Tash Walker On Why Companies Should Adopt A 4-Day Workweek

[01:45] Paul: Today I'm talking with Tash Walker. She's the founder of The Mix based in London. For the last year, her team's been working a 4-day work week and just released a fascinating in-depth report about what they learned. I am really pumped to talk to her about this today. Welcome to the podcast.

[02:03] Tash Walker: Hi, thank you so much for having me.

[02:05] Paul: Everything you do seems to be driven by a fascination of human behavior. You write this in a lot of places and in the report, around The 4-Day Workweek, you write, "Human behavior is fascinating. Research isn't." Perhaps we can just start with that statement and dig into what you mean there.

[02:25] Tash Walker: So that is a line that has been relatively controversial. Certainly, some of our research clients are not totally in favor of that line. But it's a line that means a lot to me because I think that if you go for dinner with people, then you often talk about a TED Talk that you may have watched, or maybe an article that you've read. Maybe you've read a Malcolm Gladwell Well Book, all of these kind of things. And we're all obsessed with reality TV. So we cannot get enough human behavior.

We really enjoy learning about ourselves. Psychology is the number one subject for any TED Talk. If you search for favorite TED Talks, it's always to do with human psychology. And yet at the same time, we spend more and more money on research. So the research industry is growing. Every year it grows.

We spend more money on it. And yet it's almost the last thing that gets referenced in the boardroom. If ever, maybe it never gets mentioned, because ultimately we're really bad at telling stories about the people that we find. And so it becomes very data-oriented, and we really stop our ability to even really determine what's insightful at all, because we're just drowning in information.

And so the research industry has become quite, I think, poor at being able to see the wood from the trees, at being able to tell those stories in a really compelling fashion that really makes a difference at board level, despite the fact that probably half those members of the board are watching TED Talks TED Talks and reality TV themselves, they're not being interested in the people that are buying their products or services because research is not doing a good enough job of getting insightful information into their hands in a way that's digestible and engaging in the same way that either TED Talk would or a reality TV show.

[04:04] Paul: Completely agree. It almost seems like because we have so much information, we've made the consistent mistake of thinking, okay, more information is better. And we're slowly realizing that that actually might not be true.

[04:19] Tash Walker: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that for me, the biggest thing here of all is this absolute tsunami of information that we're dealing with all the time. And that, of course, means that we just don't pay attention to the right things. We get easily distracted and we miss the bigger picture of what's really going on. So, yeah, we get very, very stuck into lots and lots of tiny bits of detail and forget about perhaps some of those stories that are really interesting and could make a real difference in the world.

[04:47] Paul: In digging into some of the research, we'll get to the 4-day workweek, but you did another post, I think this was in 2016, where you talked about your firm banned PowerPoint. So perhaps your firm already had some practice in terms of taking alternative routes. Maybe you can talk about that and how it might have laid the groundwork for what you did more recently.

[05:10] Tash Walker: Well, I mean, I think PowerPoint is a great example of this. All accept that lots of the things that we do, particularly in the workplace, are just a given, that they're kind of these facts of life that we can't move around, and that PowerPoint and Excel and Word and all these things are kind of objects and we just have to work with them. But I studied design before I studied anything to do with psychology or research, and the one thing you get taught when you start out as a designer is don't go straight to the Mac. So think about what you want to do, use your pen and paper, Because ultimately, anytime you use any kind of program, any kind of office-y type scenario, it's already training you to think in a certain way. It's already programming you to work in a linear fashion.

So, exactly like PowerPoint, you know, you'll write your slide and then you'll go to the next slide, and everything about that program forces you to think in a certain way. And so, if you recognize that, then you can start to think, well, actually, maybe there's a different solution here, and we're being forced to think about it in this particular way because of the constructs of, you know, the office place and how we work together. And so, yeah, absolutely. I think when we started out at The Mix, you know, the joy of about having your own business and starting your own thing, as any startup or entrepreneur will tell you, is that you can decide what to do. And I think there's no point in doing that kind of endeavor unless you then play with it and have a bit of fun. And you get to challenge the things that you hated about your previous jobs and go, actually, we don't have to do that.

We can do something different. Banning timesheets, for example, brings great joy to my life. Right. Yeah.

