Companies that took a ‘leap of faith’ with a four-day workweek increased

By Andrew Keshner

Pulling off the four-day workweek can take effort, businesses say

Ever since one business-to-business news website switched to a four-day workweek last year, the fully remote staff has been far more sparing with the amount of meetings they have, and their length.

“I can’t remember when I was in a meeting thinking, ‘I don’t know why I’m here,'” said Jenise Uehara, CEO and co-owner of Search Engine Journal, a trade news outlet focused on digital marketing.

Online advertising sales are up 22% year to date at the publication, which has more than 30 staff members across the country and the globe, she noted.

The shift to four days was an attempt to stave off burnout and boost productivity. A better work-life balance was “a welcome and needed sided effect,” Uehara said.

Meanwhile, Friendly Design Co., a design agency with staff across the U.S, has also taken a scalpel to meetings in order to cut Fridays out of its schedule.

But lopping off a day of work is actually hard to do, said Geoff Silverstein, the company’s managing director and partner. The toughest change is the continuing mental focus needed to maintain schedules that maximize efficiency over a span of four days.

“It was a little bit of a leap of faith, and we continue to tinker with how it works to make it better and better,” he said.

In the firm’s 11-year history, this May and June were the two biggest months for gross revenue, Silverstein noted.

Like Search Engine Journal and Friendly Design Co., other companies and organizations that are using the compressed workweek are getting so proficient that employees are still trimming hours off the job clock while maintaining productivity.

That’s according to new data on the potential benefits of the shortened workweek in research where both Search Engine Journal and Friendly Design Co. are some of the pilot participants.

The workers at companies and organizations involved in the study said their average workweek dropped to approximately 33 hours. Six months earlier, those employees said they were working around 34 hours, according to the research from 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit supporting the condensed week. At the start a year ago, the baseline was a 38-hour workweek, researchers said.

The still-shrinking number of work hours highlights the range of time-wasters that management and staff can weed out, said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, director of programs at 4 Day Week Global.

After picking out the clear time sucks — like long, recurring meetings that may or may not have agendas — the research indicates workers and management are still motivated to pinpoint time inefficiencies that are harder to spot, he said.

Now people are scrutinizing how work is accomplished and how schedules fit together, all while doing their jobs. “That stuff takes time to figure out, and to see results,” he said.

It’s a process that doesn’t stop once the four-day week is achieved, said Mike Neundorfer, CEO and owner of Advanced RV, an Ohio-based maker of custom motor homes, which is also a participant in the research.

“We’re very aware of meetings — some we added, some we deleted, some we shortened,” Neundorfer said, adding that meeting agendas are a critical ingredient.

“At 32 hours, I think we are where we were at 40. It’s a constant process and it requires everyone at the company to be aware,” Neundorfer said.

The four-day workweek is still the exception to the general rule of five days on the clock. For example, 20% of businesses surveyed by ResumeBuilder say they have a four-day week, and of that portion, 69% say the policy doesn’t extend to everyone. By the end of the year, 30% said they’d have a shortened week.

But more attention for the four-day workweek is happening alongside the ongoing debate over the return to the office. And both are issues are getting at the same questions: What counts as productive work, and where does it have to occur?

Roughly one-third of workers go to their office five days a week, while another 56% go in anywhere from one to four days, according to a recent McKinsey & Company analysis. The consulting firm surveyed nearly 13,000 office workers in countries including United States, United Kingdom, Japan and China.

At 4 Day Week, Soojung-Kim Pang said researchers are not seeing either remote businesses or in-person operations pulling off the four-day workweek more successfully than the other.

“What is more common is professional culture and our assessments about how work has to happen,” he said, which is “the impediment from us moving to four-day weeks.”

In his experience, nurses are open to the idea because they already have schedules that can be compressed or switched around….