Working a four-day week, seven years on

Management

Tash Walker at The Mix Global shares insights into the realities of implementing a four-day working week

The four-day week is very much back in the news again: as Bernie Sanders’ bill to introduce a shorter work week sparks debate about its merits in the US, while in the UK a campaign group is urging businesses to trial a four-day week during August this year.

For me, the four-day work week isn’t up for debate. At The Mix Global, our workweek has been Monday to Thursday for the last seven years.

In 2017, when we started the four-day week trial, we were a team of 12, with a turnover of roughly £1 million a year. Seven years later, we are 43 people, with offices in London and New York, with a turnover of £4.5m a year. Numbers don’t lie.

The impetus to try

When I founded The Mix in 2012, it was at the tail end of the 2008 financial crisis. People thought I was mad to start a business at still such a time of great uncertainty, especially when I had a perfectly good job, but I knew it was right for me.

At the start, we worked a conventional work week. But, five years in, my business partner Austin was struggling with complications from a back injury, as we continued to metaphorically break our backs to grow the business. Everything felt like a battle.

It was too difficult for Austin to be in the office five days a week. This was pre-Covid, when the stigma of working from home was still acute. His back problems left him feeling like he wasn’t pulling his weight, while I tried to help by working all hours to paper over the cracks.

We weren’t happy.

One thing Austin taught me was to stop and think. Work didn’t have to be this hard. We didn’t have to do things just because that’s how they’d always been done. We could find another way.

So, we looked around. We found companies that worked 4.5 day weeks, companies that took Wednesday afternoons off for sports, and some that had particularly generous wellbeing policies. All of these sounded nice, yet they didn’t feel like they actually moved the needle.

Then we came across the four-day week movement. In 2017, there were only a handful of examples of those actually doing this. Most in Scandinavia, a few in New Zealand. There were however, documented and proven benefits from the few companies that had trialled it.

For us, this felt significant enough to make an actual difference.

How we did it

First, we embarked on a three-month trial. It was an emergency rip cord if the business was negatively impacted, but also chance to work out the practical considerations.

My biggest worry was that clients would suddenly feel we weren’t around. The reality? In the three months we trialled it, not a single client noticed.

The other critical part was working out how to operate together. This meant creating clear lines of communications, setting up well-defined expectations of what to do and how to manage clients.

The key to implementing a successful four-day week, is not to cram five days into four, but change the way you work.

This is how it works for us: everyone gets paid their full wage and gets a full holiday allowance. On Fridays, employees are expected to check their emails once in the morning and once in the afternoon. If you take a holiday, you have to take Friday as part of your allowance. There are very rare occasions when certain projects demand people will be required to work on a Friday.

It’s not a case of implementing a four-day week and getting it working perfectly overnight. You need to take time and work out the best fit for the business.

For us, it’s been a game changer. It’s allowed the team to thrive not just in work, but in life. It makes for better creativity: we think of it as “fresh, not frazzled”.

We’ve also seen a significant reduction in sick days and it has improved team retention. It’s a running joke that when people leave, they eventually come back. Right now, we have three re-joiners on the team.

Our US team also benefit from the four-day week, where it perhaps makes the biggest difference, in a culture known for long hours and very little vacation time.

The decision has put what’s best for our team at the heart of business decision-making but it’s also helped the business grow.

Making it work

For any business looking to trial a four-day week, these are my tips for making it work:

You can’t just expect four-day weeks to happen; it requires work: Over the past seven years, we’ve had a few re-set moments where things were sliding back into five days. Sometimes you will need to re-state the commitment.

Make the commitment at every level: You can only get to a four-day week if everyone is in it together. It’s about accountability and clarity across the team.

Communicate: You know what they say: your friends keep you honest - and it turns out so do your clients. We’ve found they are universally supportive of what we are doing with the four-day week, and telling them embeds that commitment further.

Collaborate more, do fewer meetings: We all can be smarter about meetings – even when working a traditional week – but when you work a four-day week asking if a meeting really needs to be an hour is even more important.

The Harvard Business Review recently did a study that suggested that 50% of all meetings were totally pointless; I agree, do less of them.

Tash Walker is the founder of The Mix Global market research agency

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Anastasiia Yanishevska