This August, we gave our entire team an additional month's leave on full pay. The main reason for our pause was to offer a month to rest and reflect following a pandemic (and our re-emerging from it) that put pressure on everyone we knew.
We received considerable favourable attention when we proposed the idea of taking a collective pause. Many people were saying how "groundbreaking" and "exciting" it was.
So much so that it almost made me nervous. What I had thought about as a straightforward, logical and necessary step for myself and my team suddenly felt like a huge deal.
Because it was 'outside of the norm'.
Before leaving our desks for the summer, my team and I sat down to write a letter to our future selves. We did this in an attempt to spend our time off in an intentional way and decide how we'd like to feel when returning to work.
As I wrote down how I'd like the month off to feel, I looked ahead to four long weeks stretching ahead of me, and it felt like a huge luxury. I planned on dreaming up ideas, listening to life-changing podcasts, relaxing, and sorting the entire house out.
I'd had so many plans for those days.
But in reality, time for myself was almost non-existent.
I achieved one solo dayall to myself (for the record, it was as good as it sounds, and I relished every second). However, aside from that, all I managed was to clear a backlog of tasks left undone from the previous two years, and I barely even made a dent in that. Once I broke my weeks down to days, moments without a one and three-year-old tugging at my sleeve (or wiping some mess on it) quickly felt minimal.
We also had a reasonably major family crisis.
It was so helpful and necessary to have additional space during this time for the kids, to call friends, to focus my energy on solutions and keep family members updated.
All I could think was, "How on earth would I have managed if I was working full-time?"
After a month away from my desk, I reflected that it wasn't groundbreaking. It turns out it was common sense and completely vital.
We all need more time to deal with the realities of life, and one month off barely touched the sides.
Almost two years ago, 64 Million Artists shifted to working a four-day week on full pay (with no compressed hours). It has been essential for me to have that extra day free each week to manage our life with two small children.
There has been and always will be time off for team members to recover physically or mentally from something happening in their lives because, as a team, we take mental health seriously.
We believe in people first. And sometimes, to put our people first, we have to think outside of 'normal, traditional working cultures'.
So much of the UK's working culture still looks and feels deeply unhealthy; winning, being the best, financial and personal growth, constant forward movement, and succeeding are the order of the day across many organisations.
Usually, across businesses, tackling the issue of mental health or well-being at work is often an additional afterthought or a tick-box exercise. Workplaces might offer yoga before work, counselling, well-being workshops or something that can put a plaster on a problem but refuse to address the cause.
Too often, workplaces forget that everyone has a life outside their job roles, and life takes time and space to manage. Too many people work a 60-hour week, have additional caring responsibilities, and want to maintain a social life with relationships but are wholly exhausted from work by the evening or weekend.
We have found that, by investing in staff and giving them a proper holiday, rest time and respecting their need for time off hasn't made us less productive, but more so. We have better ideas. We're better at maintaining relationships, are happier in our work and are more balanced because we have a life outside of what we do.
Other countries are thinking this way with incentives such as six-hour working days and no strict hierarchies, so why can't we?
The UK seems to be heading into an economic crisis following the pandemic. But it's also a crisis of how we live and what we expect from people at work during times of hardship.
The increasing number of strikes show that we can't expect people to work for little money in poor conditions and sacrifice much of their lives. Sooner or later, people reach breaking point.
The pandemic was an intensely stressful time for most. It was hard work and emotional, but it also gave us a glimpse into what is possible when a crisis forces us to change how we live and work.
It removed the illusion that traditional ways of working are necessary for all of us. Our pace of life and work can and should be manageable.
Work/life balance isn't a personalised, individual problem we need to give people to solve. It's an endemic, cultural issue that needs unpicking at its core.
I don't have a one-fits-all solution for culture change (the downfall of capitalism is somewhat outside of my expertise!). But post-pandemic, we now know more of what's possible. It woke us up to a world of working that was always within reach had our workplace cultures allowed it.
Changing the way we live and work is possible and always has been. For some, remote working was always possible when senior management said it wasn't. Flexible working was possible when HR rules said no.
"If you do it, everyone will want to". Many of us heard that line.
Now we know that if everyone wants to, the world won’t fall apart. It might even improve. Everyone deserves a workplace culture that works for them. And they will work better in it if it does.
We mustn't let our old ways and broken workplace cultures pull us back to square one like one big elastic band.
I may not know the answer, but I know it's time to stop and ask the question, "What needs to change about workplace culture"? We're constantly learning, listening and adapting at 64 Million Artists and want to hear what others say and how they feel.
Culture change must continue, and together, maybe we can move the needle. If only one millimetre at a time.
64 Million Artistsare a social enterprise. We believe that everyone is creative and that when we are creative we can make change in our lives and in the world around us.
We will be going live on Zoom to discuss "How do we co-create workplace cultures?" on Wednesday, 21st Sept at 10 am (BST). If you’d like to be a part of the conversation get your free ticket here.
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