How To Change Your Boss's Mind

There's a very simple way to get anyone in your life to try out something new, like convincing your boss to move to a four-day work week.

Last month I gave a talk in Spain to a group of business owners from around the world. Inside a beautiful library in one of Palma de Mallorca’s oldest 12th century buildings, I fielded questions about the future of work, and how we’re going to get there.

We discussed a bunch of the tools we now have to help us work in better ways, like remote working, better meetings and AI, but there was one question that really stuck with me. “All of these things sound great,” they asked, “but how do you actually bring others along for the ride so we can implement them?”

We were in the middle of a discussion about four-day work weeks, perhaps the most powerful tool we currently have to rebalance our lives and work.

There is a lot of research emerging on the results of four-day week trials around the world, and one theme keeps coming up repeatedly: it’s basically a one-way street. Once companies move to a shorter week, they almost never return back. Results from nearly 3000 UK workers who completed 12 months of working four-day weeks found that more than 90 per cent of the companies would continue it.

This is mainly due to benefits like a 71 per cent reduction in employee burnout levels, 43 per cent improvement in mental health and other benefits like less stress, better sleep and more time to invest in other areas of your life.

Which all sounds pretty amazing, right? But how do you actually go about it? That was the question put to me by the group in Spain last month, and I explained to them that there’s actually a simple trick to doing this.

So for this month’s OUTLET I thought I’d share the same secret with you that can help you convince your boss, colleagues, workmates and anyone else that they should shift to a four-day work week so you experience some of those positive benefits.

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One Useful Thing for July 2024: How to convince your boss to move to a four-day work week

If you want to get your boss - or anyone in your workplace, or life - to start doing things differently, there’s a really simple way of doing it in a relatively risk-free way. The trick? You need to position it as an experiment.

As soon as you take away the pressure for something to solve all of our problems overnight, or be a permanent move that’s never going to go back, you are giving everyone permission to play around and test out new things.

Most bosses like to think of themselves as open to different way of working (or at least, to not being completely closed off to them), so by positioning a four-day work week as an experiment that they should test out for a set period of time, it reduces the stakes and makes it easier to try out.

These are the steps to do that:

1. Ask your boss if you can run an experiment.

The push for a shorter working week can come from anywhere in a workplace. Some progressive employees and switched-on managers who follow media stories around the topic might already be curious, but any worker who wants to improve their conditions can ask to test it out.

I’ve helped several companies run experiments on four-day weeks, and it’s always fascinating to observe how different people deal with change. The biggest learning is that each team, business and industry is unique, and there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to employees. That’s why it’s recommended that you choose a set trial period, usually from two to six months, to test it out with your team.

2. Co-create it with all levels of management

Ask to be involved in, or to run, the process so you can co-create it with your bosses to ensure that everyone has a say. This is not the type of change that should be announced one day and implemented the next without consultation. Everyone in the company should be involved far in advance in order to design the best program together.

There are lots of variations in what a shorter working week can look like, and everyone, from management to workers, should go into it collectively with a spirit of experimentation to give it the best chance of working.

A shift to a shorter work week changes the focus from looking at the hours someone works to looking at the productivity and outcomes they can achieve during those hours. It’s a large mental jump, and something that needs to be agreed at all levels of a company and modelled from the top down. It means new ways of measuring performance and rewarding effort that focus on what someone does, instead of how they do it. As long as a worker can perform all the tasks they are meant to as part of their job, they should be celebrated.

3. Agree what success looks like before you start

Like any experiment, you should test and measure results before, during and after the period so you can see what effect it’s had.

When I’ve introduced a four-day work week into a new business I set up a regular survey and ask the following questions of everyone in the company, getting them to assign their responses on a scale of 1–10 and watching how they change over time. You can also use them as a basis for measurement at your workplace, and suggest that senior management use these as a guide.

• If you had to assess your overall happiness (in both work and life) right now, where would it be?

• How would you rate your overall mental wellbeing right now?

• How would you rate your work productivity right now?

• How would you rate your connection with your work colleagues right now?

• How would you rate your satisfaction with work right now?

• How would you rate your ability to effectively work on side projects/hobbies/interests right now?

You should ask these questions before kicking off any experiment so you have a baseline level, and then track the responses on a regular basis, taking note of any changes. Before starting, you should also be clear about exactly what outcomes you’re expecting, so that you can determine if the trial has been successful or not.

4. Start experimenting

Sometimes it will work, and sometimes it won’t. But the beauty of an experiment is that it doesn’t matter which outcome it has, you’re still going to learn something along the way.

So, if you want to move to four-day work week but don’t know how to talk to your boss about it, use this simple technique of positioning as a limited-time experiment . You might just be surprised what they say, and the potential upside is unlimited.

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I’ve just finished up a month driving and hiking around the Alps, which was just magical, at parts exhausting and so bloody satisfying. My husband and I hired a campervan and drove from Marseille to Munich, racking up over 3,500 kilometres of winding Alpine roads and hundreds of kilometres of hiking up and down mountains. It was just heavenly.

But I’m now back in Mallorca for a few days before heading back to Australia for a quick trip to run a leadership training course and deliver some keynotes.

I’m also currently working with my international publisher on a slightly updated version of Work Backwards that will be published as a hardcover in the UK, Europe and US on November 21, with a UK book tour to kick off the promotion. I simply cannot wait to keep spreading the important messages inside it around the world.

Until next month,

Tim