A new take on a 4-day working week? Microsoft partner to trial 'nine-day fortnight'

Brighton-based Cloud 9 Insight will allow staff to have every other Friday off while being asked to add 30 minutes onto their normal working day

A Brighton-based Microsoft partner is trialling its own take on a four-day working week by moving to a ‘nine-day fortnight'.

Gold-level Microsoft Dynamics partner Cloud 9 Insight will trial a nine-day fortnight, which will allow all staff to have every other Friday off work.

However, employees will be asked to work an additional 30 minutes each day - bringing their work day from 7.5 hours a day to eight hours.

The change was prompted by employee engagement surveys which showed that staff wanted to compress their hours, the firm claims.

CEO Carlene Jackson, who founded the company in 2010, told The Argus that she was concerned about adopting a four-day working week, which would mean employees would have to accept longer work days.

Instead, a nine-day fortnight will mean its 35 employees are still able to benefit from fewer work days without having to drastically increase their work hours on the days they do work.

"We were concerned [a four-day week] could lead to the opposite of the intended outcome - with staff working much longer hours on work days and not being able to have dinner with their partners or to put their children to bed in the evening," Jackson said.

"So we came up with what you might call a Third Way - the nine-day fortnight. Under this scheme, employees would have every other Friday off, while only being asked to add 30 minutes to their normal working day."

She added that the "net-loss" to the Cloud 9 Insight business would only be three hours per person each fortnight which she said "is not being viewed as a loss in reality".

At the beginning of the month, thousands of employees across some 70 UK businesses joined in the world's biggest trial of a 4-day work week.

Running for six months, the trial is being run by 4 Day Week Global in partnership with the thinktank Autonomy.

UK tech firms have already begun piloting a 4-day week. Reseller Highgate IT began a three-month trial in April while UK tech firm Civo permanently shifted to a four-day working week this year after a trial conducted in late 2021 proved a "great success".

Channel recruitment bosses recently gave a mixed reaction on whether moving to a four-day working week will become the norm for the channel, with some claiming that it would boost employee wellbeing and attract new talent, while others questioned whether customer service would be negatively impacted.