The Complete Guide to Implementing a Four-Day Workweek
The Complete Guide to Implementing a Four-Day Workweek
If you want to create the kind of workplace no one wants to leave, while still pushing for excellence and work-life balance, consider this long overdue, and much-misunderstood management tool. To watch a training on this topic, go here. This post has been covered in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
In the past few years, a four-day workweek (4DWW) has been getting increasing attention. Interest is only growing with each additional study that shows it works. TIME Magazine suggested that “2023 Could Finally Be the Year of the 4-Day Workweek.” The latest real-life, multi-continent experiments show that four-day workweeks bring incredible benefits for workers and companies, including less burnout and increased revenue.
I’ve seen these benefits firsthand. In 2022, as the executive director of a US-based national climate change nonprofit, I implemented a four-day workweek for my organization. In this article, I’ll share my own story of leading an organization to adopt a four-day workweek, provide a roadmap for implementation, answer key questions you may have, and explain some of the main lessons I learned.
As to my background in nonprofit leadership, I am a 30-year veteran of nonprofit organizations and political campaigns. I have been an executive director for five organizations. I earned my master’s degree in public administration and I coach and train nonprofit executives through my firm, Mind the Gap Consulting.
The Complete Guide to Implementing a Four-Day Workweek
What is a Four-Day Workweek?
The four-day workweek (4DWW) is a shift from the more standard five-day workweek (Monday to Friday) for salaried full-time employees. The five-day workweek is common in the US and many western countries for white-collar, professional, and service-sector careers. The four-day workweek usually entails a reduction in the number of hours worked between Monday and Friday so that only four days are required for work.
There are a variety of ways to implement a four-day workweek, including longer hours during the four official working days or even alternating the expected work days. Some employers simply change their requirements about what hours employees are expected to be productive and/or available to managers and coworkers. Keep reading for a list of different models.
Why is everyone talking about the Four-Day Workweek?
The pandemic has been a force multiplier for people struggling with their professional careers, commuting, and finding joy in their work. Particularly in the US, which has one of the most productive workforces in the world, the consequences of an incessant drive for productivity are becoming clearer.
People are reconsidering the human and economic toll of work and productivity at the expense of rest or paid time off. Many are reevaluating their work and lives. The World Economic Forum just did a highly publicized panel touting the benefits of the Four-Day Workweek.
Unlike many European countries, the US government does not require employers to offer paid vacation days - it is up to each employer.
Worker stress and burnout were accelerated by COVID-19, social distancing, and the shift to hybrid and work-from-home (WFH) regimens. The attention to the “Great Resignation” a year after the pandemic began really shined a light on employee retention.
Today, workers, advocates, HR experts, and forward-thinking leaders are increasingly exploring different models for how to work, including the four-day workweek.
My Own Journey with the Four-Day Workweek (4DWW)
The global pandemic impacted me personally in a really emotional way. In March of 2020, I was living in San Francisco with my husband and running a national climate change organization (Climate Advocacy Lab). As COVID-19 was sparking lockdowns around the country, San Francisco arguably had the strictest restrictions for any large US city. I had never heard the term “shelter in place” before but within hours of the decree, I knew we were in a different world.
I am an extreme extrovert and knew that this level of social distancing wasn’t great for me emotionally or psychologically. As a gay man, Covid-19 also had echoes of the fears early in the AIDS epidemic because it was a mysterious new thing that could kill you just by being close to someone. It seemed that everything and everyone I loved, was taken away from me, and it left an emotional scar.
“This [the pandemic] is stressful and distracting. I don’t need you at peak productivity right now. It’s OK.”
The staff of the climate organization I was leading was already distributed and virtual, but several of us worked at co-working locations around the country. We gave those up within a few months and everyone started working from home. I hated staring at the same walls every day, working in a makeshift office with no certainty about the future, no sense of normality, and almost no access to people or restaurants that I loved.
I had bad dreams and started consuming any news story I could find about how other people were responding emotionally and psychologically to these dual tragedies of death and distancing.
I knew that if the pandemic was impacting me emotionally, then it certainly would be impacting my staff and could start impacting morale. As a manager, I kept reading about how the pandemic caused burnout and stress. Relationships were strained at home and at work, within families and among friends. We took action at our nonprofit to immediately set a tone of compassion.
In late March 2020, I told our staff, “I know what we are going through is unnatural and huge and stressful. Many of us have loved ones with pre-existing conditions or who are “essential workers” and are doing everything possible to stay safe. This is stressful and distracting. I don’t need you at peak productivity right now. It’s OK.”
I think setting this tone mattered. Several employees told me it was important and helpful to hear that. Over the next year, we expanded time off including additional holidays like Juneteenth after the murder of George Floyd.
