Hey, so, it’s the end of the day on a Friday. Hope you had a good week. You did a lot of work, didn’t you?
For some reason, we missed posting on a very interesting development that’s now two weeks old: Wieden + Kennedy’s London office is experimenting with a fairly radical concept that management likes to call “work/life balance.”
Remember when France decided to adopt an official “35-hour work week” policy so that employees across the country could spend a little less time in the office and a little more time doing things in other places (unless maybe those things involved hanging out with porn stars while still technically at work)?
Apparently that’s not working quite as well as hoped, because “many employers say it has escalated labour costs and handicapped French companies struggling to compete in global markets.” So they’re tweaking the law to allow businesses more leverage in negotiating overtime with their staff.
But the general idea caught on in different ways. From Campaign’s initial report, here’s a summary of the W+K plan, which was developed by deputy managing director Helen Foulder:
“For the next few months, the creative agency is barring staff from organising meetings before 10am and after 4pm in a bid to stop its employees coming into work too early and leaving too late. No staff will be expected to work more than 40 hours a week.
Agency staff have also been told not to send or read work e-mails after 7pm and are encouraged to leave work at 4.30pm on Fridays.”
For perhaps the first time in history, the comments on that post are worth reading. Seems that W+K London is known as “Weekend + Kennedy,” and this is an effort to prevent its employees from looking elsewhere.
Wieden ECD Iain Tate wrote a separate post about the experiment on his personal blog to clarify what this is all about:
“Always-on sounds a bit nicer than never-off. But they’re the same thing. And creative brains need time off.
We are in a business that’s almost entirely about brain work. So we need to make sure that we’re protecting our people’s minds. Buying a bunch of gym passes, hiring in a lunchtime Yogi, or putting a NutriBullet in the kitchen is all good. But we felt there was an opportunity to do something more fundamental.”
The idea, then, is that creatives will be more productive with a little variety, doing something other than staring at the same series of screens all day.
That one hit pretty close to home.
For the record, the rumor is true: we Americans do work our asses off. But if we’re talking average hours per week per worker, several countries are ahead of us…including Korea, Russia, Poland and Donald Trump’s chosen nation of Mexico.
When we inquired about the experiment, Wieden + Kennedy declined to comment on its future plans to work a little bit less. But we hear that the concept might become contagious if it proves popular in the U.K.
According to Tate, it has already “made a massive difference to how I feel in the evening.” Good on him, then.
[Image via W+K London]