[06:36] Paul: Where does this come from? I mean, this— I've worked with a lot of founders who I think there's a natural hesitancy just to try new things because it is so, you're so close to the company and you don't want to take risks to potentially lose it or blow it up. So where does that come from, from you?

[06:53] Tash Walker: I think probably I have a quite pro-risk attitude and I love that conversation around risk. I think I love, you know, people's insight into how they feel about risk because of course we're all such contradictions. And you know, part of what we do here is all around behavioral economics. People view risk in different situations very differently. I'm quite, risk-averse, I would say, if it came to a social situation, but very pro-risk when it comes to work. And I think that's partly down to this idea that I genuinely think that, you know, we're not saving lives with what we do here ultimately, but we can make things a bit better if we embrace the idea that, you know, maybe we should try something different.

I mean, the risk to me of this all not working out is, okay, well, I'll go and do something else then. So I think for us, there isn't a risk. So it doesn't feel risky when we try these things. Just feels like, well, we can see a problem, why wouldn't we try and come up with a solution? I think when people are more risk-averse, it tends to be because they've got something really physical or tangible to lose. Maybe that's money, maybe it's commitments outside of work, maybe mortgage to pay, all of those kind of things, which I think can inhibit your feeling that you can be pro-risk.

But I think if you reframe that conversation and ask yourself, what's the downside of not doing this? For me, is always the thing that spurs me on to think, let's do it because I don't want to think about this in 5 years' time and think, if only we tried that.

[08:12] Paul: That's a lot of driver around personal regrets too. I think I was reading some research that says that people rarely regret the moves they make because then you can just adjust to what happens on the downside versus regretting things they wish they had done.

[08:28] Tash Walker: I think it's a great, great way of looking at things. And I think, you know, we live in a world where There are lots and lots of things that frustrate probably most of us on a daily basis. If you have a chance to maybe challenge just a tiny bit of that, then I think that's, I think that's something worth doing.

[08:43] Paul: I'd love to dive into the initial impetus for thinking about the 4-day work week. In the report, you talk about a crisis you were dealing with where you're working a lot and you didn't even have a lot, anything left when you're coming home at the end of the day. Maybe you can talk about that and how the wheels started initially turning for this experiment.

[09:05] Tash Walker: I mean, take yourself, for example, or anyone listening today. If you think about how your day feels, you know, think about all the interruptions you might have, the different responsibilities you might have. Maybe you've got your kids to pick up from school. Maybe you've got to run to gym class. You know, how many times a day are you checking your phone, checking your notifications? That kind of experience of living in the world today, I think, can be incredibly stressful.

And we noticed that of the people we worked for, so our clients, but also consumers that we were working with as part of research. And I think it felt like this common theme that was constantly coming up again and again that people just kept saying, I just feel so stressed, I've got no time. And it kind of made me think, actually, how do I feel? And I think I noticed quite quickly that the more I heard other people saying that, the more you start to pick up on your own kind of sort of emotional landscape, if you like. So I think running a business, if anyone ever done that, everyone knows what it's like. It's pretty full-on, it's high stress, there's lots of pressure.

You feel compelled to work all of the time because it's your thing and you want it to work so much. So, I think personally, I got to a point where there was just a recognition that this is happening everywhere to everyone, but I was part of that. And I think often, when you're observing other people, you can sort of forget about your own emotions within that. And I think there was a moment, probably certainly about 18 months ago, where collectively as a business, we just kind of started to think maybe we're not that different from everyone else. And, you know, my relationships were part of that. You know, my husband certainly was saying to me at points, can you just not work right now?

You know, when are we going to spend time together? And so the start of that process of thinking, okay, this is something that we should be thinking more about, and taking the temperature of people in the room that work for us and work for me, it was clear that everyone was feeling that. And I think the worst thing to think is that if you're leading a business and people working for you, that they're experiencing some of that level of stress that you you obviously don't want to feel yourself. So, we started doing a bit of research into different ways of working, very broadly, not with any kind of particular agenda at that point, more just to understand if there's a better way of doing things. And so, we looked at different ways of working in different sizes of business, from different places around the world.

