Latest news with #AledNelmes
Irish Times
26-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Times
Would you work 32 hours over seven days?
A few weeks ago, the 29-year-old boss of a small tech start-up in Wales went on LinkedIn to say he was going to try a new way of working . 'We're abandoning the four-day work week,' said Aled Nelmes, whose staff had just spent two years working roughly 32 hours a week from Monday to Thursday, with no cut in pay from their previous five-day week. This had boosted output and staff retention, he said. So he was going to go a step further with a three-month trial of a completely flexible 32-hour week. Employees could work any time on any day from Monday to Sunday, anywhere they liked. The idea was to make Lumen SEO, the Cardiff search-engine optimisation company he founded in 2020, as attractive as possible to parents, new joiners and its existing seven staff. READ MORE The response to his post, it is fair to say, was large. [ Four-day week easier than hybrid working, Atom Bank chief says Opens in new window ] Nearly 1,000 people commented on an idea that many said sounded 'epic', 'brilliant' and 'stunning'. Several asked if Nelmes was hiring. (He plans to). And some asked the question that first came to my mind: how on earth can something like this work? How do people know who is working when? Do staff feel compelled to be contactable 24/7? How does the business stay responsive to its clients' needs? Nelmes admits the effort takes discipline. He uses a software platform to delegate tasks to staff each Monday, depending on how many hours each job is expected to take. A messaging tool lets everyone know whether people are available or not. A lot of preparation is done for meetings, to avoid wasting time. Everyone has to work at the same time for at least two or three hours a week but Nelmes thinks that in general, the corporate working world is too industrialised for a digital age. So it pays to let people shape their working hours as much as possible. 'I would argue that, because staff members have more time outside of focused, regimented, structured work, they tend to come into the office with more ideas,' he says. So far, Lumen seems to be an outlier. The UK's 4 Day Week Foundation has been encouraging a 32-hour, four-day week for years but its campaign director, Joe Ryle, says most firms adopting the idea work four weekdays. [ Which of these four types of leader are you and why will it help you to know? Opens in new window ] A minority of organisations have tried 32 hours over five weekdays, he said. But he didn't know of any trying Lumen's full-fat version of 32 hours over seven days. I can see why some might try, if they are in a white collar sector and have a business like Lumen, whose staff do a lot of work individually, on tasks such as writing material for company websites. They would also need a boss like Nelmes, who likes to travel and winters on the Canary Islands for weeks at a time. ('You meet lots of interesting people and it's just healthier.') And I'm sure it would help if a business was small. Still, Lumen's trial fits with the pandemic-fuelled shift to more flexible working, which has persisted at a greater scale for longer than many expected, including me. The conventional four-day week itself has proven more tenacious than critics had predicted, though perhaps not as successful as some campaigners hoped. The Indeed job site says the share of postings mentioning a four-day week has risen noticeably since 2020 in the US, Germany, France, Canada and the UK. But it's still below 1 per cent, even in the UK, which has the largest share of the five nations. In 2022, Belgium gave workers the right to ask for a four-day week but only by condensing existing hours, not cutting them. Other regions have trialled the idea, as have many companies. Of the 61 organisations that took part in a big six-month UK trial in 2022, 56 decided to continue with the model, says the 4 Day Week Foundation, which has now accredited more than 230 four-day organisations. Most have 10 to 50 employees. The largest is Atom , the app-based bank, which has around 470 staff. A lot are in sectors such as tech and marketing. But a number are doubtless run by bosses like Nelmes who are convinced this is the way of the future and are, crucially, young. Their ideas might stick around for a lot longer than you think. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
Wales Online
05-05-2025
- Business
- Wales Online
Boss spends whole winter working abroad and lets staff do whatever hours they want
