If you’ve been following any of the business press over the last couple of months, you’ll have heard about the historic UK trial of the four-day working week.
Organised by the 4-Day Week think tank with the support of Cambridge and Boston universities, this is the biggest revolution of the working week since Henry Ford championed having Saturdays off some 100 years ago. 70 UK companies are taking part, and (gulp) Amplitude is one of them.
For me as a director, the opportunity to take part just felt right. We have championed being a ‘values first’ organisation for the last few years, donating 5% of our net profits back to environmental charities via our Your Planet Your Choice initiative, alongside advocating for better business practices with The Better
Business Act.
The pandemic saw a huge pivot in the way people manage their work and home lives. Britain currently works the longest hours in Europe, yet we’ve had huge developments in communications, technology and automation in recent years, so my question here is, why? Why are we burning out when we could be just the opposite?
The answer to this in my mind is culture. Our modern work culture puts busyness front and centre, and I’m incredibly guilty of this. My go-to answer when asked how work is going is ‘I’m so busy!’ We wear our hectic schedules like a badge of honour. With the pandemic now behind us I feel this really is an opportunity to do business better, so how are we planning to do it here
at Amplitude?
Firstly, a few FAQs on the trial. Our aim is to do the same level of work, or more, in 80% of the time, with staff still receiving 100% of their salary. We’ll still be producing the same volume of videos, photos and design pieces, still providing the same consultancy and, all being well, having much better creative concepts and ideas. Ahead of the trial, we undertook massive reviews of our processes and workflows and looked at how everything ran at every critical stage, and it’s via this work that we intend to buy back our day.
In our industry, our role is to understand the client and their audiences, take briefs, create concepts and then roll out assets at scale. When projects have overrun or gone over scope, it is because that early work wasn’t done effectively. My view is that if a client needs to come back five times to change a piece of design then the briefing process wasn’t robust enough. If my team didn’t get the pitch right, then we didn’t communicate, research and build the relationship enough.
It’s these essential steps that make a creative agency excel, and this is where we feel we really shine. My team is so invested in their work, always striving to wow the client, and in my mind that should be rewarded, not taken advantage of for my own profit.
Of course, there’s a long-term commercial benefit here too; the culture we’ve built here means I’ll have the cream of the crop at my door. What’s more, our ‘values first’ approach has already won us several clients.
Will things go wrong? Absolutely! But we’re ready to learn and adapt, and we’re being 100% transparent with our clients along the way. I’ll be keeping you all in the loop with a monthly column in All Things Business for the next few months so you can follow our journey, or, if we’ve really fired you up, get in the Amplitude inbox and socials to find out more and share your thoughts.
Find out more at www.thisisamplitude.co.uk
