Undoubtedly the best idea to come from an ad agency this month is BBH's decision to allow staff to vote on a 3.5% voluntary pay cut - in the shape of a day's unpaid leave every month. Certainly the people at BBH seem to think so, since they voted 99.5% in favour, a kind of unanimity you don't usually see outside a North Korean election result.
BBH staff vote for pay cut over redundancies
I can't quite understand why this isn't more common.
For a start, it isn't quite accurate to describe this as a pay-cut at all. A pay cut would involve less money for the same amount of work. Here staff are being offered the chance to trade a 3.5% cut in pay for a near 50% increase in their holiday allowance. It would be interesting to find out how many people would have willingly made this trade-off even before the downturn. Nearly all studies show that employees would like to translate some of their wage gains into greater leisure, but are reluctant to do so for fear of seeming uncommitted. Unless you are a banker, and see your life's purpose as nothing other than a matter of self-enrichment, most people realise that the value of your money is enhanced when you have time enough to enjoy it.
However, in a recession, the trade off makes especially good sense. For one thing, this is a disproportionately bad time to lose your job. But it is also a disproportionately good time to keep your job. Prices are falling, and mortgage costs are probably low enough to offset the loss in pay for many people. Moreover the leisure is also offered in an intelligent form - single days off. What always struck me as moronic about the French attempt to enforce a 35-hour working week as part of their bid to reduce unemployment was that there is very little benefit to anyone in a marginally shorter working day. Once I have gone to the trouble of getting up, dressed, washed, shaved and then have to make the journey to and from work, I might as well give it a full nine hours. No, the minimum (or "quantum") unit of worthwhile leisure is the single day off.I might also add the fact that (as my self-employed father always loved to point out) a day off during the week is twice as valuable as a day off on Saturday or Sunday.
It is far cheaper for an agency to engage in this arrangement than to lose or hire people every time the climate changes. In fact, given that advertising is becoming a slightly seasonal business - with some months routinely busier than others - it's possible future agency contracts should allow for a certain flexibility of employment as a matter of course. Leisure, incidentally, can be a very tax efficient perk.
But there's a final reason this is such a good for our industry. You see it isn't clear that BBH will be much worse off for everyone's one-day absence. One of the fabulous things about this business, for all its annoyances, is that you can become better at your job by doing just about anything. Actuaries or lawyers don't become better at their jobs by reading a novel, listening to a conversation on a bus, watching a film, going to an exhibition or sitting in a park. We do. Rather as Google has found, the odd day for staff to pursue their own interests may pay back in more than mere cost savings.
Beyond advertising, we also need to ask ourselves whether BBH may have pioneered one possible answer to the economic downturn. Reading about this issue the other day, I stumbled on a few articles on the five-day week and the shorter working day. Until then, I had always assumed that Saturday had become a day of leisure through the efforts of social reformers. Not so. In the US, at any rate, it was pioneered by Henry Ford, driven by a mixture of philanthropy self-interest.
In his article Why I Favour Five Days' Work for Six Days' Pay Ford explains that a well paid and more leisured working man will have time and money enough to create significant demand for manufactured goods.
With a two-day weekend, it might even be worth buying a car.
