For several months, Emilie has taken the time to have lunch with her daughter on Friday lunchtimes. A few hours later, she also has the option of picking her up after school at 4:45 p.m., and not at 6 p.m., like the other days of the week. And, in between, the forty-year-old gets involved in community activities, goes shopping or goes to medical consultations. Since her company implemented the four-day week in September 2023, Friday is now the first day of the weekend for this mother. “It drastically changes my professional and personal daily life: I take more time for myself and my loved ones, and when I am in the office I am really productive,” she rejoices. At Elmy, the renewable electricity supplier for which she works as brand manager, the weekly working time has been reconsidered to correspond to the expectations of employees over the four-day week: for management, however, there is no question of impose on its 130 employees a “classic” condensed week from Monday to Thursday.
Managers, who until then worked 39 hours per week, increased to 35 hours, while employees saw their hourly rate increase from 35 to 32 hours per week. “All this without reduction in leave or salary… Otherwise, it’s called part-time, and it’s not really a revolution,” underlines the director of human resources, Camille Darde. For the HR department, the four-day week must be accompanied by a reduction in working hours, in order to avoid “a poisoned chalice” for employees, potentially “out of breath and exhausted” by nine or ten hour days. continuously. A very different concept from that announced by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal on March 27, who proposed a four-day week on the TF1 set, without an overall reduction in working time. “For it to really work, you need an agile and flexible corporate culture, ready to rethink the way of working by letting go of unnecessary meeting hours or presenteeism, for example… Without imposing an infernal pace on employees to do go back five days in four”, comments Camille Darde.
A reduction in time spent in meetings
But at Elmy, “it wasn’t about doing anything either”, adds the HR director, who recalls that the company carried out a six-month preparation phase before launching a one-year experiment, then to definitively put this organization in place. “To ensure continuity of service, the ‘off’ days are determined for one year without being able to be modified, and pairs are formed to avoid gaps in the schedule,” develops Camille Darde. The meeting format, previously set at one hour, is now 45 minutes, and each employee has been trained on issues of personal efficiency, stress management and organization of working time. To maintain the productivity of the various departments, some employees arrive an hour earlier or leave an hour later, others shorten their lunch break, or take time off from work without any external solicitation, etc.
“We focus on everyone’s responsibility. At the beginning, I felt a little guilty, I tended to reconnect in the evening or on Friday… And then I learned to delegate, to slow down a little, to concentrate better on the essentials”, explains Emilie. The result seems, for the moment, very positive: in July 2023, Elmy already observed an average reduction in the time spent in meetings of 3.33 hours per week, an absenteeism rate down by 70%, and a multiplication by 2 .5 of the number of CVs received by the HR department. Employees, for their part, indicate 50% “feel less tired”, and 88% have noticed “a positive impact on their sleep and their ability to disconnect from work”.
While the four-day week is increasingly popular with French companies, and Gabriel Attal himself has announced an experiment in this direction in the ministries starting this spring, Benoît Serre, vice-president of the National Association of HR Directors (ANDRH), warns: “This measure is far from being trivial, and should in no case become a simple marketing argument. It is a real economic and corporate culture choice: we must agree to work differently, accept this proposal to the end.” For this organization to function in the long term, Isabelle Rey-Millet, professor of management at Essec and director of the Ethikonsulting firm, highlights the importance of “letting go”, particularly among managers. “If we remain in a classic and obsolete vision of control, presenteeism, timekeeping, it is doomed to failure. We must rely on the natural motivation of employees enabled by this additional ‘off’ day, their empowerment through inclusive and participatory management, which will improve their productivity,” she explains.
Above all, the management professor strongly advises against setting up a four-day work week without prior discussion with those concerned. “In this case, we risk seeing burnouts, people in pain, or simply not interested in experimentation,” she warns, drawing in particular on the highly publicized case of Urssaf Picardie. In March 2023, the public body’s proposal to concentrate the 36 weekly working hours of civil servants into four days, without reduction in working time and by giving up several days of RTT, was described as a “total fiasco” by the deputy director of the structure Anne-Sophie Rousseau, interviewed by Le Figaro. Of the 200 eligible employees, only three had chosen this formula. “This inflexible proposal effectively excluded employees with children who would not have been able to pick them up from school, those who did not see themselves working nine-hour days or giving up their RTT,” estimates Christophe Nguyen, manager from Empreinte humaine and work psychologist. “The four-day week, with or without reduction of work, must at least be thought about collectively, co-established with the teams and managers, to avoid this kind of pitfalls,” he argues.
At the town hall of Neuilly-sur-Marne (Ile-de-France), where the four-day work week has been tested for a year and a half on a voluntary basis, mayor Zartoshte Bakhtiari insists on this notion of flexibility. “Whatever happens, public employees must work their 1,607 hours, so reducing working hours was out of the question,” he emphasizes. But, to adapt to everyone’s organization, the town hall has offered various formulas to its employees: working 35 or 38 hours in 4 days, 4.5 days or 5 days, with RTT maintained only for people working 38 hours. “Most agents have tested the 4.5 day week in 38 hours, thus being able to keep their RTT. Employees organize themselves in advance to maintain the continuity of public service, and it works,” explains the mayor. According to him, none of the agents who tested the truncated week wanted to return to their previous rhythm. Convinced by these changes to the classic work week, the elected official would even like to go further. “The next project I would like to think about is that of daily schedules: why not allow employees to start at 7 a.m. and leave at 2 p.m., depending on each person’s rhythm?” he asks.
Another way of managing
Renaud Villard, director of the National Old Age Insurance Fund (Cnav), is not there yet. But, after more than a year of experimentation with the four-day week on around twenty agents, the man wants to extend the system to the majority of his agents. To ensure their 1,607 hours, they currently have the choice between weeks of 35 hours in four days without RTT, or 37 hours with eight days of RTT. “We realize that with a lot of organization and flexibility this measure can be put in place for almost all of the 150 Cnav professions, from the reception agent to the service directors – with the exception people on a day package -, relying in particular on the expertise of managers”, indicates the director.
So how can we prevent these changes from weighing too much on the shoulders of department heads? “We relieve them of compliance management to bring them closer to performance management,” replies Renaud Villard. “Clearly, we are not asking them to check if an agent has completed four and a half files over four days of work, but if they have fulfilled their objectives in their entirety at the end of the month, and if this work is qualitative,” he illustrates. To guarantee productivity without putting additional stress on managers, each schedule was also established in advance, and training was offered to department heads, particularly focused on “mobilizing the skills of their employees” or “facilitating of the collective”. “We also encouraged them to offload part of their activity by learning to delegate, rather than controlling, verifying and assigning everything,” adds the Cnav management.
A strategy also adopted by Emilie, who manages a team of two people at Elmy. The manager thus co-constructed her schedule after numerous discussions with her colleagues, remaining attentive to everyone’s wishes. “We decided that we would all be off on Friday, to maintain four days of work together. It works in good harmony, precisely because the smallest detail was thought out in advance,” she assures. Since then, the productivity of her department has not declined – on the contrary, the forty-year-old has even observed an improvement in the work of her team. “We have employees who are better at their daily lives, and better at their work. These conditions make us all want to give our all, and above all, to stay.” An unmistakable indicator: at Elmy, the turnover rate since the start of the experiment, a year and a half ago, is down… by 150%.
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