I was 6 days into the Camino Portuguese, revelling in the simplicity of walking every day, cathartically clearing my head of long held baggage, when it happened. The sun was shining, I was walking alone down a beautiful, wooded pathway when I felt something I didn’t recognise. A lightness of being and a feeling of great balance and peace. A warmth and light flowed through me which made me smile and lift my feet a little higher. An excitement and eagerness for the world around me and the adventure ahead. 

The feeling was so strange that I struggled to identify it. What was this intense, unusual feeling? With a shock I realised that I was happy. Joyous. Living the way humans are created to be. It had been so long since I had felt this way that I had reset my compass. Life had become so busy, so full of things to be done, that the simplicity of being happy had been forgotten. 

In chasing success and driving myself to be the best I can be, I had forgotten that the best success indicator is happiness. Joy. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t unhappy or depressed.  I am proud of my successes, the awards and the accolades. The business and financial success. The loving relationship I have with the people in my life and the things I have provided them. 

There were moments of absolute joy in achieving those things. The deep, loving joy of my wedding day. The deep, wondrous joy at the birth of my two children. The moment of winning the NZ equivalent of the FA Cup for the first time in the football clubs’ history. The absolute joy at the final whistle of winning it 3-2 in extra time is something I will never forget. 

The joy at having survived the start-up of a business and going on to sell it to create some financial security for my family. But living a joyous life? Making the number one priority in my life to bring happiness and joy to myself and others? 

No. I failed at that. I simply didn’t prioritise it. 

It took stripping everything back to identify and reconnect with joy. How can we achieve the balance of living a joyous life and still achieve at a high level? The balance is not easy, but at the technology business I run – the Arken Group, we have discovered that time and space and alignment with purpose are critical. 

Time and Space 

The world is a chaotic place today. The blurring of the lines between work and home is now at an all-time high and intensifying. Staff bear the brunt of this, and it impacts on mental health and productivity as time and space become compressed, sometimes to the point of being non-existent.  This is not sustainable and works against a business which wants to work fast and achieve big through the efforts of its people. 

Working a 4-day working week has helped with creating time to live, for our staff. We implemented the policy in October 2020, during the second Covid lockdown in the UK, initially as a method primarily to preserve everyone’s mental health during what was an incredibly challenging time.
 

However, the 4-day week quickly became a vehicle where the company could receive the same or higher level of productivity while everyone has the flexibility to spend time with family and friends, pursuing life interests, learning or simply getting life organised so that weekend days were spent on things that matter. This time and space, creates freedom of thought and focus and is reflected in better designs, higher energy levels and more ability to withstand the pressures and challenges of a fast-growing business.
 

Purpose 

To go fast and achieve big, you need alignment in collective purpose. Why does the company do what we do? Why does this matter? Above KPI’s and financial outcomes, what is the higher purpose for the company’s existence? 

There is an inextricable link between purpose and the 4-day week. Our purpose at the Arken Group is to transform the way the world manages estate planning and inheritance.  We work with clients across the globe, empowering them to make estate planning accessible and simple for all. Whether that be facilitating broader conversations and offering holistic financial wellbeing advice or by harnessing the time savings and efficiencies our software provides to fuel productivity and minimize risk.  

We enable clients to focus on what really matters, delivering exceptional service and putting families and their loved ones at the heart of what they do.  

In sharing the 4-day week together, everyone at the Arken Group lives better lives in line with our purpose. In doing this, we tap into the high-performance energy that comes from everyone working together towards a common purpose. 

Productivity 

The 4-day week forces conversations about alignment and productivity and creates a framework where this is measured. The question we need to ask, is ‘What is productivity? 

A company needs to fulfil its vision and achieve its financial targets. How those things are achieved is important. Should we measure productivity by KPI’s alone? There needs to be measurement of productivity, and this will be different in every business, however much like the aging paradigm of having to work a 5-day week, measuring by KPI’s alone is also aging. It is my experience that when people are invested in a collective purpose that they will self- manage productivity and deliver what they need to, because they don’t want to let the group down or detract from the purpose of the company. In a high performing culture, it is this that will determine success or not. 

Final thoughts 

The connection between joy and the 4-day week are hard to measure but the Arken Group experience is that it definitely exists. We achieved 80% better growth in working the 4 -day week than in working 5 days a week, and this is down to several things, but amongst them is the adoption of the 4-day week which created joy. We need to adjust our thinking to consider that the world is changing, and the long-promised benefits of technology are here. We need to adopt our human behaviours and the paradigms we work in, to leverage the solutions in front of us, to create time and space for ourselves and the people in our companies. 

Our genetic predisposition as humans is to chase joy. Reconnecting at a homosapien level to this, is possibly the most powerful thing an organisation can give to its people in today’s world. 

Connect yourself and your team with joy. Consider the 4-day week.  

The Arken Group has been the global leading technology innovator for the estate planning market since 1992. Our goal is to make estate planning simpler for everyone, businesses, solicitors, advisors, and individuals alike. 

The Arken Group consists of:

Arken Legal, Estgro and Footprint