Workers for the town of Sackville will be trying something a little different this summer, working a compressed workweek of just four days, but with longer hours for those days. CAO Jamie Burke says the new scheduling system will run for three months, from June through August, and then be evaluated as a longer term option for the town’s workforce.
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One of the inspirations for the experiment is a small municipality in Nova Scotia, which was one of the first in Canada to try and later adopt a compressed workweek. Barry Carroll is the CAO of the municipality of the District of Guysborough, on the southeastern tip of mainland Nova Scotia. He credits the pandemic with the municipality’s experiment. “It’s kind of a good news story coming out of COVID for us,” says Carroll.
At the outset of the pandemic, Guysborough had split their workforce of about 60 into two teams, and alternated days on site and working from home. The flexibility was popular, as was the ability to keep in operations during COVID. Then one day, Carroll was listening to a federal COVID briefing when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau mentioned the four-day workweek, and the idea was planted. “We said, look, maybe this is something that we can try on a pilot basis,” Carroll recalls.
The municipality implemented a nine month pilot starting in June 2020, with two teams working compressed four-day weeks, either from Monday to Thursday, or Tuesday to Friday. “So everybody’s working the same number of hours,” says Carroll, of either 35 hours or 40 hours per week.
The reaction was positive, and continues to be, says Carroll. “Honestly, there’s a bounce in people’s step, every day of the week. They’re as excited about it now as when we first implemented it two years ago.”
Carroll says sick leave is down more than 50%. Workers have time to, “book a dentist appointment on their day off, or take the car to the garage, or do whatever they need to do,” says Carroll. Younger employees have had to negotiate daycare schedules, but Carroll says they enjoy the extra day to spend time with family. “It’s been a win-win,” says Carroll, who has done over 100 interviews about the compressed week, ranging from the BBC to other municipalities in Canada that want to know how it works.
Sackville CAO Jamie Burke was one of those interviews, and now Burke is hoping to put some “bounce in peoples’ steps” in Sackville. Burke says the idea for the compressed week actually started with some town workers who had heard of what was happening in Guysborough, and brought the idea to management. Burke also noticed that after Christmas break, morale was low in the town workforce, possibly due to “winter blues”, “post Christmas anxiety”, and the compounding stress of the pandemic. “We’re also going through a restructuring,” says Burke, “so I know that’s on employees’ minds as well.”
The combination of factors made Burke realize he needed, “to do something to show employees that they’re important, that as the leader of the organization you appreciate the work that they do. So that’s really what inspired the initiative,” says Burke.
The compressed week was one of three initiatives to make for a happier town workforce. Council recently approved a new benefit that gives town workers up to $300 back each year on wellness related activities like gym memberships, yoga classes, or personal fitness equipment. The third new policy allows for employees to bring their dogs to work.
“It’s not an all-dogs-in-the office type thing,” explains Burke. There’s a schedule, and one dog at a time is allowed to join the workforce in the non-public areas of the building. “If nothing else, it’s made the workplace a little more fun,” says Burke.
Much of the chatter about the four-day workweek in the media and online has to do with actually reducing hours of work, but the Guysborough and now Sackville versions of the concept keep classic work hours. In Sackville, inside workers will stick with their 35 hour week, and work longer days. That will in turn allow town hall to be open an hour longer each day for public service, a benefit that Guysborough also experienced. Starting on May 30, Sackville town hall will be open 8am to 5pm from Monday to Thursday, going back to regular 8:30am to 4:30pm hours on Fridays. That will last until the pilot is scheduled to end on September 2.
When it comes to outdoor workers, there’s a 40 hour work week that needs to be crammed into 4 days. Public works staff will be starting at 6:30am and finishing at 5pm. “So it’s a long day,” says Burke. But the new schedule makes good use of daylight hours and “they get out to kind of beat the heat first thing in the morning.” It also might be more efficient as it can reduce set up and tear down time for various tasks.
Sackville’s system differs slightly from Guysborough in that workers will alternate between having Mondays and Fridays off, leaving them with alternating two and four-day weekends over the summer, as opposed to consistent three-day weekends.
Burke says he and the management team consulted with staff before going ahead with the pilot, and that included consulting the workers’ union, CUPE Local 1188, which just signed a new contract early this year. As negotiations were settled, “the union was aware that we were going to be looking at the compressed workweek,” says Burke. So the town and the union drew up a memorandum of understanding outlining the parameters of the pilot project.
The final clincher for staff acceptance of the compressed week pilot: it’s not mandatory. “There’s really no pressure on employees to participate,” says Burke, noting that a handful of employees have chosen to opt out of the 4 day schedule. “We’re fully supportive of that,” says Burke. “Given the way the schedule has been designed. We’re very confident that there shouldn’t be any hiccups over the summer.”
Whether Sackville workers are as enthusiastic as Guysborough workers remains to be seen. “We we will talk to employees as we go through this and at the end of this,” says Burke, “to determine whether or not we can do it again, or whether it can be expanded, enhanced, tweaked, etc.”
It’s not clear what will happen in September as the pilot winds down. Burke is less confident that such a program can work through snow clearing season, but he’s open to the possibilities. As it stands now, on September 3, staff will return to their current 5-day-a-week schedules. But for the summer months at least, those who opted in will enjoy alternating four-day weekends, all without taking a single day off.