We saw some people were doing things like, you know, finishing an hour early on a Friday in the summer, for example, or giving people time off to go do yoga class on a Wednesday afternoon. And so there were lots of different initiatives, I would say, that felt very much part and parcel of normal business practice, but we're just kind of trying to mitigate some of the stress level. We then came across a report from some Scandinavian countries into the idea of a four-day week, and it was the first time I read something and I thought they're not just dancing at the edges of the problem, that they're really, really trying to tackle it head-on. Because, you know, an afternoon off here or there, or an hour off to do do more yoga felt like you're just asking them to do more with less time. And that for me was just not the point at all.

It felt like, okay, if we're meaningful about, you know, playing with things and, you know, rethinking about how we do stuff here, then we need to do something that's more tangible and more meaningful than just an hour off here or there. And 4-day week was the only one that we found that did that. And there were all sorts of sort of reports in terms of how productivity was better and how mental well-being was improved, and all of these kind of things. So, we then kind of laid out all of these different options in front of us, and in honesty, I was really nervous. I was thinking, God, that's, that's really significant. You know, maybe we should just do a half day, or maybe it's this, or maybe it's that.

And I think we constantly came back to this idea of, if you mean what you say, don't do a half measure. And so, 4-day week felt like the one that was risky enough to feel like it was worth doing properly. And so, I think going back to that conversation we were having around risk, we almost needed it at that point to be significant significant in order for it to feel like it was going to make an impact, and everything else just felt like, you know, like you were just messing around with something that was probably not going to change a great deal and therefore was a bit pointless. And that's how we started. It was just a real recognition of our own feelings in the world, and then that feeling that, okay, we need to try and do something significant about it, and 4 days was the most significant example out there that we could find that really put that into practice.

[13:37] Paul: In some of your research on this, you discovered that the shift from giving people a half day off on Friday to a 4-day workweek is actually a change in the type of fundamental questions you're asking about people's relationship to work in their life. Maybe you can share a little bit about what you found there.

[13:56] Tash Walker: Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing to note is that work is only a part of people's lives. And I think increasingly today what we find is, particularly in the kind of style of work that we have, there's pressure to do more and more and more. So if you think about how many times you answer email in the evening, maybe it's the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning, on the weekends. And so I think there's this pressure to do more, even though productivity is not improved as a result of that. I think what we also notice is that that means that all of those other things in your life which are really important, you know, seeing friends and family and taking care of your life admin that people often talk about, gets increasingly squeezed into smaller and smaller buckets.

And as a result of that, you feel this constant pressure that you're juggling, and that's whether you're a parent or whether you're just a single person. That's true of everyone now, and we found that ourselves, that you get to the end of Sunday and it just feels like, wow, you've just spent a weekend doing another set of jobs because actually you've had no real leisure time. And leisure time, I think, has really suffered in the world, particularly as technology has increasingly meant that we can work everywhere, and so actually our leisure time is decreased significantly. Really kind of trying to redress that balance, I think, was really important as part of 4-Day Week to create more boundaries so that people had time to do the things that they wanted to without fear of needing to have to work literally every single day of the week in order to prove themselves.

And in effect, that's what it does. It creates that boundary of saying work and life are both important, but one is not more important than the other. And in fact, life is much more important. And that's really the intent, is to try and make sure that people are aware of that.

[15:40] Paul: When you went to finally— so you did all this research, you said, okay, maybe this is the right risky decision we want to make. What did you do next? Did you bring it to your company? How did people react? How did you actually just implement this?

[15:57] Tash Walker: Uh, yeah, we brought it to the team and it was a decision, um, that we made to do it. We decided to do a 3-month trial and that was because we thought We thought there would be lots of problems, honestly. We thought it would be full of difficulty and challenge, and we weren't sure that it would work, quite frankly. There was a real nervousness that it would just be— could be a disaster, I guess. So we initially brought it to the team as a proposal of, this is what we want to do. The team then were responsible for coming up with how.

So we spent a lot of time before we started the 3-month trial thinking about the things that might go wrong or the different ways that we might need to work, because the emphasis here was not about doing 5 days in 4. It was about how do we work differently. So we brought it to the team. They were nervous, more nervous than I anticipated. You know, I think everyone now is probably suspicious of businesses doing things. You know, where's the what's in it for you mentality?

