The Four Day Work Week Paradigm: Can IT Companies Make It Work?
In the U.S., 83% of workers favor the four-day work week model. Adopting the new model can help reduce burnout and retain skilled talent, but can tech companies afford to take the plunge?
The four-day work week model is being tested by organizations worldwide, and lawmakers are keen to make it a norm in the coming days. But will the model suit organizations that need to be on their toes 24×7 to succeed? Here’s all about the new work model, its benefits, and what IT companies should do to make it work.
There has been plenty of discussion around the emerging trend of the four-day work week. Many believe it’s another trend arising out of the realities the COVID-19 pandemic brought about, but it isn’t an illusion that business leaders need to be wary of. The practice, which aims to ensure a work-life balance without affecting productivity, has been tested and implemented worldwide in many countries and organizations.
The Emergence of the Four Day Work Week
In March this year, Belgium gave its labor force the right to work for four days a week instead of five without any cuts in their salary. “The goal is to give people and companies more freedom to arrange their work time. If you compare our country with others, you’ll often see we’re far less dynamic,” said Prime Minister Alexander de Croo. To ensure that bosses didn’t find workarounds around this rule, the government also empowered workers to ignore work-related calls or messages outside work hours.
Iceland trialed a four-day work week in 2015 and 2017 involving 2,500 public sector workers. The results led Iceland’s Association for Sustainable Democracy (Alda), and the UK think tank Autonomy to conclude that the new paradigm had a “powerful positive effect on work-life balance,” with people being able to spend more time with their children and pursue hobbies.
Both Spain and the UK have also launched four-day work-week trials. In the UK, the six-month program will kick off in June and enable participants to work up to 9.5 hours a day, thereby clocking their weekly working hours in four days instead of five. So far, 60 companies with around 3,000 employees have signed up for the pilot. In Australia, according to Mercer’s 2021 Australian Benefits Review, more than one in four organizations are now offering a four-day work week environment, and the number of such organizations has risen 29% since 2017.
See More: Is Your Organization Ready for the Four-Day Workweek?
Lawmakers step in
With the four-day work week paradigm creating a sustained noise and delivering results, lawmakers in the U.S. are stepping in to formalize the practice, starting with Silicon Valley. Recently, a federal and a California bill were introduced to limit the working week to four days. The Assembly Bill 2932, introduced by two California lawmakers in February 2022, seeks to reduce weekly working hours from 40 to 32 at organizations with more than 500 employees and seeks overtime wages for those who work beyond four days a week.
“At a time when the nature of work is rapidly changing, it’s incumbent upon us to explore all possible means of ensuring our modern business model prioritizes productivity, fair pay, and an improved quality of life for workers,” said Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), one of the three lawmakers who introduced the federal bill in 2021. “I am introducing this legislation to reduce the standard workweek to 32 hours because – now more than ever – people continue to work longer hours while their pay remains stagnant. We cannot continue to accept this as our reality.”
“Many countries and businesses that have experimented with a four-day workweek found it to be an overwhelming success as productivity grew and wages increased. After the COVID-19 pandemic left so many millions of Americans unemployed or underemployed, a shorter workweek will allow more people to participate in the labor market at better wages,” he added.
The bill is supported by the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the National Employment Law Project (NELP), and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). According to Tukano, the bill is also supported by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which comprises nearly 100 lawmakers.
Organizations and employees are keen to opt in
The federal and state bills were inspired by groundbreaking work done by industry groups and organizations that ran pilot programs to test the efficacy of the four-day work week. Among the leading proponents of this movement is 4 Day Week Global, a consortium of organizations and professionals which runs 6-month coordinated trials of the four-day working week worldwide.
To date, over 150 companies and 7,000 employees in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand have signed up to participate in 4DWG-led trials. The objective of these trials is “to experiment with and implement reduced hour, productivity-focused working, based on the 100-80-100™ rule: 100% of the pay, 80% of the time, in return for a commitment to delivering 100% of the output,” says Charlotte Lockhart, the founder and managing director, 4 Day Week Global.
As we speak, 35 companies in the U.S. and Canada with over 2,000 employees are participating in 4DWG-led six-months trials to test the efficacy of the new practice. However, the efforts put in by 4 Day Week Global are a fraction of the number of organizations across sectors that are thinking of, are testing, or have implemented a four-day work week. This is driven by the fact that a survey of 4,000 full-time employees by GoodHire revealed that about 83% of them favored working four days a week, with 96% of millennials voting in favor.
