Around the world, the #4DayWeek movement is growing— fewer and fewer people are happy with the grind of a five-day, nine-to-five workweek. Automation can help you achieve this goal by freeing up your team from monotonous tasks and, at the same time, improving efficiency by delivering faster ways to do things.

The global pilot program from 4 Day Work Week is growing in popularity with more than 75k signatures on the petition up and many from major cities like New York and Houston in the USA. Many companies are already running with it. Unilever is leading a 6 month trial across all New Zealand operations and FinTechs such as Bolt in the US and Atom Bank in the UK have already made the switch.

There are some huge benefits: better work-life balance, lower facility costs, talent attraction, and improved productivity across the board. But many businesses jump into it without thinking through the practicalities. Their way of working, or operating model, will need to change, utilizing new processes and technologies while winning over their people.

Why automation-first operating model enables a four-day working week

An automation-first way of working will ease the pressure. Mainly looking at how digital workers or robots can complete the manual “cut-and-paste” processing tasks to help free up time in your team’s workweek. So as momentum for a four-day working week picks up, here’s how it can help:

  • Productivity – using automation means it runs whenever you need it. It maintains or even improves productivity by running processes over the three-day weekend.
  • Operational resilience – helps build business continuity, agility, and security by layering over other systems.
  • Error-free – the hard-coded logic reduces workflow errors and, more importantly, the time spent reworking.
  • Happier team – it takes away the tasks employees hate, which means they have more time to spend on meaningful activities without distraction.
  • Consistency in customer service – it can keep up with customers and partners on different work patterns.
  • Scalable – as the business grows, digital workers can scale within the governance set-up, allowing for future productivity.

If you’re wondering how to get started with automation, read our explainer blog or book a free consultation.