a permanent policy.”

Media Contact
Company Name: Patch Marketing
Contact Person: Cerys
Email: Send Email
Phone: +44 20 7952 1740
Address:The Warehouse Hill St
City: Tunbridge Wells, TN1 2BY
Country: United Kingdom
Website: https://patch.marketing/

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