“There is evidence that it works. I’ll send it to you.”
But I also worried about losing our top-flight talent. I wanted to do everything in my power to create the kind of workplace that attracted and retained top-notch employees. I wanted the kind of team that everyone wanted to steal, but who wouldn’t leave because they loved their job.
I wanted to retain my staff because they were awesome, but also because leading searches to fill open positions felt soul-crushing to me. It was such a huge time-suck.
I was interested in creative ways to help my employees. In the summer of 2021, I was talking with a retired private sector HR expert about the four-day workweek. She immediately signaled her approval and said, “There is evidence that it works. I’ll send it to you.”
This began my journey to learn more about the four-day workweek and to bring the idea to my nonprofit organization. If we implemented it right, it could even be a model for others.
[Side note: the Climate Advocacy Lab earned a reputation for constantly learning and innovating on workplace equity, like refusing to share job postings unless they listed a salary range and a non-discrimination statement.]
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The Four Phases of a Four-Day Workweek Implementation (4DWW) - A Case Study
To implement the four-day workweek (4DWW) at my national nonprofit organization in 2022, we used four phases: Assess, Anticipate, Announce, and Adopt.
I was in my third year as executive director at the organization, and we had 9 full-time staff at the time. I had been in executive director or CEO roles at four prior organizations, which meant I had hands-on experience with human resources and staff policy.
If you plan to pilot a four-day workweek at your organization, try to include someone familiar with human resources. If you want to go deeper, on any of these elements, you can also work with me one-on-one.
Phase 1: Assess
In the summer and fall of 2021, I did some informal research from news articles and human resources publications about how other employers were implementing the four-day workweek. I actually did this before telling my staff I was interested in the topic.
I also asked lots of questions to HR experts in my sphere. I wanted to have some evidence and knowledge before bringing it to my organization.
I tried approaching the research skeptically because the 4DWW almost seemed too good to be true. Could you really reduce the workweek and see increased productivity and morale?
As an executive director, my stakeholders (my board and funders) want me to get results, but our staff also wants to get those same results in the context of work-life balance. Could we really still deliver results and work fewer hours?
The different configurations of the 4DWW
Not every organization may be able to implement a 4DWW and many may be able to do it, but in a different way than we did. Some different models for reducing or altering the workweek include:
Leaving on Fridays at 1 PM. Many companies do this now in the summer or year-round
Shortening every Monday to Friday workday to 6 hours. This is not a 4DWW.
Allow each worker to choose the four days each week they want to work. (We thought this was too disruptive).
Let each team decide its 4DWW configuration based on department.
Let each team decide its 4DWW configuration based on geography.
Have your four work days be ten-hour days or “Four Tens” (Data showed this actually irritated workers, especially parents, therefore hurting morale).
Have your four work days change occasionally until you get the right fit.
Possibly skipping the 4DWW altogether and considering Open PTO/Unlimited PTO instead, or in addition to, reduced hours.
Phase 2: Anticipate
After doing some preliminary research, I floated the idea of a four-day workweek to our staff. This was a very important moment because I wanted this idea to come from management. Being pro-worker, it's important for me to lead and be proactive, and to innovate on workplace quality-of-life matters.
As a progressive organization, we were well aware that there was growing interest around the US toward unions, but I don’t think our staff was considering this option and we didn’t move to the 4DWW to prevent unions, nor would we. I think our staff was pretty satisfied with the organization and their jobs. But I knew that continual leadership helped our small team forge solutions together.
Key questions to answer before a pilot:
Once our team began discussing the four-day workweek, we needed to ask ourselves:
Would moving to a 4DWW complicate our commitments to funders, coalition partners, or other stakeholders?
Would it complicate our programs, activities, or mission attainment?
Would anyone’s job materially change because of truncated timelines, fewer meetings, or additional dependence on deadlines?
Would people work differently, with increased speed, or other constraints?
Would anyone on the team have to change their work plans, and if so was that good or bad in the short and long term, especially if the 4DWW pilot failed?
We had just finished a new 5-year strategic plan as we were implementing the 4DWW. What impact would the 4DWW have on our long-term plans?
“Being pro-worker, it's important for me to lead and be proactive,
and to innovate on workplace quality-of-life matters. “
Creating our Four-Day Workweek pilot plan:
Internally we knew moving to a 4DWW could potentially be stressful, especially during the transition period. To start, I did not want us moving to four ten-hour days. My research showed that workers, especially parents, found this model counterproductive. Also, would longer days really get you the best quality work?
We decided to move to a more generous model where each worker would have the same workload and the same pay but try to get their work done in a truncated timeline.
