Knowledge Bank - Ep. 003: Could your team do more in four days than it does in five?

A Four Day Work Week: From location to work hours, recent history has forced us all to adapt and evolve our perceptions of our working lives. For employers, this has created opportunities to break free from the status quo.

There is a growing movement of companies now looking to differentiate themselves not with more money and benefits, but by offering a four day work week.

In a recent interview, Andrew Barnes, co-founder, and architect of The Four Day Week, gets deep into his reasoning and commitment to this movement.

Andrew is a former hard-charging banker, turned entrepreneur, pubCo operator, and founder of New Zealand-based Perpetual Guardian. Now, after building upon outstanding successes, he has committed himself to advocating for a four-day workweek globally. And true to his word, he's implemented it across his organizations.

What I really appreciate is Andrew's approach to this. It is not based on feel-good logic, but on empirical data which shows valuable productivity gains for the employer and remarkable increases in employee satisfaction.

CEOs: Read this Before You Open Your Mouth: About a year and a half ago, we did some video work for the Chairman of a multi-billion dollar company. The work was by design meant to be informal, welcoming, and uplifting for his employees despite the global pandemic.

Unfortunately, the message delivered by the Chairman lacked any sort of empathy. Instead, it was an off-the-cuff announcement about the facts and figures that were most important to him. For some reason, this experience stuck with me in an unsavoury way.

My recurring memory of this reminded me of an HBR article written by Peggy Klaus about bringing more humanity into executive communications.

I encourage you to read this, but in summary, here are some points to keep in mind:

Default to genuine communication that leans more toward emotion vs. logic.
Ask yourself what's in it for the listener, as in how are you leaving them better off than you started your speech.
Be willing to be vulnerable as it humanizes you and helps build trust with your team.

When I look back on this client engagement, I realize that there are very successful leaders who default to the facts and figures (to this Chairman's credit, his organization is an outlier of financial success).

However, there was a missed opportunity to bolster the resolve of the team, simply by changing his approach and the words he used.

Trust - The Next Technology Frontier?: We've never been at a lower point of trust than we are now. I'm not being hyperbolic.

When looking at our politics and our economies, there has been an exponential increase in misinformation and disinformation, increased motive lead censorship, overstepping of authorities and echo chambers that provide little room for differing views.

Perhaps brought on by information overload, we, the consumers of media and simultaneously the revenue-generating product of social media companies, are inundated by headlines engineered to drive clicks first, entertain second and far down the list, provide validated information.

As we are collectively becoming aware of the powers and dangers of all media, like we became aware of the dangers of smoking, the problem will eventually be matched by a solution. It will be a David vs. Goliath scenario, but I believe we will see free enterprise tackle this problem.

So it begs the question - how could technology play a part in the rebuilding of trust? What role would decentralization and blockchain play in this? What analog is there that could be reflected and refined in digital?

I have no conclusions (yet), but share some food for thought.