‘An undeniable success’: first UK council trial of four-day week set to be extended – South Cambridgeshire council plans further 12 months of scheme plus pilot for refuse workers
‘An undeniable success’: first UK council trial of four-day week set to be extended – South Cambridgeshire council plans further 12 months of scheme plus pilot for refuse workers
16 comments
Get all publicly paid employees back into the office and provide the service we expect.
Would you take a four day week if you had to be in the office for three of the days?
Great to hear. Here’s hoping its success continues.
So they can do 4 day week while council services (and even basic things like answering telephone call) is at all time low. How is this good for the tax payer?
Why do people care about how many hours someone is working as long as the work gets done? You’re just wasting time if you make them work five days for work that can be done in four
I work with Councils in a professional capacity. They are woefully inefficient. It doesn’t surprise me that they are able to reduce the working week to 4 days with no appreciable dip in output.
If the Council was working efficiently and at capacity, a 4 day week wouldn’t be possible – there wouldn’t be a day of wasted time each week to cut.
I wonder how long it will be before the Council staff slip back into their previous inefficiencies, but then on a 4 day week – reducing the output even further.
The whole country is trialing a four day week this month with all the bank holidays we’re getting.
It’s nice to know that the office class will now be able to only work 4 days a week.
I do 4 on 4 off works well I still do the same hours as 5 on 2 off but have 4 days off, it’s changed my life for the better and I feel far more relaxed and as a result I think I work better
Didn’t realise Councils didn’t work 4 days a week now. They never answer their phones….
When you can’t afford pay rises, cut hours. Makes sense.
The majority of the country is about to have a 2 week trial.
Let’s see if it makes a mark more than usual 🤞
>About 450 mainly desk-based employees of the Liberal Democrat-led South Cambridgeshire council embarked on the three-month pilot in January.
Oh how lovely. Don’t come to work and nobody can tell the difference. If you needed any more proof as to how useless the average council office worker is.
If you’re working only 4 days a week, don’t be surprised when a fifth of you are made redundant soon.
If its so easy for the council to do all their work in 4 days, then give us a 20% cut in our council tax.
Doesn’t this just suggest that some jobs don’t really have enough work to fill a 5 day week?
Are we going to expect a bus driver to do the same amount of work in 4 days as he currently does in 5 days?
Well knowing that just over 10 weeks of extra time off was on the cards, I’m sure these council workers pulled their thumbs out for 12 months to ensure the trial was a “success”….not that making the typical council office worker accomplish in 4 days what little they do in 5 days is much of a feat.
However now that the trial is over, let them work under the impression that there’s no longer a team of researchers scrutinizing their productivity, and this 4 day week is here to stay as the new normal. Then compare the next 12 months of productivity with the baseline. I feel this would give a much more accurate picture of the reality of this situation.