Am I going to get paid the same? All of these kind of questions, which are totally fair. And so we had to do a lot of work together to work out actually what's the good way of doing this for us that makes sure that everyone feels comfortable and not more stressed rather than being less stressed, which is the intention. And then we started. And honestly, I think that 3-month trial was interesting. Not everything went right.

But in the trial, we didn't tell clients what we were doing. We were really nervous that they would suddenly think we were doing a rubbish job or where have we gone? And we suddenly weren't as available to them. So the trial was really much more about clients in a way. And then, of course, us working out how to do, how to do what we do in 4 days. And then we got to the end of that 3 months and no one had noticed.

So that was a bit crushing, crushing in a way, because you kind of think, oh, I thought we were more important to you than that. And then great in another way because you go, ah, no, they don't care, so we can do this and we have permission to do it. And I think honestly, I don't know what we were thinking having a 3-month trial, because it's not like you could do a 4-day week for 3 months and then be like, oh, actually guys, sorry, that was a rubbish idea, we're not gonna do it.

[18:03] Paul: That is bad, bad business.

[18:07] Tash Walker: Ness to do that, take something really good away from people. So no, I think we did it foolishly, but with good intent. And it worked. So that was the important thing. It worked. No one had noticed.

And in fact, when we did start to tell clients, they were like, what? This is amazing. You should do this more. This is fantastic. And, you know, we'll support you and we'll help you. And, you know, they do.

They absolutely do. They're pivotal to our success in 4 Day Week.

[18:34] Paul: So I think one of the sacred beliefs— I worked in professional services for 10 years— is that you're getting paid for availability, right? Responding on weekends, late nights. I never bought that. I just said we do that because we're neurotic about responding rather than clients are actually paying for that. I always said clients are paying for incredible work, right? So did this make make that fundamentally clear or did you also have to make some changes to shift around that as well?

[19:06] Tash Walker: I think you're right. I think because the bulk of, I guess, value, particularly in the economy now, comes from the services rather than from manufacturing, I think there's a real feeling within the services that service means being available, to your point, or being there always or creating better ways of doing things. And that ultimately often just leads to bureaucracy. To unnecessary process, to presenteeism, and to a whole host of things which are fundamentally pointless. So I think you're right. I think what we had to stress to clients was that this would produce better work, because the other thing about the service economy is that it's about ideas, right?

So we're selling ideas often. And if you're not coming up with good ideas because you're knackered or tired or stressed out, then your work is not as good. And so I think for clients, we talk about it in the context of being fresh, not frazzled. And if they want great work from us, then we need to be fresh and to be a part of the world and not just to be chained to our desks. And that makes our work better. And I think we've definitely seen that.

Clients rate that. They like the fact that we turn up and we've brought them a different thought because we had an extra day of the week to not be buried in emails, but just looking around us in the world and thinking about the different solutions we could come up with. So I think it puts much more value on ideas. Fundamentally, I think 4 days means that what you're saying is the most important thing to your business is that people are coming up with great work, not great availability. And I think that's exactly right.

[20:48] Paul: What are some of the things you stopped stop doing because you just had less time and realized they weren't priorities that people were just doing regularly?

[20:58] Tash Walker: I think we prioritize our time internally more than meetings externally. So, I mean, everyone talks about being in too many meetings. I think we spend more time together as a team. And actually, I think one of the misnomers about 4-day week is that you just stop working together. So, you know, a common phrase that we use today is flexible working. And I think what that ends up meaning is that you just spend endless amounts of time working in different places using technology, but you don't ever actually spend a lot of time, quality time together.

And so in 4 days, you can't individually get to your 4-day unless we work together to get something done. So I think it's meant that we prioritize that much, much more and we spend much more time and quality time with no technology and actual good, honest conversations and interactions. Which means that the ideas are better straight away and then people spend much less time actually physically getting it done. And that's, I think, the fundamental difference to the way we work now.

