Staff at British startup Atom Bank will be punching out on Thursday under a new policy that will shorten the working week to four days.
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British fintech Atom Bank will move its staff to a four-day week without cutting wages in the latest shakeup to the workplace since the start of the pandemic. The banking app says its 430 staff would see working hours fall to 34 from 37 hours in a bid to improve “employee mental and physical wellbeing”.
The policy will see staff at the Durham, England-based digital bank who opt to work a four-day week working an hour longer on average to compensate for Monday or Friday being taken as a day off. Some service and operational staff will operate a different schedule but also with a shorter week to be available to support the bank’s customers.
Atom’s chief executive Mark Mullen says the five-day work week was rooted in the industrial demands of the 19th century and was now outdated. “While we appreciate a four-day working week will not be right for all workplaces, the move to working from home has proved that working practices that may have seemed years away can be introduced rapidly,” Mullen says. “With Covid-19 causing vast numbers of people to reconsider how they want to live their lives, anything that leads to more productive, healthier, and, crucially, happier colleagues, is a win for everyone.”
The pandemic has upended traditional work practices and many businesses are being forced to make emergency policies around home, or remote work, the norm to retain and hire new talent. The shift to a shorter working week is one of the more radical proposals but has gained traction in the United Kingdom in recent years. The policy was backed until recently by the Labour Party, the U.K.’s largest opposition party, while the Scottish government has recently sponsored trials of a shorter week, and consumer goods giant Unilever and supermarket chain Morrisons have tested the concept with office staff.
Mullen says the shift will help productivity in the business, and would help employees to live healthier lives. “A four-day week will provide our employees with more opportunities to pursue their passions, spend time with their families, and build a healthier work/life balance. We firmly believe that this will prove beneficial for our employees’ wellbeing and happiness and that it will have an equally positive impact on business productivity and customer experience,” says Mullen.
The concept of working a shorter week might seem to clash with the growth-focused culture at startups but it has found some acceptance with founders on both sides of the Atlantic. San Francisco-based payments startup Bolt has launched a four-day work week trial, and Kickstarter will run a pilot in 2022, while in the U.K. marketing analytics startup CreativeX adopted a modified form of the policy earlier this year.
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