Last week, a Microsoft subsidiary in Japan implemented a four-day week experiment, closing its offices every Friday for the month of August, which lead to a 40% boost in productivity compared to August 2018.
This is the latest in series of four-day week implementations around the world, which are showing that, in the right conditions, switching to a four-day week can actually improve productivity and creative output. Also, in the case of companies that are able to close its office entirely for one day a week, there is a saving of electricity and office resources as well. The Microsoft experiment found that the number of pages printed during the experiment decreased by almost 60%.
There have been a number of calls to reduce the working week to four days in recent years. With burnout on the rise and substantial proof that one day less can actually make workers more productive, it is quickly becoming a serious consideration. In fact, trade union Fórsa is calling for a four-day work week in Ireland, saying we should be talking about productivity rather than time.
Other companies have been experimenting with the four-day week for a number of years, including software company Basecamp, American burger chain Shake Shack and online learning company Treehouse, all to varying degrees of success. But while a one-size-fits-all approach rarely ever works for different workers, industries and companies, there’s a lot to be said for the evidence that is building in favour of some iteration of a four-day work week. Thinking about implementing a four-day work week in your business? Here are a few things to consider.
To see if a reduced work week is feasible, employee output has to be matched. There is no point in reducing the work week if it also decreases your staff’s productivity. To counteract this, look at your employees’ weekly KPIs. Could they be achievable in four days? Would they be comfortable with compressing their week this way? Perhaps, condensing the hours into a four-day week would give the same results.
It’s also important to talk to your employees about this possibility. What iterations would they be happy with and which ones are definitely not a runner? If the only way it will work is the one way your employees won’t be happy, there’s no point in implementing the policy. You want this to be beneficial to the business and your employees. And if there is a successful way to implement it, it might even become an incredibly strong USP in your employer branding strategy.
A four-day week might not suit everybody, but start with a team or role for which it is easy to implement. For example, there might be a particular team or department, that have easy-to-measure weekly KPIs and aren’t required in the office five days a week and this is a great place to start.
It’s also important to know that you don’t have to go straight for the four-day week. You can start with one four-day week per month, and then two to reduce disruption and get everyone in the office used to working four days a week more gradually. Alternatively, you can implement four-day weeks during the summer months when it’s traditionally quieter, which is what Basecamp does.
These different iterations will also help you figure out what works best for your business. Perhaps you will never graduate to four-day weeks all year round, but it’s about finding what works for you and your employees.
If you are concerned about the clients or customers you work with who still operate a five-day week, consider staggering how people in the office take their day off so that there’s always the necessary people in the office each day. Perhaps each department will always need to have two people in the office every day and from there, they can figure out how best to reduce their hours.
If there’s a lot of staff to keep track of and the days change, make sure you have a solid record of who’s meant to be in and when. For the sake of consistency, it’s also a good idea to set the day off for each employee so that it can’t be moved around to avoid complicating situations and creating extra headaches for managers.
We all get a bit of a Friday feeling when our productivity slows down, which is part of the reason a condensed week might lead to heightened productivity. However, if your business reduced to a Monday-Thursday working week, is there a danger that that ‘Friday feeling’ will move to Thursday?
As we said, not all four-day week experiments have been successful and Treehouse CEO Ryan Carson, who was an early adopter of the 32-hour, four-day work week in 2015, said, “it created this lack of work ethic in me that was fundamentally detrimental”.
If you’re thinking about implementing a four-day work week, you do have to be aware of the dangers and think of all potential implications. But as the research piles up in favour of working smarter and not harder, perhaps a four-day work week is something that needs to be considered in some way, shape or form.
Calendar photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash
