Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 6 October 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Four-Day Working Week: Discussion

Ms Margaret Cox:

We are a commercial business and we hope people would choose to come to work for our organisation. It would give us the edge in recruitment and retention. What we have found is that because people are coming back more energised, more happy and more focused, we get more work done in the time we are in the office than we did previously. That is what is giving us the additional productivity gains. Let me give a very simple example. Meetings tend to go on indefinitely in many organisations. We now have a very simple rule that unless it is a very important meeting, it lasts 30 minutes. No meeting starts without an agenda and if you are not supposed to be there, or you have nothing to add, you are not invited. We have cut out the waste within the process of managing our business. If we take that concept and work through it to the business moving forward, as people will do on the trial, the waste in that business is identified. It is by identifying waste that you achieve the greater productivity gains. I am not sure if that answers the Deputy's question but I hope it does.