Background

At the start of 2022, I decided that our keyword for the year was going to be ‘productivity’. For any business owner, productivity = profitability and I was keen to find ways that we could become more profitable without increasing our costs. I had heard about the productivity benefits of a 4 day week along with other performance related benefits, and the more I found out about it the more that it seemed like a no-brainer to give it a go.

I started to join the webinars and workshops in the lead up to the pilot which was kicking off in June 2022, to make sure I was fully prepared. At the time, we was a small team of 9 and I made sure I communicated with the entire staff about the proposed changes as we moved towards a 4 day week.

Implementation

As I had worked hard to prepare the business and get all of the team on board, the roll out was pretty seamless for us. I made sure we had thought of everything; how were we going to handle bank holidays, how would we communicate it to clients, how we would handle the workload, could people switch their days off; the list goes on! I learned early on that whilst 4 Day Week Global could help give us the tools we needed to make the implementation a success, ultimately it was up to me to decide how it would work within our business.

It was really important to me that we stayed open as a 5 day week company in order to service our clients, and so, we split the team in two, with half working Monday-Thursday and the other half working Tuesday-Friday. Everyone was buddied up on client accounts to make sure there was continuity for our customers.

We took the opportunity to make lots of changes within the business and have a bit of a reset in the way we do things. It all lined up with an office move, so within one week we moved offices, moved all our operations over to Google Workspace and started the 4 day week. I actually found the initial disruption helped overall with the change management and getting people used to a new way of working where productivity was expected as the major outcome.

We had a pretty smooth transition and it worked well for us immediately. There weren’t many huge challenges that we faced, and there were only small tweaks we made to the way we implemented it to make it work for us longer term.

Outcomes

Although productivity was the main motivation for starting the 4 day week, I didn’t actually have a method in place for measuring it, and this is my only real regret. We’ve now implemented KPIs and other performance metrics but we don’t have a before and after comparison. However, as a small business, I always said that I’ve got a pretty good understanding of what’s going on, and that was my gauge.

That being said, I would say that I believe productivity has remained the same - however, maintaining that within reduced working hours and with the additional benefits we’ve gained is a huge win. The business’s financial performance during the trial was phenomenal; we performed 36% better than the previous 6 months and 47% better than the previous year. We had record sales months whilst on the trial and I attribute this to having a happier team.

Employee wellbeing and mental health has massively improved and staff retention has been 100% during the time we’ve been working 4 days.

We also massively grew our brand with the media coverage that we capitalised on, leading to global recognition. Due to this, I then went on to launch the 4 Day Week Planner, which is a diary / journal for people working 4 days a week. (We ship globally!)

Words of advice / conclusion

To anyone considering the 4 day week, I would say just go for it. It does take a lot of preparation but the results are worth it. I want to build a workplace where people love coming to work and I believe the introduction of a 4 day work week has massively contributed to that, along with all the other initiatives we do. It can be hard at times, but being disruptive is going to be difficult and I’m a firm believer that growth comes from outside of the comfort zone. On a recent webinar about the 4 day week, I heard someone say “the 4 day week didn’t solve all of our problems, but it surfaced them,” which I really believe to be true — it’s a great opportunity to shine a spotlight on your business and processes and see how you can improve them. We made so many efficiency gains that we would have probably never considered without the move to a 4 day week.