4 Day Workweek Win: Another Company Makes The Switch

Pexels/Bruce Mars

Yet another success story for the four-day workweek. Fast Company followed Wildbit’s – a small Philadelphia software company — shift to a four-day week in May 2017. Overall, it went well, in following with the trend of other companies going for the big four.

Last March, a New Zealand company of 240 employees, Perpetual Guardian, tested it out for two months and reported greater productivity; they decided to make the change full-time in October. Indiana firm Reusser Design has had four-day workweeks with longer working days since 2013.

There have been some busts, however: tech education company Treehouse had a four-hour workweek since 2006; in 2016, however, they laid off 20 percent of its workforce and instituted a five-day workweek. In 2008, Utah enforced a four-day week with 10-hour days for state employees to save on operating costs, but the program only lasted three years.

Unsplash/Bruce Mars

Wildbit already had a flexible work schedule in place, and most of the team worked remotely. When the team went to a four-day workweek, they had to make a few tweaks — not everyone could have Fridays off; some employees had to cover and have Mondays off instead.

And cofounder Natalie Nagele is tinkering with the schedule — with shorter, darker winter days coming, she might replace the four-day workweek with five short workdays for the winter, saving the truncated workweek for the spring and summer months.

Productivity is up: Nagele said that upon review of the first year of four-day workweeks, “we realized we launched more features than the previous year.”

She stressed that the beauty of the four-day workweek was the pressure to work smart and hard during the four days “on,” combined with the “forced downtime” of the three days off — emailing off the clock and other unnecessary disruptions just isn’t part of the culture.

This article originally appeared on Ladders written by Sheila McClear.

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