Scotland's public finance minister, Ivan McKee, has ruled out the possibility of the Scottish Government moving to a four-day week, despite a pilot programme finding that switching to a shorter working week brought both productivity and wellbeing benefits.
In a year-long pilot run by the Scottish Government, all of the staff at two of its agencies – Accountant in Bankruptcy and South of Scotland Enterprise – were given the opportunity to work a 32-hour, four-day week.
An independent evaluation of the pilot by the Autonomy Institute, published yesterday, found an increase in productivity in both organisations, alongside wellbeing improvements across a range of measures.
The Autonomy Institute said both organisations “successfully shortened the working week, giving staff more autonomy over their time, integrating more efficient working practices and maintaining organisational performance across the key metrics investigated”.
All but one staff member across the two organisations took part in the trial. By mid-trial, 92% of staff at AiB said they had managed to reduce their working hours every week. At the end of the year-long pilot, 94% of SOSE staff said they had either "completely" or "mostly" been able to do so.
Responding to the findings, PCS called on the Scottish Government to allow SOSE and AiB to make the four-day, 32-hour week permanent, and to “create the conditions for access to the four-day, 32-hour week to be rolled out across the public sector”.
But McKee said the Scottish Government and its agencies “will not be moving to a 32-hour week”. Instead, he said the pilot “has identified several examples of more efficient and innovative working practices, which will be made available to the wider public sector to help drive reform”.
McKee said staff members at SOSE and AiB "have shown the benefits of skill-sharing and closer working through the pilot and accompanying evaluation" and that this would be applied to improve current ways of working.
He added that the Scottish Government "continues to support flexible working arrangements that enhance wellbeing and operational efficiency, including the recent move to a 35-hour working week framework".
'Significant increase in productivity' and satisfaction boost
To assess productivity, AiB monitored the time taken to complete processes for its three main areas, comparing it to the year before the trial. It found no detriment in all three areas – and some elements of improvement – despite staff reducing their hours by five hours each week.
The evaluation said this means that the pilot “was associated with a significant increase in productivity, with work performance remaining stable”.
And it found “many cases of improvements in processing times" when measuring quarterly performance compared to the same period the previous year. It concluded that there was "no negative impact on service delivery".
SOSE’s productivity assessment focused on process time for responding to client enquiries, comparing it to the year before. It found a small decrease the percentage of client enquiries that received an initial response from staff within three working days – from 94% to 92% – but an increase in the total number of enquiries responded to within the target period, as staff had to deal with more enquiries in total.
The Autonomy Institute said it is “fair to report that the reduction of working time to 32 hours over four days did not cause any significant disruption in the area of client response times”.
The evaluation also found significant wellbeing benefits, including an 18% improvement in self-assessed mental health scores and an average 18% drop in average scores for work stress at AiB
At SOSE, the percentage of staff feeling "very satisfied" with their work-life balance rose very sharply, from 4% pre-pilot to 84% nine months in. It also found 83% of staff reported a "very positive" or "positive" impact on stress (meaning a reduction in stress) and 98% believed the pilot had led to a "very positive" or "positive" improvement in motivation and morale.
There were also some positive impacts on sickness absence, with SOSE finding a small decrease in overall instances of sickness (from 122 to 119 instances) but a 26% drop in sick days taken for psychological reasons, from 357 in the year before the pilot period to 265 days during the pilot period
The Autonomy Institute evaluation also found that the pilot was a good example of “social partnership working”. It said the two organisations “showed a strong commitment to principles such as consent and staff collaboration in the setting up and running of the pilot” and added that the process “may provide a useful model for other national governments considering pilots”.
Ruby Gibson, the national officer for PCS in Scotland, said the pilots "prove the principle" that a four-day, 32-hour week "can increase productivity, reduce absence, and support the delivery of high-quality public services".
"The question is no longer whether it can work, but whether the government is prepared to back what works," she added.
Click here to read more about the findings of the evaluation.