A small local government in Western Australia’s south is being held up as a case study in creative workforce policy after its move to a four-day working week helped solve a persistent staff attraction and retention problem. The Shire of Boyup Brook, which had struggled for years to attract and keep staff in a tight regional labour market, says the shorter working week has made a measurable difference to recruitment, prompting interest from other local governments grappling with similar challenges.
Like many small regional shires across the state, Boyup Brook has long competed for workers against larger regional centres and the mining and agriculture sectors, which can often offer higher wages than a small council budget allows. Rather than trying to match pay rates dollar for dollar, the shire opted to compete on lifestyle and flexibility instead, condensing the working week into four longer days while keeping staff hours largely unchanged.
A Practical Response to a Persistent Problem
Regional and remote local governments across Australia have wrestled for years with recruitment difficulties, particularly for specialist roles such as planners, engineers and environmental health officers, where the pool of qualified candidates willing to relocate to small country towns is limited. High staff turnover creates its own costs, from recruitment and training expenses to the loss of institutional knowledge each time an experienced staff member leaves.
For Boyup Brook, offering a three-day weekend every week has proven to be a genuine point of difference in job advertisements, particularly for candidates weighing up a move to a small town against the convenience of city or larger regional centre living. An extra day off each week gives staff more time for family, hobbies or simply the logistics of living in a rural area, where trips to a bigger town for shopping, medical appointments or recreation often eat into a standard two-day weekend.
How the Model Works in Practice
Rather than cutting total hours, the shire’s model compresses the standard working week into four longer days, meaning staff work the same overall hours but with a permanent extra day off. This differs from some four-day-week trials interstate and overseas that reduce total hours for the same pay, an approach some employers have found harder to justify for public-facing services that need to maintain consistent operating hours.
Shire management has structured rosters so that counter services and core administrative functions remain available across the working week, staggering which staff take which day off rather than closing the office entirely for a fixed extra day. The approach requires more careful rostering than a traditional five-day model, but shire leadership says the added administrative complexity has been far outweighed by the recruitment and retention benefits.
Wider Implications for Regional Employers
The results at Boyup Brook are being watched closely by other small shires and regional employers dealing with similar staffing pressures. Local government associations and regional development bodies have flagged flexible working arrangements as one of several tools regional employers can use to compete for talent without necessarily matching city or resources-sector wages, alongside relocation assistance, housing support and career development opportunities.
Workplace researchers note that the appeal of compressed or shortened working weeks has grown broadly across Australia in recent years, as employees increasingly weigh flexibility and work-life balance alongside salary when choosing a job. For regional and remote employers in particular, where salary competitiveness is often structurally limited by smaller budgets, lifestyle-based incentives like an extra day off each week may prove to be one of the more cost-effective levers available.
What Comes Next
Boyup Brook’s experience does not guarantee the same results everywhere, and larger local governments with more complex service delivery requirements may find a compressed working week harder to implement smoothly. Even so, as regional labour shortages continue to bite across Western Australia, the shire’s experiment offers a real-world example that smaller, budget-constrained employers can use non-financial incentives to meaningfully improve their competitiveness in a tight jobs market, without blowing out their wages bill in the process.
How Staff Have Responded
Feedback gathered internally by shire management points to strong staff support for the new arrangement, with the extra weekly day off consistently cited as a major factor in job satisfaction surveys since the change was introduced. Existing staff who might otherwise have considered relocating to a larger centre for better pay have, in several cases, stayed on specifically because of the flexibility on offer, according to shire leadership, helping preserve institutional knowledge that would otherwise have been lost through turnover.
Recruitment consultants who work with regional local governments say enquiries about flexible and compressed working arrangements have increased noticeably among jobseekers over the past two years, a trend they link to broader post-pandemic shifts in how Australians weigh up job offers. For small shires without the budget to compete on salary alone, that shift in candidate priorities may open a genuine competitive opportunity, provided the operational logistics of a compressed week can be managed without compromising service delivery to ratepayers.