[21:58] Paul: Right. And did you establish any safety or kind of barriers to protect people from— I mean, every company is going to have those people that just want to work more, right? And one of my arguments for equality in the workplace is we should just cap the hours of everyone so we don't have these extreme outliers that are outworking everyone. So did you put any barriers up to kind of block people to work on Fridays? I know you had some exceptions in the first year, but I wonder about—

[22:30] Tash Walker: Yeah, absolutely. We have a couple of fail-safes for emergencies, which is, you know, fair, and we do have to occasionally do that, but it's real emergencies and it doesn't happen very often. I think 5 or 6 times in the whole year. In terms of that that idea of when are you working? I think a lot of it comes from top down. Like, are you as a boss sending people emails on a Friday or Sunday or at 10 o'clock at night?

And if you are, then you're placing an expectation upon people to respond to that. So it's about being respectful of people's time. I think in France they've made it illegal for employers to send emails to staff out of hours. I totally agree with that. I think that's a great attitude to have, and it's actually legal. And so I think that's exactly the kind of mentality that we would like to have here, which is live by your own standards, do the 4 days, talk to people within those days, and avoid absolutely sending people emails at ridiculous times of night because you are placing the burden on them to respond, and that's unfair.

And that's what we don't do.

[23:37] Paul: I don't think that law is ever coming to the United States.

[23:40] Tash Walker: And it should be.

[23:43] Paul: So what do you do on your Fridays now? Talk to me about your extra day.

[23:50] Tash Walker: Well, okay, so the first thing is I make marmalade a lot on Fridays, which is a personal passion point of mine. And the reason I do that is because, A, I really enjoy cooking, but also it's one of those things where you have to spend a long time doing it and it allows you to get into flow states. I don't know if you are familiar with that at all, but something I find really interesting. You can't think about other things, you're just really concentrated, and I find that so refreshing in the same way that people, you know, find going for a jog or run or doing yoga, you know, really good for your mental well-being. I do those things too, but I really enjoy making marmalade because it really forces you to get into flow states. But one of the things I think we wanted to make sure of is that Friday didn't just become another worthy day.

I think we're all overachievers in the world now, aren't we? So everyone's got to have a side hustle, everyone's got to have another charity job, or, you know, be doing all of these great things outside of their, you know, 9 to 5. And we didn't want this to become another exercise in placing more burden on people to just have to be doing more. So if you want to do your laundry, do your laundry. That's the point of the Friday. It's a relief mechanism.

It's a safety valve for your mental well-being. It's not about having to do courses or going to do humanitarian work or any of those other things. It's about being a human being and getting to do the things that allow you to enjoy your weekend more.

[25:13] Paul: What, what has been one of the most profound stories you've heard from one of your employees about the impact it's had on them?

[25:21] Tash Walker: I think, well, we did a couple of things in terms of what people are doing on their Fridays just so that we could understand. People are doing more exercise, so they're healthier. People are seeing their family and their friends more, so they're better connected. And, you know, that's, that's a win for us. I don't think it necessarily has to be more profound than that. It's about allowing you to be a human being.

And so doing exercise, being healthier, being better connected, those are proven ways of living longer and living healthier and better and feeling happier. And so if we can contribute to that by allowing people to do more of that, I'm happy.

[26:01] Paul: That's amazing. And what, what have been some of the pushbacks you've gotten, or what are the most common pushbacks you get from people? I mean, when you say, when you share these kinds of ideas with people, people are naturally so skeptical and people are so good at coming up with reasons why this can't work. So what are the biggest challenges you hear from people and what might be some of the responses?

[26:24] Tash Walker: That's so true, you're absolutely right, and it's frustrating because I think the biggest one we get pushback for is, "Oh, you're a small business, that's so nice." It's almost cute, it's like we run a cupcake shop or something. "That's lovely, you know, but this could never work here because we're a big business." Well, I don't agree with that. I think it absolutely can work for big business, and it's been proven to work in other big businesses. So there's lots of reports now of organizations as big as, you know, the equivalent of the NHS in Scandinavia who trialed a 4-day week. We've got organizations in the UK who are adopting much more flexible working practices. HSBC, it's pretty significant size banking corporation, and others as well.

So the biggest one is we're too big, so it's too complex. The pushback I would say is you have to make it simple. So for example, we work Monday to Thursday and then we all have Friday off, which means that we've got really clear boundaries. There's no worry about where people are or how to get in touch with people or understanding your team's rotas. So we've just made it really, really simple for ourselves to put stuff into place. That means that we can, we can do this really well.