By keeping the workload the same and the pay the same, our nonprofit sent a message that we were not making this move because we were low on funds, nor were we doing it because we had lower standards for productivity.
A few months before starting the pilot we began practicing blocking our calendars for “no-meeting Fridays” and getting familiar with what it would be like to have to get assignments to people by 5 PM on Thursday when you promised something by “end of week.”
We scenario-planned situations where our stakeholders needed our work on a Friday and whether we needed an “away message” auto-responder on Fridays.
In our pilot, our entire staff of 9 people would work the same four days (Monday through Thursday) and have Fridays off. The reason for this was that I wanted employees to have a long weekend, which can amplify the power of the 4DWW in terms of supporting rest, work-life balance, rejuvenation, and retention.
Giving everyone Wednesday off, for example, didn’t make much sense, and letting everyone choose their own day would be too disruptive. Even small teams want to know when to rely on colleagues for deadlines.
The pilot would be our chance to assess if we were right. Our team agreed that a pilot of the 4DWW was worth a try. Our conversations over the winter of 2021 resulted in us leaning toward a May 2, 2022 start date for a 90-day pilot of the 4DWW.
Phase 3: Announce
We told our board about the four-day workweek pilot a few months before it launched. It went overwhelmingly well. However, one board member did note that this was a pretty significant shift that could potentially get a negative reaction from funders or the field.
I think the worry was that people might be resentful or even jealous that we had this “benefit” when others didn’t or that funders might be concerned about a dip in our productivity. Each organization will have to anticipate the reaction from their community, their board, their stakeholders, their coalition partners, and others.
When we did notify our larger climate community, the reaction was incredibly positive and a number of organizations reached out to learn how to do this themselves. We didn’t want the announcement to sound like we were seeking approval or permission.
The decision had been made to do the pilot. I think that announcing a pilot instead of the full implementation gives you wiggle room in case there is blowback or if it fails. And it has been known to fail.
Phase 4: Adopt
There are many reasons to consider piloting a four-day workweek before actually implementing it, including making sure it’s right for your team and organization. We used a 90-day pilot but some employers use a 180-day pilot to assist in more data collection.
Even though our organization is evidence-based and data-driven, we decided not to focus on pre/post surveys of employees or to track productivity. Instead, we decided to monitor the four-day workweek pilot qualitatively via team journaling.
We created a Slack channel where I prompted employees weekly to share their thoughts, observations, and challenges with the move to the 4DWW.
For some organizations, implementing a four-day workweek will not go smoothly. And timing can be key. Making a move this big right before a busy season or right before your big gala is not advised.
Our team was committed to keeping an open mind and also being brutally honest with each other about what was working and what was not…in real-time. Feedback and accountability were becoming a muscle we flexed more often.
We don't know whether productivity went up or down due to the 4DWW. I think we were OK not having clear data. We do suspect that we ended up with too much paid time off for employees by the end of the year. We forgot to factor that in.
What I do know is that no one on the team wanted to go back to a five-day workweek. Having a four-day workweek became a great selling point while hiring and recruiting. Another thing we realized late in the year was that when we moved part-time workers to full-time, the shift didn’t feel like we were gaining that much more capacity, since they would be going to about 32 hours, not 40.
If I were to add a fifth phase, it would be Amend. This would be the phase where you make tweaks after you learn from the pilot.
Benefits of the Four-Day Workweek
The main goal of shifting to a four-day workweek is to help employees find a new way to stay productive while also increasing staff morale, work-life balance, and retention. But you are also working to change your community and society by valuing rest, family, and work-life balance.
But there are other possible benefits. If your employees are expected to work at a physical location, reducing the number of days that employees have to commute improves their lives immediately.
It reduces carbon emissions, soul-crushing commutes, energy costs at the office, and possibly car accidents. It may also reduce organizational expenses if you have a kitchen, coffee, or snacks that you provide to workers.
Another benefit of the four-day workweek, although we did not use it this way, is that it creates another tool for management in discussing raises and benefits. One could argue you are giving your employees a 15-20% raise in the form of their time back.
They have the same workload and the same pay, but now, if they are creative and productive, they get 7-8 hours a week back and less of a commute. Workers may not see this the same way, but you are creating a new benefit for workers and that must be factored into your compensation philosophy.
Finally, workers and managers goof off sometimes. Everyone does. CEOs do and frontline workers do. When you stretch the workweek across 5 days, you are expanding the number of hours where employees may surf the web for news, call their partners, or who knows what else.
By pushing the work into a truncated window it is simply more difficult to goof off. There is data to suggest that employees are currently being paid for many hours of “non-work” related activities.
