In 2022, Marilla Akkermans quietly ran an experiment on the clients of her Melbourne advertising agency.
“It really was an experiment to begin with. Can we make the research and the data that I see work for us? And it does. We’ve had the strongest 18 months of business that we’ve ever had,” Akkermans says.
“We were a small independent agency,” Akkermans says. “People were not backing agencies like ours to work with or to work in. They liked the perceived security that global agencies gave them.
“And so as much as I was interested in something like the four-day work week, I had to find a way for Equality as an independent agency to be an attractive offer for people to consider working at a big player.”
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Akkermans and her team spent months looking at other organisations and speaking to those who’d made the change. Only four hours each day are actually spent doing productive work – what if they could increase that to five hours? “Inventium is a great example of a company that’s done it for more years than us,” she says.
There are logistics involved in making a 32-hour, four-day week happen (and keeping it going). For one, Mondays or Fridays are generally the days people take off – a three-day weekend is what everybody wants, she says.
“We’ve got a buddy system, so everybody has a buddy. They have opposite days of the week off. We try to work two days ahead as well. So every deadline, let’s put a bit of fat into it so that you can have your day off and you’re still a day ahead for when you come back,” she says.
“We then ran a three-month trial where we didn’t tell our clients about it to see if anybody would actually notice a difference in our output. Nobody picked up on it.”
It is not a perfect system, Akkermans stresses. Buddies ideally keep each other informed about any potential major developments. There are also some weeks when things come up that require flexibility – staff know they can make that time up later.
The agency holds a weekly catch-up on Tuesday mornings (when everyone’s working) to outline their top five priorities.
Equality works with a few clients in the property space, including Burbank Homes, Arden Homes, the Dennis Family Corporation and Piccolo.
“We wiped 70 per cent of meetings that people had in their diary because meetings and emails and admin was taking up 50 per cent of our team’s time,” Akkermans says.
“If everything goes to plan. You get an extra 48 days off a year. No one’s going to take that amount of time in unlimited leave, plus their four weeks of annual leave because it’s just not possible, generally, to be able to kind of do that.”
Equality is part of an industry group called the Independent Media Agencies of Australia which runs an annual salary survey. She says her company pays average to above average, even with the added time off.
In an incredibly competitive sector where moving fast is a selling point, Akkermans says the policy has never cost them a client. Staff retention is about 90 per cent and engagement scores show 4.6/5 for satisfaction and 4.58 for Equality being a “motivating workplace”.
“It’s never lost us the pitch,” she says. “There’s definitely people who are dubious about it, and I can tell when somebody’s on board with it or not by the way that they frame the question that they’re asking, like, ‘Ah, so how’s that part-time working gig going for your team?’
“I can think of one instance once where a client wasn’t happy with us about something, and they said, ‘is this your four-day work week? Is it impacting the way that people are working?’ Overwhelmingly, though, people admire us for trying to do something different.”
Staff retention is a key factor for Equality’s long-standing clients, she says. Somewhere around 70 per cent of the people who worked at the agency when they introduced the four-day week are still there. There are additional incentives to retain good people.
“We actually give employees an additional week of leave when they hit three years with us. So everybody gets five weeks of annual leave a year to use.
“When you can keep all the IP together and keep teams of people who are really good at collaborating and enjoy each others’ company, as well as output, you know, your business only continues to grow and succeed.”
While some choose colourful events or staff discounts that are ultimately forgotten, Akkermans’ experiment ultimately found that the best thing for office morale is: less time at work.