And that's exactly the same for big business. I think often we hide behind complexity as a reason to not do something. But actually, I'd say that's probably the best reason to do something, because we know that we're working longer hours than ever and being less productive than ever, particularly in the UK. Ultimately, we have to find a better way of doing business and complexity is not the reason to not do something. Right.

[28:02] Paul: I think it's a good opportunity just to look at the productivity of creative labor. I think you alluded to some of this, which creativity is a result of being rested, well-fed, and actually having space to think, which people, for some reason, we just pretend we are these automatic robots that can just keep churning out more and more. And a lot of that's leftover from the industrial age. But have you dived into basically what drives creativity and read some of that research?

[28:33] Tash Walker: Oh yeah, you're absolutely right. And, you know, for me and what I do, particularly in my job, because my job as a planner is, you know, you have to come up with ideas and solutions. And, you know, one of the kind of longest-held beliefs of any kind of creative endeavor is that you need mental space to do that. Not even productive mental space time. It's not like you have to be working on something to be able to come up with something creative. It's more the time to mull, almost the time to not be thinking about it, because those are points in your brain where you make interesting leaps of imagination or you connect ideas that perhaps didn't look like they could be connected.

And so it's really important that you have that ability to, at points in your life, not be doing stuff. You know, and again, like I said, for some people, you know, their best ideas come when they're in the shower or for some it's when they go on a jog or run or whatever it is. But usually it's not when you're working. And it's because you've allowed your brain to rest and to be mulling something and to cogitate. And therefore you'll produce something really, really interesting. I don't think we spend enough time thinking about that in the creative industries in terms of, OK, so where are we carving out these points in our day to allow us to do that?

And at the moment, The kind of onus is on you as an individual to just add that to your, you know, rest of your life stuff as opposed to your work time. And that's really bad.

[29:55] Paul: Right. And so you share some of the human impact, right? People are more mentally well-rested, in shape. But people might say, okay, you still need to make a profit. That's the whole point of this. And your results actually were pretty impressive.

Did those surprise you?

[30:16] Tash Walker: Yes and no. I think we assumed that productivity would go up because everything we'd read suggested it would. So I think I assumed that, maybe unfairly, but that's been true. That has worked. We've had 75% less sick days, which I think tells you a lot about the kind of stresses and strains that most normal people encounter. And if you think about it, we had in the UK last year 12.5 million days related related to work-related stress.

So people not being able to go to work because of that. And that's not necessarily attributed to a specific mental health problem. It's more, you know, you get those days when you think, I cannot cope with today. I can't face going into work. That's the most common sick, you know, type of sick day that people take. So we've had 75% less.

So I think that's a really good indication that we're getting better at making people feel like they can cope with what they've got on their plates. Our revenue has gone up by 57%, which is extraordinary. I don't think that's about 4 days. So I'm not going to stand here and say, oh, if you do a 4-day week, you're going to make more money, because that's, I think, not true. But what I would say is I don't think it's anti-commercial. It's not going to prevent you from making money.

It's not going to stop you being a good commercial outfit. And, you know, I'm a business owner. I need my company to not go bust. That's important. You can only do good things in the world if you're in business. And if you go bust, then you can't do those things anymore.

So that's important. But it's not stopped us making money. And I think the emphasis for me is on this idea of creativity. If you can't do the same stuff, if you have to rethink about how you work, then you come up with better solutions. And so I think our work's got better as a result of that. And I think the work's better.

Clients are happier. They give you more work. And it's a virtuous circle. And so I think that's why I think it's a very, actually very commercial decision as opposed to something that feels anti-commercial, which I think is often how 4-day week is framed by some as though it's this kind of hippie-ish, very socialist agenda which somehow doesn't understand the needs of big business to make money. And I don't agree with that.

[32:26] Paul: Right. And I imagine you you've had clients or potential clients come to you because they see, oh, wow, they're thinking different and they're valuing their people. Have you had any of that reaction?

[32:39] Tash Walker: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I wouldn't be having a conversation like today with you if we hadn't done this, which is, you know, an enjoyable thing. So we've made interesting connections. We've, I think, deepened our relationships with our existing clients because everyone I think in the world looks for places where they can find their own humanity. And I think the more we talk about our humanity, the more other people think, wow, they're a decent bunch and I want to work with them. And we have much better relationships with existing clients.

