Back in pre-pandemic times, when a company wanted to switch to a four-day week, it did the obvious—delete a day and see what happens. This meant cramming five days of meetings into four, inevitably jeopardizing focused work time. But amid all the lockdowns and isolation of the past two years, businesses have done a lot of experimenting, and their ideas are starting to better reflect the intent behind the concept: improved work-life balance. “Four-day workweek” now means a condensed schedule, stripped of inefficiencies, says Brian Gorman, a principal at Do-Be Associates, a consulting company that helps businesses transition to fewer hours. “It’s a metaphor for flexibility.”
Common variations are parents who work Monday to Friday but only on six-hour shifts; or coders who do three 11-hour days. The overarching goal should be 100% pay and 100% of the effort in 80% of the hours, says Charlotte Lockhart, co-founder of 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit that is helping more than 100 organizations in six countries pilot shorter schedules. “At its core, this is about changing a business’s productivity culture so that the business doesn’t lose any revenue but its people are able to take time off without losing pay.”
Do-Be, which sees so much promise in a condensed schedule that it trademarked the term “4-Day Work Week” in the U.S., outlined the general steps to transitioning a company to a flexible timetable, which typically takes six months, Gorman says. “It’s worth going through the process even if you decide not to switch the work schedule, because what you’re doing is rooting out all the inefficiencies and non-value activities.”
Phase 1: Why are we doing this?
This is an organizational assessment. “It’s really a pre-mortem,” says Gorman, who suggests considering fundamental questions in conversations with workers, rather than drawing on surveys. What’s the objective? What do employees want? Why consider the shift? What are the company’s business, productivity, and output goals? “This is an opportunity to not only assess employees and their processes, but understand what feeds their souls and hearts and minds,” Gorman says. Is Friday lunch yoga popular because people love it, or just because everyone’s stressed and in the office anyway?
Phase 2: Where are the inefficiencies?
Shortening hours requires eliminating inefficiencies. What processes and procedures really work? Which don’t? What teams or departments duplicate each one another’s work? “You have to figure out how to make decisions more quickly, and distribute information in an asynchronous way,” says Meghan Keaney Anderson, chief marketing officer at Wanderlust, an outdoor adventure booking platform. Wanderlust transitioned to a Tuesday-to-Friday schedule in 2020. “It puts a lot of very sharp choices around what meetings are actually necessary and what decisions can get made without convening people, yet still being inclusive,” says Anderson, who also serves as a coach for the 4 Day Week Global pilots.
Spoiler alert: meetings land on the chopping block of nearly every company. Wanderlust culled a third of its meetings, with various measures. If a meeting has no agenda, it’s canceled. The company encourages employees to reschedule meetings when they’re unprepared. Some organizations shorten default meeting lengths, sometimes to just 15 minutes.
Phase 3: Let’s Do This
Belief in the project starts with the C-suite, “but everyone has to buy in, and it’s the employees who make it happen,” says Tony Carnesi, a principal at Do-Be. Here’s a critical consideration: “That profit and loss statement needs to not be affected.” He suggests that each team help create its own benchmarks, timelines, schedules, and ways to hold individuals accountable. Common benchmarks include not just productivity and profit, but also engagement, mental health, and burnout. “So many businesses don’t know how to measure what they’re trying to achieve,” Lockhart says. There’s no one way to cut back hours, but some begin incrementally, starting with a weekly half-day.
How workers use their time off varies. At Wanderlust, many staffers spend three-day weekends in nature; others, often care-givers, use their extra day for errands and appointments. “I use it to be alone, which is amazing,” says Anderson, mother of a 5-year-old. “My weekends are not calm. Mondays are the only day just for me: I read, I write, I walk my dog, I think. And I swear to God, on Tuesday I come in sharper and stronger.”It’s the day off that often leads to “ta-da moments, when you suddenly crack a problem,” says Andrew Barnes, co-founder of 4 Day Week Global. Choosing a Monday off is better for centering before the workweek; a Friday off tends to be consumed by the weekend. Where possible, Anderson suggests that team members all have the same day off, to avoid emails and Slacks flying five days a week. “Otherwise you don’t achieve mental space from work. The problem is always being on as an employee.”
Step 4: How’s it Going?
In the early months, iteration and adjustment are essential. Policies, schedules, and workloads will change. “You need to have constant communication back and forth between management and employees,” Gorman says. Keep in mind that these adjustments likely involve upskilling for managers, who’ve never before done things like explain to customers that the company now only works 32 hours or transition already heavily-loaded employees onto even shorter time scales.
Organizational growth creates particular challenges, as it only takes a few people shooting out too many meeting invitations or off-hours emails to spiral the efforts of hundreds of employees. “The more stakeholders there are, the more points of failure there are in proliferating meetings and Slacks and emails,” Anderson says. This requires training new employees and also conducting ongoing analysis of, say, when emails are being sent and what’s preventing people from reaching goals. This requires a person to oversee the progress. Anderson says she may never leave Wanderlust, which is attracting more job applications since it condensed its schedule: 2,000 people applied to work there in 2021, about 20 times the submissions in the prior year. “I would work for a five-day company again,” she says. “I’m more driven by the role and the purpose of the company than the schedule. But it’s certainly going to be a while before I look, because this has revolutionized the way that I live my life outside work.”
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