Ms Margaret Cox:

I thank the Senator and I thank the committee for the invitation to be present. I recognise the balanced discussions on both sides of the argument between IBEC and Fórsa. Our organisation, the ICE Group, is a member of IBEC and we have been delighted with the help we have received from Ms McElwee and the conversations that we had with IBEC as we have gone through this journey, especially on the employment law and legal side of things.

Our model is very simple. We decided to go for a fixed flexibility model. In the ICE Group we work around a three-day weekend and everybody works Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and they are off Friday, Saturday and Sunday, or they work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and they are off Saturday, Sunday and Monday. We have small teams and it is a small organisation.

On the complexity issue, we went through a trial for six months that started on 1 July 2019 and we are now more than two years into the whole programme. The trial was important because it allowed us to work out with our team members how we were going to address aspects such as covering the fifth day. We did not take on any additional headcount to deal with people being off on the fifth day. We did take on additional headcount because our business expanded.

For us it has been a commercial success. It has been a societal success in terms of our employees as they have more time off, more time with their families and more time in the community. We have increased our productivity. We measured an increase in productivity in the first year of 27%. We also measured a 33% increase in our wellness and happiness score. We reduced our single day absenteeism to one in a six-month period. Across all of our employees, we had one loss of unplanned absenteeism during a six-month period and we improved our retention. From our point of view it has been a commercial success and a success for all of our people. It is a three-day weekend in the ICE Group every single weekend. It is like having a bank holiday for 52 weeks of the year around the weekend. I am not sure this answers the Senator's specific questions but I am happy to answer any additional specific questions.