Yorkhill Housing Association will begin a 12-month pilot of a four-day working week in April.
From next month, staff will compress and reduce their hours into a 32-hour week from Monday to Thursday, 9am until 5pm. This will be pro-rata for part-time staff.
Its office will be closed on a Friday from 3 April. It will be open eight hours per day and 32 hours per week instead of 22.5 hours, and it will no longer close at lunch or on a Wednesday afternoon.
The housing association’s office currently opens at 10am, while its phones open at 9am. It closes at lunch at 12.30pm and reopens at 1.30pm every day apart from Wednesdays. On Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday it closes at 4pm while the phones remain open until 5pm, and on Friday the office and phones close at 4pm.
After discovering the impact of a four-day week trial on other organisations, which reported happier and less stressed employees with a better work-life balance, the senior management team and management committee made the decision to start the pilot. Its aim is to benefit the organisation and improve its offering as a modern and forward-thinking employer.
Tony Mallaghan, chief executive of Yorkhill Housing Association, said: “This is an exciting pilot. We hope the improved work-life balance for staff will bring greater efficiency in our work, and evidence suggests that our performance should not be affected, and in some cases be improved, as our staff are happier in their working lives. We’ve recently implemented a new website with a customer portal, meaning even more of our services can be accessed 24 hours a day.”
Grant Kennedy, deputy chief executive of Yorkhill Housing Association, added: “We’ve already received positive comments from our tenants, they like that our office will be open longer, and the opening hours are simpler to understand. We’re grateful to other RSLs for their advice, which was incredibly useful for our own working group. We’re looking forward to seeing how this pilot works out.”
