Feature
Everyone loves a long weekend and some businesses are exploring how to make them permanent.
The four-day workweek continues to gain momentum both within organizations and at the state and federal levels. Senator Bernie Sanders recently introduced the "Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act" to reduce the standard workweek from 40 hours per week to 32. Countries such as Belgium and the United Kingdom have launched pilot programs to test out the idea, with largely positive results, including lower turnover, reduced burnout and higher productivity.
Despite this, implementing a four-day workweek isn't as simple as dropping one day of work. Everything from communication patterns to meeting schedules need to change to accommodate new ways of working. And how do you maintain productivity with less time to get things done?
How I Decided on a 4-Day Workweek
The original catalyst behind our decision came in 2015. I started researching the four-day workweek in 2015 when some outdoor sporting goods companies posted some blogs about it. I also read a study by Microsoft in Asia experimenting with the four-day workweek and tried to get my prior company owners to agree to do it, but they just didn’t see the benefits.
For Sphero, I took over operations in 2020, at a time when our outlook was bleak and the only way we would recover and remain a company was to retain key personnel. Morale was pretty low and, for the first time, I didn’t have anyone that needed to approve the 4-day workweek.
In short, the catalyst was trying to improve morale while also having the authority to make it happen.
I alone drove the decision and I didn’t involve anyone else, but socialized the “trial period” with my new exec team. It was a moment of, “Hey, we are doing this as a trial in June (2020) and if everyone can still get their work done, then we will extend the trial through the summer,” and everyone was all in. There were no surveys of employees done.
The biggest factor when making this decision was determining between a 32-hour work week and a 40-hour workweek. With most of our employees categorized as salary exempt this is not as hard of a line, but I believed (and still do) that 40 hours of productive work in a week is the right number, so we decided on four 10-hour days. To me, the 32 hour workweek would have rendered the four-day workweek dead before it ever had a chance.
Additionally, I had to determine if we were going to stay open five days a week or just shut the whole company down on Fridays. The execs, their direct reports and I worked together to come up with a plan where half the people worked Monday through Thursday and the other half worked Tuesday through Friday in case we needed it, but we decided that we would start out being closed on Fridays. Due to the nature of the education classroom business, being closed on Fridays has worked out fine for us.
One thing to note is that as we get into different segments of education, we will probably have to do the “split shift” and rotate certain employees working Fridays and having a different day off.
And lastly, will we be as productive as a company? This one is the toughest to quantify, but the nature of our work allows us to be more efficient by having fewer, longer work days.
Once the decision was made, It was a “rip the Band-Aid” off moment. We started the trial on June 1, 2020, and never looked back. At that time, our office was in Boulder, Colorado and we were not allowed to be in the office for all of 2020 and some of 2021 due to COVID-19 restrictions. So during this time, we had to navigate working remotely (most employees were in the Boulder office) and the 4-day workweek.
In terms of what had to change to support this model, This is a tough one to answer because the COVID-19 restrictions at the time forced us to figure out how to design and engineer products in a remote work environment. We were so focused on the changes we had to make to support remote work in a culture that was mostly in the office that the four-day workweek was kind of just happening. People were getting their projects done, customers were getting their support questions answered and the sales team had more opportunities than ever. We didn’t receive any pushback — quite frankly, most employees at the time were working at least that long plus had some pretty long commutes before the pandemic.
Looking back, It has almost been four full years since implementing the four-day workweek and it is the number one benefit our employees cite as their favorite benefit. It is part of our culture and we don’t even really talk about it that much anymore. We have had constant growth years as a business since 2020 and we are getting our developments completed in the same timeframe as before, but with a lot less rush at the end.
When people talk about work-life balance, there are really two ways to look at it. A lot of executives treat that as “people just want to work less,” but I view that as a very cynical way to look at it. With seven days in a week, it is almost impossible to achieve a balance if you are working five of them, even if it only is an eight hour work day. On both ends of the work day, you need to get ready (whether you are in the office or remote), prepare for your day, take time to set up and more. You have to do that five times per week. The way I look at [the benefits of a four day workweek] is through the lens of efficiency. I’ll explain:
To me, our remote work culture (yes, we are fully remote, except for our warehouse operations) and the four-day workweek go hand in hand. Together, they are a powerful force of efficiency. People who were in the office are now saving two or more hours per day getting ready, commuting, etc. Those hours are converted to productive work time Monday through Thursday and allow the employees to focus on complicated tasks for a longer duration. By giving our employees a whole day to balance the scale of work-life balance, they actually work harder on the other four days. This 4/3 split is essential, to me, in obtaining both work-life balance and an efficient productive employee base.
Conference
Sep
16
HR Tech Conference Las Vegas 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
I believe just as strongly in remote work, where possible, combined with the four-day workweek.
Along the way, we did learn that a lot of people can’t handle remote work and the four-day workweek, mostly because they are so entrenched in the normal eight-hour work day that they do not work enough productive hours Monday through Thursday and get behind. We use productivity as our guide at Sphero and we did not emphasize that enough early on. We had several new employees who just did not make it at Sphero because they couldn’t be productive in our environment. We learned that remote work plus the four-day workweek was a hard cultural shift for most people so our People team works with all new employees to make the transition and helps them with tools to transition to our way of doing things. If I could go back, I would have invented that training sooner.
We have no plans to go back to the five-day work week, but every quarter the exec team and I discuss if the “split shift” is needed to support our operations. Even after almost four years, I feel the four 10-hour days is still the right way to go, and our employee retention seems to show evidence that the trade off is worth it.
