The Murrumbidgee Council has voted to implement a four-day working week trial for most staff starting in January in what is an Australian first for a local council.

The council will put together an agreement detailing what the four-day working week will entail and how success will be measured.

Employees will get 52 long weekends next year when a four-day working week trial begins at a south-west New South Wales council.

“The agreement will be for 15 months so that we can have a review in 12 months… and we can determine whether it’s going to continue or revert back,” council general manager John Scarce said.

“As everybody knows, in rural Australia it is hard to attract staff so you always have to have a competitive edge.”

The trial will retain a 38-hour week for people at the council’s depot, office, library and in its work crews at Darlington Point, Coleambally and Jerilderie, but compressed into four days.

Most services will be closed on Fridays, though the childcare centre and caravan park will remain open and on-call essential service workers will still be rostered.

Mr Scarce said the trial will start in January.

He said the data already collected, particularly around road repair and construction, indicated a positive outcome was likely.

“In a week, we can grade six kilometres [of road]; with this compressed to four days, then we expect that six kilometres to be done, but there’s also probably going to be another half a kilometre of road done because the lost travel time is work time,” he said.

It follows staff and community consultations that indicated 75 per cent of staff preferred the compressed work week, while just under 40 per cent of community submissions opposed it.

Over the next six months, Mr Scarce will put together an agreement about what the working week will look like and which performance indicators will be used to measure the trial’s success.