Changing our company to a 4 day week

This is the second in a series of three articles. For the first, click here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/i-introduced-4-day-week-my-company-how-did-turn-out-neil-knowles/

For clarity: same salary, same workload. We just don’t work Friday, Saturday or Sunday. A 3-day weekend, every weekend.

In part one I ran through the internal preparations and discussions for switching to a 4-day week. In this post I am covering when we we did the actual shift. We came in Monday morning, bright eyed and keen, and we worked solidly all the way through to 5.30, and we did for 4 days and on Friday we just… stayed in bed. (Actually, I went to Boot Camp Fitness, Marta went to Kew Gardens to see the new Orchid collection, other people did other things, but you get the idea).

My company Elektra is a lighting consultancy. We work with architects and project managers to help deliver amazing projects such as 5* hotels and retail projects. These people all work on a Friday. Would it be OK if we didn’t? In an industry that prizes long hours and tells you you’ve failed if you’re not working 60-hour weeks, is it Ok to say no?

We set a standard footer on our email from day one telling everyone we are working on 4 days a week. So every email that got sent out had this in big letters on the bottom. We got a lot of replies back , mostly saying “just noticed this on the bottom of your email, it’s awesome – can you tell my boss please?” which was good. Not a single person was negative about it.

Out of office autoreply is sent to automatically turn on Thursday evening. Again, no negative comments to this. A few speculative job applicants though.

We do a lot of work in the Middle East, on projects like hotels and masterplans, (you can see lots of these on our website, www.elektralighting.co.uk) and they don’t work Fridays as standard. Everyone just accepts it. They are not there, you’ll need to wait. Our new week is the same. Additionally, we spend a lot of time on a building site so often people are just not available sometimes and cannot just do the drawing you need. It’s OK. The only thing we had any problems with is the kind of big team meeting common to a lot of construction projects, with all members of the design team – architect, interiors, M+E team, acoustics, lighting, surveyors and more – but we just said, “we can’t do that day” and it got reshuffled.

Then we actually did a lot of those things that efficiency experts tell you to do. Turn email off whilst busy. Put your mobile away and on silent. Tell

We removed distractions. To say “can you be quiet you are disrupting me” is encouraged, especially from juniors, who we allowed to say this to seniors. We make a dedicated effort to focus on what’s important – delivery of design information and client care – and not interrupting each other all the time.

One of the side effects of this is to cut down on office chat. So we started to arrange more social things on Thursday evening (this week we’re going to a new restaurant around the corner, in two weeks’ time its bowling). Thursdays are the new Fridays.

But most of all, everyone had to buy in to the idea to work hard. I was clear about the criteria on which this would be judged; ongoing client satisfaction and turnover. I was clear that if we let our clients down, or saw a drop in income, we'd be back to our 5 day week. So what happened? More on that next week.