Australia: Audit firm becomes the first to adopt nine-day fortnight
July 19, 2023
Mori Fathallah thinks of the three-day weekend he gets every fortnight when he’s under the pump at work.
Knowing he can take every second Friday off gets him through the tough times and means he doesn’t have to use his weekends for medical appointments and other types of personal admin. He can use them to go camping with his family instead.
“We all know how good it is to have a long weekend. So imagine having that on a regular basis rather than just a few times a year,” Mr Fathallah told The Australian Financial Review.
The senior audit manager works for Findex Group’s auditing arm, Crowe Australasia, which on Wednesday announced it had moved to a nine-day fortnight after a six-month trial covering 340 employees showed improvements in employee health and engagement.
Under the new model, staff work extended hours over nine days in return for getting every second Friday off work.
It comes after Grant Thornton started a similar trial in March, but marks the first time a large Australian audit and accounting practice has adopted a nine-day fortnight permanently.
Healthier and more engaged staff
Findex Group co-chief executive Matt Games said the new model, which was stress-tested during the company’s busiest period last year, brings the best out of employees because it helps them balance their personal and work lives.
“It’s not all about work gains,” Mr Games said. “It’s about overall gains. And when people are in a better place [overall], they certainly work better.”
During the trial, workers reported feeling healthier and more engaged in their work while remaining just as productive – findings that echoed the results of a six-month trial by not-for-profit 4 Day Week Global.
Mr Games said the nine-day fortnight had also made it easier to attract and retain staff. Roughly three-quarters of people who apply for a job at Crowe cite the company’s flexible working arrangements as one of their reasons for applying, while employee exits during the trial fell by 10 per cent, he said.
“The other big thing that it does is it changes the available workforce for a particular role,” Mr Games said.
“It opens up some of our senior roles to people that need that flexibility to either come back into the workforce or come back into the workforce full-time. So that’s a big advantage to working mums and [people] like that.”
In addition to making a nine-day fortnight a permanent feature for Crowe’s 340 employees in Australia and New Zealand, Findex will now trial a similar model across its wealth division for an initial three-month period.
Mr Games said he expected that trial would also be successful and a nine-day fortnight would become a permanent fixture for that division too, before it was rolled out in other parts of the business.
He told the Financial Review the company’s main consideration when deciding on the change was how to do it without inconveniencing clients.
But the audit business ultimately concluded the coordination benefits of having all employees take the same day off each fortnight outweighed the negative of having one day every two weeks when clients couldn’t contact staff. Plus, Mr Games said, the business could respond to “super urgent” matters on those days if need be.
Compressed working hours gains momentum
A Grant Thornton spokeswoman told the Financial Review the company decided to trial a nine-day fortnight “in an effort to achieve better outcomes for our people, while also improving quality and client service”.
“As part of the trial, our people are encouraged to contribute ideas to work more efficiently, including redesigning the workday, rethinking meetings, and leveraging technology,” she said.
Other companies that have introduced a nine-day fortnight or four-day week include The Walk, Inventium, Tractor Ventures, Indebted, Good Empire, Commission Factory and Versa.
Bunnings also agreed to trial different models to achieve either a four-day week or nine-day fortnight in an enterprise agreement struck in May.
[The Financial Review]
