Workers Four Day Week How to have a four-day work week
Four Day Week
Wildbit experiemented with working four days a week in 2017. This week they've been reflecting on the experiment that never stopped.
Here's what they gained from working less with more intention:
- Work/life balance
- Higher-quality work
- Recognition and community
- Fulfilling work and progress
Read their full reflection to learn:
- How you can successfully move to a four-day workweek
- Challenges and pushback they experienced
- How their workflow might evolve
It's not just high-margin software companies that are practicing this. Agency Radioactive PR have been doing a four-day, same-pay work week since 2018. Here's what having the extra day has meant to some individuals at the company:
- ‘I have registered with a charity to volunteer my time to go make tea and spend time with older people’
- ‘It’s helped me because I’ve had more time to finish my Masters degree’
- ‘We wouldn’t have been able to get a new puppy! Settling him into the new house would have been much harder, and also, we’d have had to spend out on a dog walker’
- ‘We’ve been able to get our garden house ready and up on Airbnb, which took 8 weeks. This would have taken way longer if it wasn’t for the extra day at the weekend’
- ‘I’ve been able to spend more quality time with my wife, just us – a rarity when you have two exuberant school-age kids!’
- ‘I’ve started yoga, I joined a community committee to raise money for a local facility and have been able to spend more time with family and friends’
A word of caution:
I've been lucky enough to have experienced a similar set up in the past. One thing both Wildbit and Radioactive have in common is that almost everyone takes the same day off (Friday). At Wildbit some members of the customer support team take off Monday instead so essential support functions five days a week. It's tempting to give individual team members a choice of which day to have off but I'd encourage against that.
Even if your team are masters of asynchoronous communication, relationships will start to drift when you don't work on the same days. That might be ok when the drift is equal across peers or averages out over a few months. But unintentional biases will inveitably develop towards the people that leaders crossover with the most. It's similar to what happens in teams where some members work remotely from everyone else.
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