4-day work week: Will it work in Malaysia's adland and marketing scene?

The topic of four-day work weeks have been up for debate in recent times as companies adapt to the new norms of working following COVID-19. Beginning next year, Malaysia is allowing flexible work arrangements. Meanwhile, Singapore's minister of state for the Ministry of Manpower, Gan Siow Huang, said that although a four-day work week might not work for all, companies and staff should still adopt a flexible mindset regarding this topic.

A study done earlier this year by Milieu Insight found that while the majority of respondents in Vietnam (78%) and Indonesia (69%) expressed receptiveness towards compressed four-day work weeks, only 48% in Malaysia voted so. While a five-day work week is common in Southeast Asia, businesses are gradually moving away from that. GO Communications, for example, slashed its work week in 2020 to 4.5 days and its CEO Peter de Kretser said previously that this move was "a calculated strategy" for the team based on research and results.

Separately, the BBC reported last July that trials of a four-day work week in Iceland were "an overwhelming success" and this resulted in numerous workers moving to shorter hours. Countries such as the UK, New Zealand and Japan are also testing out four-day work weeks.

That said, the advertising and marketing industry is known to be a gruelling one with long hours. With the increase in chatter surrounding four-day work weeks and even work-life balance in general, industry players shared with A+M whether they think a four-day work week is possible for the industry.

(Read also: Mental health in adland: What is one change agency leaders are pushing for?)

Diana Boo, CMO, Boost

I am a supporter of flexible work arrangements instead as I can’t quite come to terms with a four-day work week yet for several reasons, the first being the commitments of marketing professionals. In marketing, there are people who deliver different facets of the business, such as customer frontliners or operations, who will have responsibilities beyond 9am to 6pm of the five-day work week. The primary priority to marketers is customers' needs and reach. Hence, we need to cater to and address these needs, within or outside the usual working hours.

Flexibility doesn’t need to be outlined by a hard rule such as a four-day work week. Instead, it is about leadership maturity in managing the flexible work environment and employees’ accountability in finding the balance between work delivery and personal well-being.

We are conscious and sensitive about our employees’ time investments and contributions. As such, we allow for replacement day offs and time offs for them to attend to their personal needs. To me, implementing a four-day work week may not mean that the actual work is reduced, it only means that people have less time to complete their week’s deliverables, with added pressure to work longer hours during the four days. There is also a risk of promising a four-day work week, but in reality, your teams are working through the rest days, which may give the impression that the employees are being short-changed or misled by a false promise.

I prefer to focus on building deliverables-based work environment with trust and empowerment at the core of the culture, which will fuel accountability and flexibility. I prefer that we set a perimeter for each day to enable a more balanced work habit so that a balanced week is more achievable and sustainable. Team support and collaboration are often under-valued in today’s work environment as a core factor to well-being at work.

We have not started officially work from office but the teams and I have started to meet at the office two days each week, specifically to schedule collaborations and workshops in order to get the most out of our face to face engagement. When we finish work on time, we head off for team dinners to catch up and continue building that team spirit. I believe that keeping teams efficient is not a hard and fast rule governed by hours or days, but on clear deliverables and working towards the deadlines together.

Mazuin Zin, MD, Edelman Malaysia

Call it work-life balance or blending, we’ve all been trained rather well by the pandemic. In fact, for the past two years now we, at Edelman Malaysia, have been promoting flexibility for our people, realising that the ways in which we work, where we work, and when we work have fundamentally shifted.

Employees have responded well to the flexibility, switching off early on Fridays, for example, observing our 'From Dusk to Dawn' email policy, time off for mental health, and our new 'Four weeks to work from anywhere' policy.

These timely initiatives have really served us well, underscoring our commitment to ensuring mental well-being for all during these testing times. In my view, the very discussion around a four-day week is a positive sign of more exciting things to come, as we all continue to reimagine our workplaces and how we will collaborate in the future - making these evolve into a sanctuary for mental and physical wellbeing.

Bala Pomaleh, CEO, Mediabrands Malaysia

In the agency sphere, it often seems like there aren’t enough days in the week, so decisions like these need to be taken collectively, with clients, agencies and media owners coming together to create their own rules for successful collaboration and following through with it.

For us, the future of work comes with flexibility and improving employee productivity. We experimented with this at a relatively early stage of the pandemic while activities around us were returning to business as usual. Through multiple surveys and feedback sessions from employees, we developed our hybrid work policy, Better Way, which means we work 50% in the office and from home. Our priority is to ensure flexible workspaces and flexible timings, with open lines of communication with managers, the HR team and even myself. This isn’t just a top-down approach but based instead on what our employees and clients want and need. Over the past two years, we have also begun to develop tools in-house to automate various processes, workstreams and reporting, reducing man hours for more repetitive tasks.

Despite the government's talk of the four-day work week, we had to identify what worked best for us. Our understanding is reduced hours rather than a compressed work schedule.

Our clients are unique and diversified with different ways of working, as are our teams. The volume of work and activities fluctuates rapidly in the industry, meaning a fixed schedule is challenging. We also recognise that productivity and an efficient way of working look different across each of our various units across Mediabrands.

As such, a four-day work week is not required at this stage, but throughout this journey, we keep our ears on the ground to adapt to what works best for our team's well-being, ensuring client satisfaction and company productivity. Alongside this, we continue to build a strong culture of inclusivity, and in this spirit, we have a very comprehensive health and wellbeing programme available to all staff.

Kristian Lee, CEO, Naga DDB Tribal

As a concept, this could work only if we have the support and compliance from all parties involved; namely the clients, our business partners and our vendors.

As we are part of the service industry, it requires everyone in the ecosystem to agree and acknowledge the importance of more sustainable workplace practices whilst juggling the balance with business operations to ensure minimal to zero disruption to productivity.

While we continue to operate on a five-day week basis, it is our practice currently to only require our employees to come back to the office on a two-day per week basis. This has given greater flexibility to employees to juggle their personal and work commitments to an effect that it is probably better than a four-day work from office arrangement. 

We have implemented regular team huddles on a weekly basis to ensure that the day-to-day operations are kept in check. A bi-monthly catch up is also scheduled between team leaders and the senior management to discuss business priorities as well as any key challenges. This has proven effective in serving as a platform to discuss and resolve issues such as bottlenecks, resource challenges, and client relationship issues, among others.

Related article:
SG parliament discusses four-day work week: Yay or nay for agency chiefs?