6 Tips For Shifting To A 4-Day Work Week

The 4-day work week is a simple concept: employees work 4 days but get 5 days’ worth of work done and get 5 days’ worth of pay. But it’s raised as many questions for leaders and people managers as it has potential answers. Is the tradeoff worth it? Do we really need people working 5 days a week?

Andrew Barnes’ The 4-Day Week shared the many positive results of his firm’s (Perpetual Guardian) experiment in shortening the work week. The compressed week worked beautifully there. Employees were 25% more productive in 80% of the time. Barnes became a short-week evangelist, and a global movement was born. It’s hard not to love a game-changing concept proved out with real data. Still, before the pandemic, the 4-day week just seemed a bit too radical.

But now it’s gaining traction. We’re in dire need of better people management strategies to offset the talent shortage, engagement gap, rising stress levels, Great Resignation, and so on. We need to improve employee well-being, and giving people more time to attend to their lives is an obvious solution — so long as working less is working better.

Barnes’ nonprofit has been busy: they’ve helped hundreds of companies take part in pilots on the 4-day week. A 6-month global trial program in the UK wraps up in November, involving some 72 companies. Similar trials are happening in Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. But despite research showing that a shorter week does raise productivity and improve employee well-being, some companies are on the fence. One key factor: the right execution. You can’t just shut down on Fridays. That’s not going to change the game.

So here’s a look at some proven strategies for effectively leveraging the advantages of a 4-day week:

1. Consider this a redesign for resilience. A happy workforce is a resilient workforce. But you need to attract more talent to build organizational resiliency. Among the stats 4DayWeekGlobal mentions: Not only are 78% of employees with a 4-day week happier and less stressed, 63% of companies find it easier to attract talent with a 4-day week. Better engagement + retention = a resiliency holy grail.

2. 80/100 should be the rule. A recent list of over 150 companies hiring and offering a 4-day work week includes a small percentage offering a 4-day work week at 4 day’s pay. That’s part-time work. If you want to attract a fully committed employee who wants to grow with your organization, think again. Doing 80/80 may attract applicants who would rather work a day less, but it’s likely they’ll have divided loyalties — with at least a vigorous side hustle, if not another job. Also, you’ll likely lose the top prospects to companies who offer full pay for the shorter week.

3. Look beyond employee happiness to operational advantages. Not surprisingly, many tech firms are finding the 4-day week fits their work culture. But it’s not just about offering this as a new shiny perk. The shorter week reduces operating costs. Take Microsoft Japan, who experimented with the 4-day work week in August 2019. They saw productivity rise by 40% while costs sunk: 23% less electricity was used; 60% less paper printouts were run. For organizations looking to save on-site operation costs, a 4-day week makes a big difference.

4. Don’t assume managers will object. In fact, many managers are on board. San Francisco’s Bolt, an e-commerce developer with some 550 full-time employees, made its 4-day work week permanent after 91% of managers wanted the program to continue. Managers juggling employee PTO and flexible schedules may find the shift refreshingly straightforward; it gives them breathing room they could undoubtedly use as well. It’s hard to get consensus among any workforce, but at Bolt, 94% of employees wanted the 3-month pilot to continue, 84% said they were more productive, 86% said they were more efficient with their time, and 84% said their work/life balance improved. From a manager standpoint, that’s a win.

5. Lean into the science. The science of how we work is changing how we manage people — as it should be. Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman found that the adult brain learns better when it can focus deeply, doing the deep work (a term coined by Cal Newport). The ability to concentrate on something without distraction is critical for countless tasks we require of our employees, but the 9-5 (at least, these days), 5-day a week schedule doesn’t support that state of mind. We just don’t focus that well for that long. The very neuroscience of efficiency points to a shorter work week as a better way to get things done.

6. Change your metrics, change your meetings. Two cornerstones of how most organizations function are metrics and meetings. We may have highly sophisticated tools to run analytics, but we don’t always use the right metrics. Instead of focusing on whether employees are at work, we could focus on what they’re doing. With meetings, that status quo of an hour meeting X times a day is already changing, but we could use a push. New research shows pandemic-era meetings got 20% shorter, with people spending 11% less time in them. But to support a 32-hour work week we need to cut meetings even more and require less people to attend. Microsoft Japan slashed nearly half of all of their meetings from an hour to half an hour, capping attendance at 5 — and got better at covering that agenda and achieving ke objectives.

During lockdown, organizations learned to trust that people were at work even when we couldn’t see them. Now we need to learn to trust that they’re getting things done even when they’re working less hours. That means shifting the culture to one of accomplishments rather than attendance. And if we no longer accept what Bolt’s founder and CEO Ryan Breslow calls “work theatre” — people looking busy even if they’re not — we may be getting there. At 27, Breslow’s known for being outspoken, but to me this is an idea whose time has come. And I do see it resonating with more leaders — as they realize that performance and well-being go hand in hand.