More thoughts on a four day work week
No need for a conspicuous intro - last year we introduced a summertime 4-day work week with mixed success.
This year we did it again, a little differently. With mixed success.
The key change this year was learning from last year’s main takeaway - trying to smash a normal week’s hours into 4 days ultimately led to people getting tired and fed up.
It didn’t really live up to the dream of freeing up time for people to work on some geek projects and instead left people wanting time to rest.
And tile their bathrooms (again) but that’s really a different point1.
So this year we changed things around a bit - still a 4 day work week in August but each work day was a flat 8 hours’ work effectively reducing the work week by around a half day.
Everyone was off on Friday as before, but this year we relaxed the formality of an on-call rota for client fires - everyone just chipped in to make sure that anything urgent got dealt with, exercising judgement on the severity of things so anything non-critical could defer to the next week.
So, was it better?
In my own experience it was not materially different to last year.
Life is pretty full on most of the time and it’s not realistic to expect to be able to just announce Friday as a ‘free day’ and think that things will just be some magic nirvana of peace and productivity.
That’s not to say things didn’t slow down a little, but inevitably there were things to look at, emails to check and the odd bin fire that needed looking at.
Certainly some well-ingrained habits would need to be broken to assert a bit more discipline to really make the most of it. So mostly it ended up feeling more like a 2.5 day weekend as opposed to anything more substantial.
Which is not a terrible thing, of course.
What about the others?
Feedback from the team was not dissimilar to mine - another mixed bag of pros and cons. Our clients obviously can’t pick and choose when things go wrong (although somewhat unfortunately it tends to happen on a Friday) so most people in the team got some sort of call or issue to look at on the Fridays.
We did manage to avert the feeling of being absolutely knackered from last year and everyone felt more able to really use the time the way they saw fit.
On the whole, the team felt they were no more or less productive than usual, and although overall output (which is itself a nebulous thing to try and measure) across the company was marginally down, this was mostly explainable. There is nothing particularly insightful from the data we do have as unfortunately the team is literally too small and the work too disparate and varied to really analyse any real trends.
And when you factor in that August is a popular for ’taking proper holidays’, when at least half the time of the experiment was missed by people being on holiday, it erased the potential for any objective measurement of the impact.
It’s possible to reduce this year’s experiment to something along the lines of “on average the team got roughly an extra half day of holiday per week during August.”
Which is, of course, not a terrible thing.
Any cons?
We have always been a ‘flexible working’ sort of an organisation from the perspectives of the working hours of the day (nothing prescribed), where you work (office, home, boat… are mostly fine) and putting in enough hours (the contract says a number, but in reality performance is judged on whether the work is getting done.)
What this means though is that we are not a typical Monday-Friday, 9-5 type of organisation. Week to week will look a bit different for everyone where a busy week with deadlines and lots on will be longer. with more pressure and more frenetic; but this will typically be balanced / averaged out over time with the quieter weeks that take the pressure off.
And ‘a week’ is rarely so neat as being Monday-Friday - some deliverable may require a ramp-up of effort around a Weds/Thurs with some sort of software release, possibly checking/testing/troubleshooting over the weekend with final review and sign-off on the Monday. Thus someone working a shorter day on a Tuesday would barely raise an eyebrow.
Changing the parameters of a week to be fixed 8 hour days Monday-Thursday interrupted that flow, from the perspectives of people feeling the pressure to put in an 8 hour day even if that day or week’s tasks didn’t demand it; and from keeping an eye on whether the hours were being put in.
We’ve never been clock-watchers but it’s inevitable that this occurs when there is a more explicit expectation that longer days are being put in to justify the extra day off.
New hammer please
On balance therefore, this year felt marginally ‘better’ than last year - but we’d accept we still haven’t nailed it.
There’s much to be said for the team having more time off during the summer just as a simple perk and reward for all the hard work that had been smashed out year-to-date - but gauging whether that is the best way to reward it versus some of the other alternative ways of achieving the same is harder.
Not least because what is perfect for one person in the team will be very different to what is perfect for another. Not easy!
We’ll definitely keep tinkering with this, though.
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We also realised that, wait for it: work-life-balance is important! So whilst the nature of your typical Cortexian is to want to do geek things in all their spare time, it’s also just as important to have a life and do life things. So it didn’t really matter whether people chose to use the extra time for geek things or going to the beach, spending time with family, or tiling… and we found that ultimately the time spent was on a bit of both, but with a slightly heavier leaning towards the ’life things’ theme. ↩︎