What we’ve learned from our 4 Day Working week pilot

Introduction

The four day working week (4DW) sounds like a great idea, 4 days work for 5 days pay, but what does that practically mean for a small consultancy? Selling time is how we earn a living, right? or is it?  What we are actually selling is trusted and valued expertise delivered by a team that finds the work rewarding and impactful. A 4 day week presents a challenge: we want to  deliver more value in less time (or less energy) while not impacting our team’s mental health or reducing opportunities to learn.

Our plan was 12 months in the making. Through many team conversations we developed an evidence based approach to measure the impacts across key areas of the company covering finances, quality of outcomes, skills development and team wellbeing. With quantitative and qualitative data, quarterly reviews, and monthly check-ins, we could work on streamlining our processes, finding better ways to collaborate and work to our strengths, protecting the time to develop our skills, and continuing to deliver the value our clients expect. 

Moving to a 4 Day Working Week. A cartoon group of people of different skin colours and gender presentations holding hands and celebrating.

Making a 4 Day Working Week happen

Our focus as a company has always been to work together as a team and be a trusted partner to our clients. In recent years, this has looked like collaborating closely on project delivery across the company, as well as ensuring team members feel supported and always have space to share their thoughts and learning. 

For a 4DW to work for us, we needed to adapt that same mindset to a shorter working week. Here are some of our key learnings:

1. Be intentional about meetings

We needed to re-evaluate our meetings to make sure that we get the most out of our time, while not putting too much pressure on our team’s calendar. As for most office work based businesses, that is an ongoing challenge for us, especially because we collaborate across the business on projects, operations, and strategy development.

We have found that being intentional is the key here. We’re a relationship focused business; our meetings are also ways of ensuring team members feel supported, have a space to raise issues or share learning, and feel connected as a team. Removing meetings for the sake of removing meetings would risk changing our company culture for the negative.

So, we needed to re-evaluate meetings based on both the practical and the indirect value they’re providing, and empower team members to opt out of meetings to focus on their independent work instead. We have become more targeted with our meetings, reducing the meeting length by preparing materials in advance and setting realistic outcome goals for sessions, and providing asynchronous contribution and learning options wherever possible. We’ve started using video recordings as introductions to our online whiteboards, or as a record of meetings to refer back to as needed so that we need fewer clarification conversations and free up more time. The added flexibility, but also the transparency around how we’re adjusting expectations to work for a 4DW, has allowed us to reduce meeting time without losing our sense of team connection and our supportive working environment.

2. Keep communicating

Switching to a 4 Day Working Week is a big change that can have unexpected impacts, both on your processes and on your team. Keeping communication lines open is key to manage those impacts, and keep momentum up throughout your pilot.

This is part of where our focus on protecting our check-in spaces has paid dividends – there is always a space to raise issues, concerns or just the niggle that we can easily dismiss as “oh it’s nothing really”. These matters can be addressed before they develop into problems. We also scheduled regular team sessions to check in on the progress of our pilot from a bigger picture perspective; these naturally became more spaced out and shorter as we settled into the new working pattern, as there were fewer details to iron out and we became better at evaluating if a meeting was truly adding value.

Our communication style has also shifted more towards written or recorded communication, to support more asynchronous working. This transition was supported by our project management systems to ensure sufficient information, direction and updates were available to the team.

If you are leading a 4DW pilot, keep in mind that your visibility of the impacts of your work are limited – you need every individual to share how the changes are impacting them, so you can better plan and adapt the 4DW to suit the business.

3. Set clear key performance metrics and track them with a balanced scorecard

Communication will let you see the qualitative or indirect impacts of the 4 Day Working Week pilot, but you also need a clear idea of the measurable impacts on productivity and profitability, as well as any other metrics your company operates with. Our scorecard covered key impact areas, including investment in BG, Personal Development, and Client Service, each with clearly defined potential impacts and associated Key Performance Indicators.  

We started by doing research on 4 Day Working week pilots, to get a better sense of what to expect, what to look out for, and how other companies have handled these challenges before us. As a microbusiness, we’d be dealing with a very different challenge compared to a global corporation, but the research has helped us prepare the right mindset for our pilot anyway.

One notable point from our research was that 4 Day Working Week pilots often cause a general dip in business performance within the first couple of quarters, because the team has not adjusted yet to having less time available to get the same work done. Knowing this, we were fully prepared to manage our team’s expectations to ensure that that potential dip would not cause us to lose momentum or hope in the project – but it turned out that we didn’t run into that issue at all, probably due to our small team size already being partially made up of part-time staff.

However, having set up a 4DW KPI dashboard has helped us keep track of our performance, and see the improvement over time as our team settled into our new working pattern and saw the benefits of having more time for themselves. It became a cornerstone in our quarterly progress check-ins during the pilot, to allow us to keep our discussions focused and productive, while still covering areas like team satisfaction with job roles. It has both functioned as a sense check for the company leadership, and as a tool to communicate progress and challenges with the team over the course of the pilot.   For instance, at the halfway point of the pilot (6 months in), we noticed that CPD (continuous professional development) and learning was not meeting our threshold, so we discussed blockages and challenges and took corrective action. Action was framed as a mindset shift to value the importance of learning over purely project delivery. 

Where would you start?

If you’re thinking about exploring a 4 Day Working Week for your company, we can definitely say it’s been worth it. It is a challenging process to manage, especially because you are likely going to be managing other business challenges at the same time. It’s key to approach the idea of a 4 Day Working Week with a flexible mindset – we succeeded because we were building on our existing strengths as a company: our ability to adapt quickly, our team connection and collaborative working style, and our digital transformation work. 

What are your company’s strengths that you could build on? Defining these will help you work out what a successful 4 Day Working Week might look like for you.