So we’ve had our next session on planning out how to do our 4 day week. And one of the things that’s making me more comfortable is that we are taking quite a planned approach to this so we are looking at how do we do it in such a way that we are ready to do it – we’re not doing it prematurely, we’re not just jumping in and saying all of a sudden ‘hey presto, we’re able to do this’. We are stopping and identifying what’s the things that we need to have in place that we need to get set up so that all of us in the team can actually reduce to that four days.
And so part of the plan is that it’s not going to happen yet. In fact, it might be two to three months away. We know the assets that we need to build, to be able to gain the time, and the efficiency, to be able to drop that one day a week, we’ve got that list written out, we know exactly what it is and we know what constitutes an asset suit for us. And so now we can work towards that as a team.
I’m also more comfortable in that as directors, Alistair and I have also identified the other big things that are sitting on our plate that will impact on our ability to drop to a four day workweek. So I’ve got, for example talent spring on my plate. It is something that we want to build, and that we will need to build our resourcing on, and it will require a fair amount of time for me. And for Alistair there’s a fairly big project on his hands when it comes to transitioning our CRM or PSA over. That’s a fair amount of work that needs to be done, and it will need to be done at about the time that the rest of the team might be looking at going into a four day work week.
And so, we’ve identified that our fifth day for a while, may well need to be dedicated to those projects. Which means a more gradual transition for Alistair and I from the point of view of needing to still allocate the fifth day to a distinct area of the business.
The other thing that we will look to do which I think will be quite useful is during the next two to three months so in our trial period, let’s say, or our phase one trial period, while we’ll still be working in Focus HR for five days, each of us will be allocating our fifth day as an non-client day so that we get used to the concept of the person not being available – that will become a Chamber Day. And that fifth day will be spent on doing all the things that are required to get us ready for being able to actually be absent. So we’re giving time already to being able to be set up properly.