See More: The Next-Gen Office Will Lean on Hybrid Workforce: Here’s How To Develop It
Is the ‘Four Day Work Week’ Relevant for IT companies?
According to 4 Day Week Global, trials conducted to test the new work model revealed that 78% of employees were happier and less stressed, and 63% of businesses found attracting and retaining talent easier. With resignations hitting the roof in 2021 and the technology industry suffering from a crippling shortage of skilled workers, especially in critical fields like cybersecurity and AI, many IT companies would want to give the model a shot to retain talent and keep their workers happy.
However, it is easier said than done. Today, technology companies operate 24×7, deliver instant services, run round-the-clock helpdesks, use real-time data to make business decisions, compete for market leadership, and deliver products faster than the nearest competitor. Can such companies afford to work just four days a week?
How can an IT organization make the ‘four day work week’ work?
Speaking to Toolbox, Olly Headey, director of Engineering at 37signals, the maker of collaboration software Basecamp, says that merely adopting a four-day work week may not deliver results for everyone. There needs to be a change in an organization’s culture and how it operates.
“It would be difficult for many organizations to support this shift away from the traditional 5-day week because they haven’t taken steps to rethink how they operate. They’re still relying on countless meetings, long planning cycles, unwieldy tools and other corporate inefficiencies that would lead to a noticeable productivity drop if they adopted a 4-day week at scale,” Headey says.
“37signals has operated a 4-day workweek every summer for over a decade. This has made a huge difference to our work-life balance, and it hasn’t led to a big hit in productivity. We have been able to do this because of our leadership’s laser focus on allowing people to remain productive during a shorter working week using asynchronous working practices, best in class tools, and ensuring we deliver value to customers in 6-week cycles.”
“We’ve seen some companies reimagine their technology stacks since the onset of distributed and hybrid work in 2020 by investing heavily in cloud-based collaborative productivity tools. However, businesses will need to restructure the way they work around these tools to make the 4-day workweek a reality.
“Enterprise solutions can work well for larger organizations, but there is an increasing need for technology solutions that are catered specifically to the needs of SMBs. The market share for SMB-focused solutions is expanding as hybrid work allows for scaled-down operations and team sizes, but making an enterprise-grade platform work for smaller teams is cumbersome and can result in productivity hit.
“If smaller teams look at adopting software, applications and platforms that are designed for them specifically, they will be in a much stronger position to make the 4-day workweek a reality,” Headey adds.
See More: Adopt Human-centric Work Approach or Lose Employees, Warns Gartner
Preparing for the inevitable
Despite how rigid the ‘four day work week’ practice sounds, it is incredibly flexible, allowing organizations to implement new work models depending on which suits their employees the best. For example, instead of making employees work 9 hours a day four days a week, a business can allow them to work 7 hours a day, five days a week. This may suit workers who may suffer from burnout from working long hours, even if they work just four days a week.
“It is a flexible work model that encourages finding efficiencies in the workplace to allow workers to do more productive work in less time, thereby maintaining profitability and productivity while permitting more downtime, so people can thrive,” says Charlotte Lockhart. “For some organizations, closing the doors from Friday to Sunday is feasible; for others, if they need to maintain consistent customer service for more than four days a week, a rolling schedule works better – it keeps the business running on normal hours but ensures each staff member gets three days off (or equivalent hours away from work) in a seven-day cycle.”
Switching from five days or six days a week culture to four days a week is great for employee well-being and a healthy work-life balance. If implemented correctly, it can help reduce employee burnout, help businesses retain workers and boost productivity. Ryan Breslow, the CEO of Bolt, a fintech company that implemented a four-day work week for all employees, says that work is changing, and the most significant obstacle a company has to face is burnout. This is why people need “a period to rest, recover, engage with loved ones, think creatively and all the other things that enliven us.”
“Here’s what many of us know but can be tough to admit: Work will fill the space you give to it. My bet is that we’re going to become vastly more efficient from Monday to Thursday. We’ll trim those excess meetings; we won’t send unnecessary communications. Because we’ll have less time, we’ll get more concrete work done,” he adds.
Do you think the four day work week culture could become a norm in the future? Comment below or let us know on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We would love to hear from you!
