A Brighton-based IT company is trialling an interesting version of the 4-Day Work Week: the ‘Nine-Day Fortnight’.

Carlene Jackson, CEO at Cloud9 Insight, a digital transformation consultancy, said:

“Our employee engagement surveys were telling us our colleagues were interested in compressing their hours into a four-day week, so they could spend more time with their families. But we were concerned this could lead to the opposite of the intended outcome – with staff working much longer hours on work days and not being able to have dinner with their partners or to put their children to bed in the evening.

“So we came up with what you might call a Third Way – the nine-day fortnight. Under this scheme, employees would have every other Friday off, while only being asked to add 30 minutes to their normal working day. We are also consulting on implementing an additional twist on this so that the other Friday in the fortnight becomes a ‘strategy, innovation and learning day’ to maximise team working, entrepreneurial thinking and to accelerate career progression.

“Staff would increase their hours from 7.5 to 8-hours each day for nine days and would have a day off on the 10th day without their remuneration changing. Therefore, the net loss to the business would be three hours per person per fortnight, though this is not being viewed as a loss in reality.

“In fact, procrastination is a significant issue in any business and we believe the nine-day fortnight will lead to less procrastination, easily making up for the loss of those three hours.”

Cloud9 Insight is consulting employees and taking professional advice on this proposal, with the intention being to implement a trial of the nine-day fortnight at some point over the summer.