In September, Search Engine Journal staff voted to approve a dry run of a four-day workweek program!
We are running the program in partnership with 4 Day Week Global as a six-month pilot.
One of the key tenets of the internal study is that it is staff-led – which is why leadership asked for a staff vote to start the study. Management also appointed a committee of employees to hear concerns and implement policy related to the study.
We are halfway through our exam and I wanted to write about some of the successes and challenges we have encountered so far.
If you’re thinking about launching a four-day workweek trial for your business, I hope this information can help you prepare!
The four-day workweek program
The four-day workweek experiment has a few key tenets:
- It has to work for everyone.
- People shouldn’t try to squeeze more time into their week in other ways. It should be 100% salary, 80% time and 100% productivity.
- The end result should be making life better and less stressful during the workweek – not more stressful.
The biggest challenges in a four-day work week
If you’re reading this article, I’m assuming you’re already convinced of the potential benefits of a four-day work week.
We’ve experienced many benefits and I’ll go over them in a future article.
Let’s dive right into the challenges we uncovered with the pilot program and the solutions we’ve implemented so far.
A four-day work week has different effects on different teams
Teams dealing with external people may have a more difficult time adjusting to four-day workweeks.
Outward-facing teams like sales, account management, and media lose a day when their contacts could send important or time-sensitive messages.
When your company’s schedule isn’t communicated effectively, it can lead to frustration and missed deadlines.
These teams may have additional concerns about the KPIs they are responsible for and whether they need on-call duty to deal with urgent issues that arise on non-working days.
We’ve decided to resist the temptation to find workarounds that will ensure we maintain coverage for the entire week.
This may not work for your business. As 4 Day Week Global says, there is no one solution that works for every business.
We discussed at length the possibility of having different teams or different people working on different schedules.
However, four-day weeks is a difficult adaptation, and the more complicated you make it internally, the more likely it is that you won’t get a full implementation across the organization.
Many companies have employees who feel the need to work overtime.
In order to keep things fair and to prevent some employees from taking on additional burdens, we decided that everyone should take the same day off and enforce it as a closing time – at least for the duration of our process.
There have been a few situations where people would put in extra time on a Friday (I did, albeit only twice), but generally we find that the temptation is less when everyone is watching on the same day. Easier to maintain the cultural message that we are closed in a single day.
So how do you solve the problems that external teams will encounter?
Clear communication is our answer. Make your new schedule public and reach out to any outside stakeholders to let them know.
You need to keep sending reminders. It’s good to place the information on your website, in email signatures, and in any boilerplate messages you send externally.
This requires the support of leadership and each employee to ensure that outward-facing teams are not stressed more than others.
We are still in the process of implementing this. Different teams have different communication tasks.
A four-day workweek affects part-time, hourly, and contractor workers differently
For employees, the calculation of the four-day week is fairly simple: 100% salary, 80% time, 100% productivity.
SEJ employs people around the world and has a variety of different contracts and agreements. We have some full-time contractors, some part-time contractors, and even some hourly agreements.
Ensuring that the four-day workweek is equally beneficial to all stakeholders is a challenge we continue to rise to.
Our priority is an employee-led approach to these issues.
Because we have so many different types of employment agreements, how best to administer the program for each type of employee is an ongoing conversation, and contract employees are represented on the internal committee, which makes policy decisions throughout the process.
We found different opinions on how best to handle the different regulations and the works council presented some options to the management.
We used existing information from 4 Day Week Global, specifically some of their case studies, to guide our conversations.
Do public holidays create three-day weeks?
In the second week of testing, we ended up with a three-day week.
This caused quite a bit of frustration and concern. This extension of short-time work puts a lot of pressure on employees who need to meet performance metrics.
Part of the problem is that we had a policy that moved observance of holidays that fall on weekends to weekdays. We kept Saturday holidays on Fridays and Sunday holidays on Mondays.
With the four-day week, we decided to change this policy.
Public holidays that fall on Fridays and Saturdays are no longer observed during the working week. Public holidays that fall during the week and those that fall on Sundays still result in non-working days.
That way employees can still benefit from the occasional extra short week, but we don’t create too many stressful weeks with less time to get things done.
Four-day weeks exacerbate existing productivity problems — which is actually a good thing
If you have problems with your workflow or productivity, experimenting with four-day weeks will make them urgent.
And that’s good.
It’s easy to get so caught up on daily chores and important deadlines that your housekeeping suffers. Whether individual employee, team or company, it is difficult to find time to improve efficiency and remove obstacles.
The loss of a day makes this work urgent and necessary. It also shows you where the biggest pain points are.
That can be a bit of a shock. When you have a specific process that takes a lot of time (like, I don’t know, meetings), it suddenly becomes a lot more problematic for everyone involved.
We found this very informative and it was a great boost that we all needed to address inefficiencies as a team.
We’re still working on it. The problem with less time is that you have less time.
But this is where we feel our employee-led effort is critical: Our employee committee, which oversees the program, has been empowered to make decisions and set goals. All employees were invited to share their experiences, problems and suggestions via an anonymous suggestion box.
For this program to work, you need the truth:
- Who feels they have to work overtime?
- Who is more stressed about the program and why?
- Does anyone feel the implementation was unfair?
These are not truths that everyone will give their name to or take direct leadership in.
Because of this, SEJ felt it was important to have a multi-level staff committee with authority not only to hear staff concerns, but also to make decisions about the program.
How does the SEJ four-day work week work?
As you can see, we had many challenges! The above is not an exhaustive list of the obstacles and stumbling blocks we encountered along the way.
We are about halfway through the program and while we still have many issues to resolve, the general mood is positive.
We definitely have some big questions to answer and some big workflow issues to solve.
The four-day work week not only gives us more control over our personal lives, but also pushes us to solve existing problems that we might not have prioritized otherwise.
We are constantly collecting feedback from all team members on the program. I’ll be posting an update soon to discuss some of the findings.
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Featured image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
