Lessons in flexibility: Covid-19’s impact on remote work and the rise of the four-day week

In this think piece, LGIU England Commissioner Peter Smith considers the effects of Covid-19 on workplace practices, highlighting the shift to remote work while reflecting on his own past stance on this. He discusses employee retention, improved wellbeing, and productivity, offering insights into effective post-pandemic working strategies across various sectors, including local government. 

Covid-19 was a horrendous epidemic that led to massive loss of life and devastating social impacts on communities across the globe. We all had to stay at home in our social ‘bubbles’ and avoid contact with the outside world. In order to continue to work, in such an isolating environment, technology stepped in to enable us to engage with one another from afar and to continue to deliver services for our communities. Nowadays, there are many questions about the lasting impact of this universal experience.

• How did Covid-19 permanently impact our working practices?
• Are there ongoing benefits from our response to Covid-19 that we have taken forward?
• What are the costs and benefits of the working practices that we have retained and developed from our experience of the pandemic?
• What were the restrictions that it imposed and the new ways of working that we were forced to undertake?
• What were the benefits of those restrictions and the new ways of working that we have had to come to terms with?

Working from home: my personal experience and perspective

I worked in local government for over 30 years and in a senior management position for almost 20 years. A couple of years before Covid-19 impacted on my workplace, my authority introduced a hot-desking policy, in order to reduce costs of office space and enable us managers to allow working from home. I will admit to you now that I was a ‘stick in the mud’ who did not value this new working practice.

I refused to work from home and came into the office five days a week – I could not see how you could manage a team from home. I also wanted my team around me so that I could have immediate contact with them, without having to phone or email them. However, I had to give them all the option of working one day a week away from the office. Suffice to say, they all took up that option.

Although it was within my remit to allow further days of working from home, I refused to do so, and as a result, I lost a key member of my team whose personal family responsibilities led him to seek employment elsewhere, but only because I refused him a second day of working from home each week.

Looking back, maybe I was wrong. I was stuck in a mindset that didn’t recognise changing working practices and the resulting benefits. Should I have allowed him that second day a week of working from home? If I had, I would probably have retained his quality and experience in my team, but I would have felt compelled to offer the same option to the other members of my team, and at the time, I was not prepared to do that.

A four-day working week

Two years ago, South Cambridgeshire District Council initiated a trial of a four-day week for its employees, as covered by this LGIU briefing. A four-day week was initially introduced in January 2023 as a provisional three-month trial among desk-based staff.

By April 2023 it had become a full trial, with refuse collectors joining in September 2023. With the exception of six people, who opted to continue working five-day weeks, the council’s 697 employees all complete their work in four days and take either Monday or Friday as a day off.

In response to this trial, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) demanded that South Cambridgeshire District Council provide detailed reports of performance data to ensure that it was meeting the requirements of the Best Value Act. According to the council leader, this required the authority to provide some 200 separate pieces of data every week to MHCLG.

The current government has released South Cambridgeshire District Council from the Best Value requirements, so there is now scope for other local authorities to consider introducing similar flexibility for staff. But what are the costs and benefits of introducing such a policy? Let’s look at the evidence from across sectors and across Europe.

What do the findings suggest?

South Cambridgeshire was the first local authority in England to trial a four-day week, and an independent analysis by the Universities of Cambridge and Salford suggested that the trial was a success in both employee recruitment and retention and improved service delivery.

However, there was a similar trial ongoing within the private sector across the UK at the same time which published its outcome report in February 2023. This also produced positive outcomes with regard to both employee satisfaction and improved service delivery:

• Almost every company (92%) that took part decided to continue with the four-day week after the pilot. Of the 61 companies that participated, at least 56 were continuing with the four-day week, with 18 saying the policy was a permanent change.
• The vast majority of companies were satisfied that business performance and productivity were maintained.
• Over the six-month trial period, stress and burnout among employees both significantly declined, with 71% reporting lower levels of burnout.
• Reported levels of anxiety, fatigue and sleep issues decreased, while mental and physical health both experienced improvements.
• Measures of work-life balance improved. Respondents found it easier to balance work and family and social commitments and were more satisfied with their household finances, relationships, and time management.
• Other key business metrics showed signs of positive effects. Companies’ revenue stayed broadly the same, rising by 1.4% on average. When compared to a similar period in previous years, organisations reported revenue increases of 35% on average, which indicates healthy growth during this period of working time reduction.
• The likelihood that an employee would quit declined substantially (57%), dramatically improving job retention.
• There was a 65% reduction in the number of sick days.

In Scotland, a government trial for civil servants started in late January 2024, while the Welsh government announced in Spring of last year, that it was considering its own trial.

In February 2022, Belgium became the first country in Europe to introduce a statutory requirement for employers to allow employees to work a four-day week. In February 2024, Germany initiated a pilot project on the benefits of a four-day week involving 45 companies. We await the outcome of that pilot project. Portugal is also trialling a similar study.

The potential costs and benefits of new working practices

As the commissioning editor for the LGIU, I don’t have to manage a team in a local government environment anymore. However, I do recognise in reflection that I may have been unnecessarily resistant to changes in working practices if they didn’t fit into the long-standing working practices that I was comfortable with.

In my experience, the public sector is a juggernaut that can’t turn around as quickly as private sector organisations in response to external factors that should impact working practices – and maybe, I was part of that juggernaut in my previous position. However, the impact of Covid-19 appears to have impacted more positively on the public sector than the private sector, in respect of ongoing working practices. Perhaps that is because the public sector had to deal with Covid-19 from a perspective of delivering essential services to those most in need within close communities, whereas the private sector was already geared up to delivering products to consumers from a distance.

I also recognise, however, the potential negative outcomes of new working practices that have resulted from Covid:

• If more of us are working from home, will we lose the day-to-day contact with colleagues that help us to cut across the departmental boundaries that create the silos in local government? Will we lose the interaction that maintains and develops the understanding of our different perspectives on the communities that we are delivering services for?
• If we are working a four-day week, albeit in the same hours as a five-day week, will it mean that we are too tired to deliver the same quality of service at the end of a 9-10 hour shift as we would be at the end of a 7-8 hour shift?
• If we are working a four-day week that involves a reduction in employees’ working hours, how will we maintain the same level of customer service?

Those are the questions that we still need to examine before we determine that those new working practices benefit both employees and service users. A juggernaut is difficult to turn around, but it has a destination, and if you turn it around too quickly, it will jackknife, and that can be disastrous for all concerned. But I for one, am certainly open to the new working practices that were enforced by Covid and the longer-term benefits they appear to hold for local authorities.

This article was amended on 23 December to correct an inaccurate assertion as to the South Cambridgeshire offer to its employees.