This academic year Student Hubs are trialling a nine day fortnight. Since August the organisation has shut down every other Friday, giving our team regular synchronous time off to rest and recharge. Now we’re nearly at the six month mark, we wanted to share our reflections so far, both from a recent staff pulse survey and team reflections at Team Time – a national day where all members of the Student Hubs team get together for training, collaborating, and socialising.
The Team are happy!
Overall, the trial is going well. 100% of the team shared they are satisfied with nine day fortnights. We’ve heard from our colleagues that they’ve put the additional day off to good use, using it to visit family, do life admin such as trips to the bank, and relax.
The benefits our team have experienced fit into three broader categories:
- Better energy management: A member of the Student Hubs team shared “The consistent leave period has been very useful for managing my energy and I am feeling much better and engaged so far this season”. As hoped, this regular time off is supporting the team to feel more energised when at work, as they are enjoying more rest outside of work.
- Better quality time off: Our time off is synchronised meaning we all take the same day off, and this has been essential to the success so far. A colleague shared “It helps being off and knowing no-one else is at work and needing something from you” emphasising the benefit of taking time off knowing that your inbox, and Slack, isn’t piling up whilst you are off. So far this trial has worked to alleviate the fear of a busy return to work post-leave.
- Better planning: The shift from thinking four day weeks to nine day fortnights has forced the team to rethink their planning and time management. Whilst this has had growing pains (see below) it has been a useful reminder to all of us of the importance of regularly tweaking routines to remain innovative and agile at work. A team member shared for their local team “I think we are coming into the fortnights with a better plan!”
Productivity hasn’t changed so far
In our survey, we asked some questions directly to line managers. 75% agreed their team’s productivity hasn’t changed – with those disagreeing sharing that they actually feel productivity has improved as a result of this trial due to the refresh on how we plan and approach our time (more on that below). 100% of our managers feel the nine day fortnight trial is beneficial for their team and 75% agreed their team is on track to reach quarterly goals.
Alongside the trial we introduced two other people and culture practices to complement nine day fortnights and set them up for success through establishing productive spaces. As a network organisation it is important for us to balance local and network activities to achieve our mission and deliver high quality impact with students and communities. Network Tuesdays is a space on Tuesday afternoons which is used for meetings and communications which need to happen across our network. The purpose of this? To streamline asks and collaboration and create really focused spaces for this work which can often feel outside of the day to day. Meeting free Wednesdays are what they say on the tin – a day without internal meetings to encourage focused work and space within the week. Both of these practices received a 75% satisfaction rate, with little constructive feedback but some members of the team feeling they were less relevant for their roles.
But there are growing pains
That said, there have been some bumps along the way and there are still things for us to figure out as we enter the second half of this trial. Some of our key reflections and learnings so far include:
- We’ve had to shift our planning mindsets. Moving towards nine-day planning, compared to our previous five-day planning, has been a big change that has taken intentional discussions and support – we are definitely still figuring out the best way to plan moving forward. This new style of planning was one of the benefits we were hoping the trial would have for our team, creating less urgency and more space in our day to day as we think about how tasks can fit into a fortnight window, rather than looking at everything through a weeklong view.
- The team has taken less annual leave than at this time last year. It makes sense as there has been more time to rest and recuperate naturally built in with the closure days, and October to December is always our busiest time of the year. With this trial in place we will be encouraging the team to take longer breaks more regularly over winter, Easter and the summer as well as supporting them to create a mental split between annual leave and closure days
- It can be challenging to make space for deep and focused work when we are in the middle of delivery. As mentioned, term one is busy for us every year so this is a challenge we will be keeping an eye on as we reach spring and summer to see if it persists
- We still haven’t figured out how to fit Team Time, our monthly away days, smoothly into this structure. Currently they are scheduled for the end of a fortnightly block but we are going to explore with the team whether this sort of away day would be better placed mid-fortnight, to allow for better planning and brain space
We can’t wait to see what we learn over the next six months, especially after we implement some of the tweaks suggested above. We’ll be taking you all along on the journey – but to close out I wanted to invite you to reflect. Perhaps a nine day fortnight isn’t right for your workplace, but what might your organisation do to think outside of the box and support its people in even bigger and better ways?