5 Critical Tools to Make the Four-Day Workweek…Work
In order to implement the four-day workweek (4DWW) the way we did - same workload, same pay, truncated work window - you should strongly consider using these five practices:
Fewer meetings: Most workers in most industries report that they could get their job done much faster if they could attend fewer meetings. We encouraged all employees to cut the number of meetings and meeting length in half or cut them out altogether. You can change the default meeting time in your calendar software to 30 minutes instead of 60 or 20 minutes instead of 30. You can encourage employees to take most meetings by phone which is faster than video conferencing. [Microsoft found that meetings got longer when we went virtual at the beginning of Covid]
Employees can also set a new norm of telling meeting attendees that once the agenda is finished, they need to return to their work instead of staying until the scheduled end time on the calendar. It may sound off-putting for employees to tell others they are busy, but when put in the context of the 4DWW, many will understand. This will depend on your culture.Asynchronous work: We found that a lot of the time we spent in meetings could be handled asynchronously in Slack, Google Docs, Asana, or by sending voice messages. By requiring that everyone be in the same place at the same time just to hear updates, you lose productivity by taking up precious calendar real estate and delaying deliverables. Our team confirmed they were reading weekly updates from other team members by using emojis in Slack.
Shift nonessential personal appointments to Friday: If you and your staff want the 4DWW, it may mean asking or requiring staff to put nonessential personal meetings, lunches, and dental or vet appointments on Friday to accommodate the tightened productivity window of the 4DWW.
Talk: Make it a regular practice to check in during the pilot and throughout the year about the 4DWW. Successfully adopting a four-day workweek isn’t done after the pilot or even after implementation. It’s an ongoing effort.
Major work-blocking: I am a huge fan of blocking my Monday calendar so there are no meetings. If your entire team can have the first day back to work as a day of catching up, it may take the stress off the rest of the week. That means all meetings are happening Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. This is an adjustment, but be flexible in implementation.
Is the Four-Day Workweek for You?
Is the four-day workweek right for your organization? How does it interact with Open PTO or Unlimited PTO? For more information about these questions, the process, and the other articles and research we compiled that led us to try the four-day workweek, work with me or schedule a free consult.
FAQ’s
1) How do you handle holidays that fall on a Friday if it’s now a non-work day?
Since the four-day workweek was so generous, we did not give extra time off if a holiday fell on our fifth day.
2) How do you handle PTO and vacation/sick time if essentially you are giving people 52 additional days off?
We probably should have thought about this more because our employees had a lot of time banked by the end of the year. For many, the Fridays off were such a good benefit they forgot to take their other vacation time.
3) What if you can’t get your work done in 4 days?
The idea of a four-day workweek is not to force people to rest or have more fun or do less work. On the contrary, to make it work you need to be more creative. The goal is to create a container where the expectation is not that you must stretch your work over the traditional calendar of 9 AM to 5 PM Monday through Friday. Will some workers have to work in the evenings or on Friday or even on weekends if they don’t get their job done. Yes! But the goal is to find a workflow that allows the work to be completed in less time. Our team talked a lot about this. You aren’t failing at the 4DWW if you end up working on Friday. Just keep tinkering. It won’t be flawless. The current system sure isn’t.
4)Are you worried about productivity?
Yes, but all managers should be worried about productivity. The evolution of work has meant that we need to get creative in how we manage the productivity of employees. Structured correctly, with the full suite of HR tools at your disposal (such as management, check-ins, goals, accountability, performance evaluations, and team feedback) you can navigate the shift to a four-day workweek.
5)What about simply shortening each day to 6 hours instead of eliminating Friday work?
I considered this. I believe our pilot experiment was more successful by giving employees a three-day weekend instead of shortening each day. Because we work across multiple zones and expect salaried employees to be available to each other and the organization during the week, I didn’t think shortening workdays would result in the same benefits. Increasingly, the conversation about the Four-Day Workweek is really a conversation about flexibility creating more models for that flexibility. But your organization may feel differently.
6) Isn’t this only going to benefit white-collar workers or more affluent workers?
We don’t really know yet. Most news articles seem to imply that the workplaces most likely to experiment with the Four-Day Workweek are service or white-collar workforces, but that doesn’t mean it's the only way or that white-collar workers earn more than other workers. Also, at the World Economic Forum, a case was made that the Four-Day Workweek could lead to more equity and equal distribution of family responsibilities between women and men in the home. Many workers, especially women, people of color, and home care workers may want more hours or more consistency and predictability in their work, rather than a Four-Day Workweek. But that may be a characteristic of the way salary workers and wage workers differ.
To see a training on this topic, head here.
To improve your nonprofit workplace, work with me.
This post was covered by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as a source for tips for the nonprofit sector.
