D1.2
Tracks
Stream D
| Thursday, October 29, 2026 |
| 2:15 PM - 2:45 PM |
Overview
The Four‑Day Work Week in Practice: Outcomes from a Large‑Scale Organisational Trial | 30 mins
Presenter
Miss Sasha D'arcy
Medibank
The Four‑Day Work Week in Practice: Outcomes from a Large‑Scale Organisational Trial
2:15 PM - 2:45 PMAbstract
This keynote explores Medibank’s four-day work week experiment not as a stand‑alone flexibility initiative, but as a mechanism for fundamentally redesigning how work gets done. Framed through Medibank’s ambition to become the healthiest workplace in Australia, the session shares the learnings, outcomes, and unresolved tensions from a multi‑year, evidence‑based experiment that challenged long‑held assumptions about time, productivity, and value in work.
Launched in November 2023, Medibank’s four-day work week trial adopted a 100:80:100 model (100% pay, 80% time, 100% productivity) and was designed explicitly to eliminate low‑value work rather than compress hours. Partnering with Macquarie University’s Health and Wellbeing Research Unit, Medibank tested whether teams could sustainably create “the gift of time” through work redesign, autonomy, and sharper focus on outcomes. Early results showed stable performance alongside improvements in engagement, wellbeing, health indicators, and unplanned absences, including a two‑thirds reduction among frontline workers.
By Phase 2, participation had expanded from 250 to over 500 employees, and the question shifted from “does this work?” to “what needs to change for this to scale?” The keynote focuses on the real inflection point of the experiment: when locally optimised teams collided with enterprise‑wide systems, legacy meeting culture, cross‑team dependencies, and equity challenges. What emerged was a clear insight: a four‑day work week is not a policy you roll out, but an operating rhythm you must earn and continuously protect.
Rather than presenting a standalone success story, this session offers a candid view of what made the experiment work, what made it fragile, and what leaders had to confront when deciding what came next: expand, institutionalise, or consolidate. The goal of the keynote is to equip senior leaders, HR practitioners, and organisational designers with practical lessons on readiness, measurement, and system design when time itself becomes a constraint and a strategic lever, for better work, healthier people, and stronger outcomes.
Launched in November 2023, Medibank’s four-day work week trial adopted a 100:80:100 model (100% pay, 80% time, 100% productivity) and was designed explicitly to eliminate low‑value work rather than compress hours. Partnering with Macquarie University’s Health and Wellbeing Research Unit, Medibank tested whether teams could sustainably create “the gift of time” through work redesign, autonomy, and sharper focus on outcomes. Early results showed stable performance alongside improvements in engagement, wellbeing, health indicators, and unplanned absences, including a two‑thirds reduction among frontline workers.
By Phase 2, participation had expanded from 250 to over 500 employees, and the question shifted from “does this work?” to “what needs to change for this to scale?” The keynote focuses on the real inflection point of the experiment: when locally optimised teams collided with enterprise‑wide systems, legacy meeting culture, cross‑team dependencies, and equity challenges. What emerged was a clear insight: a four‑day work week is not a policy you roll out, but an operating rhythm you must earn and continuously protect.
Rather than presenting a standalone success story, this session offers a candid view of what made the experiment work, what made it fragile, and what leaders had to confront when deciding what came next: expand, institutionalise, or consolidate. The goal of the keynote is to equip senior leaders, HR practitioners, and organisational designers with practical lessons on readiness, measurement, and system design when time itself becomes a constraint and a strategic lever, for better work, healthier people, and stronger outcomes.
.....
Sasha is the People and Organisational Health Lead at Medibank and an Organisational Psychologist passionate about creating workplaces that work for people, and not the other way around. Sasha works to equip leaders and teams with the tools, skills and evidence they need to flourish not just in the short term, but sustainably. Her approach combines individual, team, and systems thinking to create high performing, healthy workplaces.