And you're absolutely right. It also introduces us to new clients. Like I said, I don't think I'm going to put a value on 4-Day Week as in it's contributed X percentage or X pounds to our bottom line. But I would say that I think it strengthened relationships and it's created opportunities for us to have conversations.

[33:27] Paul: Right. So who shouldn't institute the 4-day workweek?

[33:33] Tash Walker: Well, no one. I mean, I think that certainly I can speak of the service industry. I cannot think of a business that shouldn't think of doing a 4-day week and do it really properly. And I cannot think of an example of a business that can't do that. I accept that in different types of industry, manufacturing, that potentially there's challenges. But already you see in manufacturing people working shifts and different hours.

So I again think that it's possible to achieve in most businesses. And so I think, you know, the limitations on why or how to do a 4-day week are, I think, self-imposed as opposed to practical or real things that we really can't get around somehow if we use creative thinking to find better solutions, basically.

[34:19] Paul: Yeah, in some ways. I mean, I've, I've worked in manufacturing and they've pioneered some of these things a long time ago. They do 3 12-day shifts. They do every other Friday off. I've worked in different environments and they basically get you rather have somebody focused in one day a little longer than working every single day of the week.

[34:42] Tash Walker: Yeah, right, exactly. So I totally agree. I think lots of the reasons to not do this are entirely self-imposed, and I think they're just not real. I think we just mistake them for being significant problems when actually what it comes down to is being risk-averse and fundamentally not being prepared to think differently about the way that we have our relationship with work set out.

[35:10] Paul: So question for you: is there too much stuff in the world?

[35:15] Tash Walker: Yes, there is way too much stuff in the world. I'll give you two examples of this. So if you go into a supermarket in the UK, you want to buy jam, or jelly as you might call it in the States, you would be able to find 104 different varieties. That's a lot of jam. It would take you two years to eat all of that. That's the paradox of choice right there.

That is the paradox of choice right there. And I think hilariously, we had an example 2 years ago in the UK, which we bought for the office actually, where I think the ultimate example of too much choice is that you could buy Christmas-scented toilet roll from one of the major retailers in the UK. And that for me was the moment in my mind when I thought, this is the point where I realize that there is too much stuff in the world. Wow, we've done it. That's it. Capitalism gone too far.

It's too much. We need to pull back. And you know, there's loads of conversations now around sustainability, around how do we have an economy which is buoyant but at the same time doesn't rely on just constantly selling more things. Black Friday, we've just had a great example of consumerism gone mad, despite the fact that for the most part, most of the deals aren't real, that they are, you know, marketing, and most people are not going to be better off by buying more of those things. So yeah, there is way, way too much stuff in the world. And it inhibits us.

It inhibits our ability to choose well, to feel good about the choices that we make, whether that's the kind of jelly you buy, toilet roll that you buy, or whether it's the kind of pension scheme that you have. There is too much stuff. And the mistake is that because we live in democracies, we kind of have this mental association with freedom and choice. Freedom and choice often go hand in hand. You know, you have a conversation about choice and it leads to freedom of choice. And so we wrongly associate the idea of having lots of things in the world as being a positive thing for our experience of being humans and wandering around feeling happy and content.

And that's a mistake. It's great to have choice in certain instances and when the choice is limited. When we have lots of choice, actually what we end up finding is that we then just doubt ourselves and that even if we really like something, we question whether it was the right thing. And that can be anything from a book set to a life partner. So ultimately, the more we do this to ourselves, the less we will enjoy our experience of being in the world.

[37:47] Paul: And how do you navigate that belief with running a marketing firm and working with your clients?

[37:54] Tash Walker: Because I think what often happens in marketing is that there is no ability to think around the right choices. So in marketing, there's a proliferation of just things being produced. And, you know, failure rates of innovation in marketing are astronomically high, somewhere around 98% of all pieces of innovation fail. And so I think the way that we rationalize it here is if we can have a hand in helping people understand what people really need rather than what they say they want, then we can have the opportunity to help people make things better, produce better things, produce fewer things, but better things. And ultimately, is then not just contributing to the tsunami of rubbish that we produce And this may be jumping back a bit, but how has your—

[38:42] Paul: or how did your studies in just literature and art influence your perspective on the world and how you think about running a business?

