A four-day workweek for city employees is being explored by Cambridge city councillors to see whether it could improve employee happiness and reduce turnover among city staff.
Malden, with its population of around 67,000 and a city hall around 5 miles north, is ahead of Cambridge in exploring the idea. Around 80 of its 1,300 municipal employees have been on a four-day schedule since coming out of the Covid pandemic, said Ron Hogan, its chief strategy and innovation officer.
“The time was right for us to do this, rather than being something that was driven by data,” Hogan told councillors at a Oct. 24 meeting of the council’s Neighborhood and Long Term Planning, Public Facilities, Arts and Celebrations Committee.
The benefits became obvious.
Staff turnover is now down significantly, with some people offered jobs elsewhere with higher salaries choosing to stay in Malden with a four-day week, Hogan said. “We’re not one of the highest-paying cities, we’re constantly challenged financially, and so any advantage that we can get, we’re looking for that.”
This could be important to Cambridge, where the city was the fourth-largest employer last year, with 3,594 workers, according to an annual count by the Community Development Department.
The suggestion for the exploration came from the city manager, said councillor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, the committee chair: “We have a remote work policy now we didn’t before. Is this another shift that we want to consider?”
Cambridge City Hall is on a modified five-day workweek, open to the public until 8 p.m. Mondays and only until noon Fridays. Many city staff are also remote on Fridays, a policy the council fought for under previous city manager Louis A. DePasquale as around 130 municipal positions sat empty on the city website, many open for more than a year.
Some four-day week proposals discussed at the meeting call for a 32-hour workweek, but that wasn’t being considered in Cambridge and wasn’t the case in Malden. Employees there work the standard number of hours per week, with longer days Monday to Thursday, Hogan said.
The public needs to know staff aren’t taking an extra day off at public expense, Hogan said.
Also, not all city employees can skip Friday, such as administrative staff for police and fire departments, Hogan pointed out. It’s an issue that requires managing, as a shorter workweek is a privilege that can be seen negatively by people who work in service jobs.
There can also be demands for flexibility such as for Malden’s building department, which has to provide services to contractors on Fridays and sometimes Saturdays.
Some human-services positions such as child care have state mandates and must run five days a week, city councillor Patty said. She thinks the city needs to consider raising wages for these positions instead. “For so many of these burnout jobs, we’re not paying people enough to begin with,” she said.
Juliet Schor, an economist and professor of sociology at Boston College, spoke about other governments, nonprofits and businesses that have gone to a four-day workweek with no loss in productivity – and in some cases have seen increased productivity. There’s also been a decrease in turnover, saving onboarding time and costs.
It’s been good for employees, according to studies in place since 2022 that have monitored outcomes among some 10,000 people. “All of these companies have had a decrease in burnout,” Schor said. Employees are sleeping more and feeling less stressed, which helps reduce the number who leave.
The changed schedules didn’t please around a quarter of the people studied, Nolan noted.
One issue is how to provide services to citizens when staff are in the office less. Malden has worked on increasing what residents can do online, including digitizing records so people no longer need to come in to look at old permits or to renew dog licenses. The city has also added drop boxes for bills and voter registrations.
“We’ve also learned that no amount of communication is going to prevent some residents from showing up on Friday,” said Hogan, and this is frustrating to Malden’s mayor, who is at city hall every day of the week.
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Well I guess I’ll continue to work five days a week so that when I call or email, say, the traffic department, they’ll be 20% less likely to answer which they never do already…
The city of Cambridge already punts Fridays by closing at noon, so you might as well take the whole day off.
Some people could work M-Th and some could work T-F. The offices would be open every weekday.