The four-day working week is something that has been earmarked by organisations for several years. But now, numerous companies have taken the stride to adopt this new approach.
Earlier in 2022, tech giant Panasonic announced that they were looking to offer their employees an extra day off to relax. Despite Japan being a culture infamous for its steadfast devotion to work, the scales have begun to tip in favour of long weekends in one of the most career-focused countries in the world.
It’s not just corporations across the pond that have started to embrace shorter working weeks – European countries, such as Spain and Ireland, have already begun piloting similar schemes with great success.
In the UK, dozens of companies, including several marketing agencies like Crystallised, FLOCC and Punch Creative, have taken the leap as part of the 4 Day Week Campaign, reaping the benefits that this model of work brings.
But, how did we get here? The world of work has been changing with the evolution of technology for some time. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it allowed employees and employers time to reflect on the future of work and their approach to it. Since then, the calls for the 4-day working week have only grown louder.
The benefits of a shorter working week
At first glance, it may seem counterproductive to condense our busy work schedules down to 4 days. However, adopting this new working model has several very real advantages for businesses and the marketing teams within.
Enhanced productivity
Although you may think that having less time to do the same amount of work would cause deadlines to pile up, in many cases, working fewer hours actually has the opposite effect. When time is at a premium, staff are more aware of how they spend their hours, often resulting in them working much more efficiently.
While 4-day weeks mean reducing you and your team’s hours by 20%, embracing this new model of work has been seen to boost productivity by up to 40% – typically outweighing the time lost.
The end result? Your marketing department can increase its output in a shorter space of time. This could mean campaign assets are completed quicker, leaving you or your team more time to plan ahead.
Improved employee engagement
Giving your staff more time away from work by condensing the week can serve to improve staff happiness and engagement, in turn reducing employee absenteeism by up to 41%.
Enhancing engagement also has a notable impact on how invested your marketeers are in the company. Simply put, if people are engaged, they are more likely to go above and beyond for the business.
By limiting the number of working hours within your organisation, you not only help bolster staff attendance – the people working at your company are going to be more invested in the business and more willing to help your brand go further.
Higher staff retention
Over time, it’s natural for employees to eventually move on to pastures new. However, to keep your top talent for as long as possible you ideally want to increase staff retention as much as you can.
By embracing a 3-day weekend throughout your organisation, you work to keep existing workers happy and satisfied, reducing the likelihood that people consider leaving.
As the time and costs associated with recruitment are considerable, keeping talent inside your offices means you can spend more time and money delivering outstanding content, and less on finding and training new recruits.
Challenges of a 4-day working week
While preliminary trials suggest that a shorter working week does indeed have some very real benefits to businesses and their subsequent marketing departments, this new model isn’t without its challenges.
To combat these potential obstacles, tools such as BAM by Papirfly™ can help organisations overcome the challenges ahead, allowing them to leverage the benefits of this new way of working. With this all-in-one software, 4-day weeks can become a reality for your organisation.
Fewer hours to deliver
The most notable challenge enterprises face when switching to a shorter week is the fact that there are fewer hours for employees to carry out their workload. Without the right tools in place, you risk diminishing the volume of content your marketing team produces.
If you’re unable to deliver at the pace your audience expects, leads could go cold and customer engagement may dip.
How BAM overcomes this challenge
To help you upscale your content production, even during smaller 4-day working weeks, BAM allows your department to:
- Create bespoke assets that embrace your brand’s guidelines quickly and easily using smart templates – no design experience is needed
- Approve individual elements of your campaign faster to deliver a greater volume of accurate content
- Reduce the time spent looking for crucial files by filtering through existing assets in our robust digital asset manager
- Simplify your webpage management, and easily publish or update content online using an integrated CMS
Maintaining consistency
Another challenge that workers will face when moving to a shorter working week is maintaining the same level of consistency across their output. Often, when there is less time to complete tasks, it can be easy for errors and inconsistencies to creep in.
In such a highly competitive marketing environment, a brand without a clear message, tone or look may risk muddying its brand and alienating its existing customer base.
How BAM overcomes this challenege
To ensure your brand is fronting a strong image, BAM’s intelligent creative templates allow the streamlined creation of on-style visuals.
Covering everything from social media assets and email templates to posters, brochures and billboards, ensures that brand identities are locked down across all assets. Even those with no prior design experience can utilise these templates to craft perfectly branded content.
This means consistency is effortlessly maintained across your output, relieving your team of pressure when producing assets at pace.
Overseeing all elements
For managers who oversee the delivery of marketing campaigns, a shorter working week can seem a daunting prospect.
Not only will you have less time to fit in your weekly duties – as a manager people rely on your input all of the time. If you can’t cast your eyes over everything you need to, it’s likely to cause delays in the pipeline, hampering efficiency.
How BAM overcomes this challenge
BAM’s powerful campaign planner gives you a bird’s-eye view of your campaigns across brand divisions, letting you create briefs, assign marketing materials and outline timeframes from one single place.
This doesn’t just save you and your fellow marketing managers valuable time – the robust campaign planner aims to give you the information you need to make informed decisions that benefit your brand.
Leverage the benefits of the 4-day working week with BAM
With the likes of Panasonic and Canon recently taking the leap to a 4-day working week, this new approach is here to stay. And rightly so – trials indicate that there are very real benefits to this new working model.
Despite there being a number of challenges associated with adopting shorter weeks – BAM our revolutionary all-in-one solution – is perfectly positioned to help your organisation adopt this new model of working, overcoming challenges and harnessing the unmissable advantages.
Over 500,000 users in some of the world’s most well-known organisations – such as Coca Cola and HSBC – recognise BAM as the future of marketing. This is because our all-in-one platform doesn’t just deliver quality, on-brand content at speed – our cutting-edge software can also:
- Edit and brand videos for websites, social media channels and digital campaigns
- Simplify the process of localising and adapting content to new regions
- Centralise assets and important documents into an accessible online folder structure
- Allow content to be updated and published across sites using one central CMS
- Integrate seamlessly with existing PIM and ERP systems
If you want to learn more about BAM, and the ways in which it can help you ramp up content production in a condensed timeframe, get in touch today, or book your demo online.