6 things I’ve learned on the 3-year anniversary of offering a 4-day week

You wake up bleary-eyed at 6 a.m. on a Friday morning. “One more day until the weekend,” you think to yourself. But then you suddenly remember that you don’t work on Fridays! Every weekend is a three-day weekend. And here’s the kicker: You still get paid a full-time salary for working just four normal-length, eight-hour days.

This has been the life of my team for the last three years at Inventium, the behaviour change consultancy I founded 16 years ago. What started as an experiment in the last half of 2020, the four-day workweek (FDW) has turned into a permanent fixture.

We call the initiative Gift of the Fifth (GOTF), which serves as a reminder that if you are able to get your work done in four days, you receive the gift of time on Friday. The time might be spent with family, in the community, or even having some much-needed “me time.”

This is what I have learned after three years of taking most Fridays off.

Everyone needs to change how they work.

If you ask most full-time workers about their workload, free time isn’t something they are drowning in. So, if you’re given only four days to complete a workload that would normally take five, you’re going to need to change how you work. Because it’s not like we are sitting around pleasantly staring out the window for eight hours during the current workweek.

It’s not enough for one person to declare they are not going to attend meetings so they can get their work done more effectively. Instead, it requires a team to decide they will, for example, default to asynchronous communication and use meetings sparingly and deliberately. And that’s what we agreed to do at Inventium.

You need to be selfish and selfless with how you use your time.

A successful move to the FDW requires a unique mix of selfishness and selflessness. Over the past few years, I have found myself saying “no” more often to requests that are not core to my goals—which is ultimately selfish.

In addition, I try to put the time of others at the front of my mind and I’m sparing in the emails I cc others on, who I invite to meetings, and, indeed, whether something even deserves a meeting, because I owe my teammates the same level of mindfulness about how I use both mine and theirs.

Goals need to be centred around value, not hours.

At Inventium, using objectives and key results (OKRs) as our goal-setting framework means that every team member knows specifically (and objectively) what they need to achieve over the course of a year. They then break this down into quarterly and weekly goals. Using this method helps everyone know whether they have indeed completed their job in four days, or whether they need to spend a bit of time working on Friday.

It’s the best gift I have given my team.

I hear leaders talk a lot about things like employee engagement, employee experience, and having a unique employee value proposition. But really, how many are achieving this successfully?

Aside from having different coworkers, if most people were magically transplanted into a different company doing the exact same job, how different would it feel in terms of working conditions?

When I started Inventium, I wanted to make it the best organization any of my team had ever worked with. I think the FDW is the single biggest initiative I have put in place toward achieving this goal. It’s like giving someone an extra 52 annual leave days every year. And trusting that, because you think they are so awesome at their job, they will still be able to achieve everything that their full-time role entails.

As with any HR benefit, it risks being taken for granted.

I am often asked about the problems I encountered with moving to a FDW. In the first two years, challenges were few and far between. However, after having the policy in place for so long, it does risk being taken for granted. Just like any amazing life change we experience, when we live with it for long enough, the novelty wears off.

In addition, I have found that exercises like talking about how we all use our Fridays off is helpful in making sure we all continue to appreciate how fortunate we are to have nearly every weekend be a long one.

It would be really hard to go back to the old way of working.

I’ve occasionally asked my team how hard or easy it would be to go back to working a standard five-day week. I know that for me, I would struggle. I love the flexibility I have on Fridays and the choice I have in how I use my time.

One of my team members, a working mother with two small kids said, “I would faster take a part-time role for less pay than work five days every week.”

If you have been contemplating whether an FDW is right for your team or organization, my advice is: Treat it like an experiment. If you need help crafting what this looks like, you can check out how we approached it and what we measured.

For me and my team, the Gift of the Fifth has been the gift that has genuinely kept on giving. I can’t imagine going back to a five-day week ever again.