Boss spends whole winter working abroad and lets staff do whatever hours they want The business has ditched the nine-to-five routine and instead staff can work from wherever they like at hours that suit them to fit around their hobbies and needs The changes were made to help fit with hobbies, childcare, traffic, holidays, and hormones (Image: David Manton of Photodrome ) A business owner in Cardiff has flipped the nine-to-five norm on its head in favour of a completely flexible working week. Aled Nelmes, who owns a marketing agency, lets his staff work whenever and wherever they want in an effort to "harmonise work and life". Aled has questioned many of the everyday routines most of us follow without thinking twice about. He's now consciously gone against the norm in search of a more efficient, staff-friendly way of working. Aled's employees have paid breaks, can work from wherever they want, and partake in a variety of team bonding activities. After a successful switch to a four-day working week two years ago Aled decided to go one step further and ditch certain days and times completely. At Lumen SEO they now have a completely flexible 32-hour working week to help fit around hobbies, childcare, traffic, holidays, and hormones. When they went down to four days a week, initially as a three-month trial, they cut the week by four hours overall so they worked four nine-hour days, either eight until five or nine till six. Aled said in those two years the "had our best growth years". "The four-day week was so successful for its increase in flexibility, autonomy, and trust that I wanted to see how we could get more flexibility out of it. I decided to take it to a new extreme where people can plan their weeks how they like them." Aled said it was his "inherent curiosity into human performance" which sparked his interest in what the best way for people to work is. Never miss a Cardiff story by signing up to our daily newsletter here. Article continues below Aled working from the Canary Islands in search of some winter sun (Image: Aled Nelmes ) The nine-to-five working norm became widespread after Henry Ford introduced the eight-hour day and five-day work week across his factories in the 1920s. At the time it signified a reduction in work hours. Aled reflected: "The nine-to-five became popular in the industrial age yet now in the digital age and the AI age we still have the same working pattern." Aled said the more he looked into working patterns the more he realised it didn't make sense. He said: "I think we're trying to shoehorn women into leadership roles and we're getting it a bit wrong. We're trying to get women to work more like men rather than looking at their unique biological and neurological capabilities and playing to those strengths. "There are times in a women's cycle when they have more energy but we aren't giving them the autonomy of placing their hardest work in that phase." The further Aled looked the more he realised the current system don't work for men either. " Men are way more focused and driven in the early hours of the morning so when you wake up guys get a shot of testosterone and that testosterone drops throughout the day. "Because you've got emails and all that we're not really doing any focused creative work until about 11 – and that's if you don't have meetings you don't need to have." Something else Aled believes is especially important is ensuring people take breaks, because it improves focus and reduces employees error counts, so employees have paid breaks. It's these small changes Aled has implemented which he credits with his 100% employee retention rate. Aled employs seven people at his marketing agency (Image: David Manton of Photodrome ) "I want to create a world that suits me as hopefully a father one day and I'd love to have a life where I work from seven till three and then go pick up the kids and kick a football or rugby ball around." Three weeks into the trial Aled has already seen both benefits and challenges. "The only challenge we've had is with training sessions. They are really important to our work and a lot of preparation goes into them so although we do record them it can be deflating when no-one turns up because they're out doing something else." In terms of benefits Aled said he's seen several. He said one of his account assistants worked the Easter bank holiday weekend and instead took some days off after. "She had a great time – it was silent and there was no traffic. It means that on Sunday she gets totally focused, total peace and quiet, very little messaging needed or communication needed. She can just focus down." He said another employee finishes early on a Monday to make it to her football practice early and another is able to make room for a therapy session and they will pick up the hours missed later in the week. Some people will shift their days to make a four-day weekend and another person was able to see their partner the day they got back from a four-week stint working in France despite it being a Monday. The Cardiff-based marketing agency have quarterly team yoga classes (Image: Aled Nelmes ) "My favourite thing a team member has done is one of the girls does three hours of yoga on a Monday morning. I love that because whilst everyone else is like waking up and racing to work she's doing three hours of bending around and deep breathing." Aled, who was born in Abergavenny and grew up in Pembrokeshire, conceded he was a bit of a hypocrite and didn't stick to the 32 hours himself but explained he thought there would always be a difference between business owner and employee. "Although I don't do the 32-hour week I do work flexibly and I spent pretty much the entire winter out of the UK which is nice. "I think there's definitely a range in terms of some staff members are more experimental with it and some actually still quite like that Monday to Thursday structure that we had before." Article continues below Aled is keen to continue after the trial but acknowledged he may need to make some soft rules and make sure meetings are scheduled when people are most likely to be working.