[38:51] Tash Walker: Well, I mean, I think the one thing that you learn when you study literature and art is there is no right or wrong answer and everything is opinion. And so when you enter into the world of marketing and running a business, often it can feel quite categorical. It can feel very black and white. And I think what you realize working with people is that people are so full of contradictions. People don't behave rationally in almost any situation, although we would like to think that we're very rational beings. And we actually kind of often quite describe people being emotional in a kind of pejorative sense.

Oh, they were so emotional. That's described as being quite negative, a negative attribute.

[39:27] Paul: Right.

[39:27] Tash Walker: They're just actually mostly emotional. Yeah. They're being human because that's what we are. We don't make rational choices. Very often at all, if anything. So those kind of ideas, I think, work very nicely when you look at the world of art or literature, because you realize that quite almost immediately that the way people write, the way people paint, draw, sculpt, whatever it is, is very reflective of our human condition.

It's that real sense that our own contradictions are the thing that I find so fascinating, that we can be one thing today and another thing tomorrow, and that's totally okay. A great example of that, I think, would be the idea of moral licensing. I don't know if you're familiar with that.

[40:08] Paul: Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell talked about that on a podcast.

[40:11] Tash Walker: That's great. Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of my favorite human features, I think, which is the idea that you can have a salad at lunchtime and then in the evening have a massive burger and several beers. And that's totally fine because you had a salad at lunchtime. Time. So, yeah, I think you can't understand the world unless you start to understand its contradictions.

And that's, that's the most important thing about human behavior.

[40:36] Paul: I love that. So what message might you leave for business leaders or entrepreneurs to rethink how they're running their business or structuring how they work?

[40:51] Tash Walker: When it comes to running a business, I think we lack empathy. Economy. So we see things in a very financial way. And I think that's fine. But if we think about the growth of the economy and the kind of pursuit of growth for endless growth's sake, what we haven't really considered is the factor of what it feels like to work in those kind of conditions. And so I think being more empathetic to literally what it feels like to work today and how that squares with our ability to have a life that feels full of meaning and purpose and allows us to get out of bed and not feel terrible about the day ahead of us, I think is the most important thing for business leaders to consider right now.

Because what is the point of growth if we can't also enjoy the experience of growing at the same time? And we haven't squared those two things yet, and I think that's the one thing that business leaders need to pay attention to.

[41:43] Paul: And what might you suggest as a first step if people just want to experiment in new ways of working, or just see if they can institute something that goes against the grain, what might— where might you tell them to start?

[41:58] Tash Walker: I think the best place to start is to look around other business models. Like everything, there are no new ideas in the world, are there? So most likely there's someone in the world somewhere that's tried something that might be useful for you. And that's exactly where I started, which is just a bit of desk research. What different practices are people doing and how do they work? And it was that simple.

it took me probably 20 minutes to find maybe 10 examples. And it was that kind of first moment of truth when I thought, actually, I don't have to reinvent the wheel here. There's already something that I can take from this. And we're going to really go for that because it fits my business model. So 20 minutes of desk research will get you there.

[42:37] Paul: I love it. Well, I'll definitely link people to your report. I think your report is one of the— it's actually one of the best things I've read on the modern state of work. It hits it from so many angles in terms of just bringing up the fundamental questions, rethinking leisure, talking about work and productivity, and definitely will point people to that. Anything else you want to leave people with or point them to?

[43:02] Tash Walker: There's all sorts of conversations around flexible working right now, and I think the one thing that I want to just leave people with is probably this idea of what do we mean by flexible? Because actually For me, flexible has become a bit of a tyranny for most people. If you feel like you have to turn up to work all of the time, whether you're at home, whether you're in the car, whether you're traveling, wherever, then that's not flexible for me. That just means that we're working all of the time. And so the way that we do it here is by being inflexibly flexible. We have really clear boundaries.

We set those boundaries. We understand that technology isn't always a good thing in business, doesn't always make things better. And so the minute you start to do that, I think you can start to have a much better relationship with how you work and put into place some different practices that make things a lot better for everyone.