Four day week. Three months in.

Today marks three months since we introduced a four day week model at Wilson Fletcher. I promised I’d share some of our initial experiences, so here goes.

Despite thinking about this approach for a long time and reading everything we could before jumping in, we were still a little nervous: it’s a big move. So far, I’m happy to report, it has definitely proven to be a positive move. Our team has been more energised, and Fridays have been used really well to improve the four days we work. There has certainly not been any dip in output.

I think everyone has recognised the positive impact the 4dw has had on them individually. A few, ironically, struggled a bit for the first few weeks to use their Fridays well, but everyone now seems to have struck a good balance between substantive personal development, reflection and thinking time, writing, reading, exhibitions and so on – and extra downtime after an intense phase of work.

Challenges.

We always assumed that it would take 6-9 months to adapt fully, and my guess is that we were about right in that assessment. There have been remarkably few real challenges so far, but we’ve had a few minor bumps.

Interacting with 5dw'ers.

Clearly, other people still work on Fridays, so we’ve had a couple of major meetings that we’ve had to attend on a Friday, and where we’re running customer insight programmes, we’ve had a few calls scheduled for Fridays by client teams because it was the only slot they could get with a particular customer.

No-one in the team has been anything other than totally accommodating about this but we’ll still try to avoid it wherever possible. In most cases, clients have just forgotten that we’ve changed to the 4dw, but we probably need to do more to keep external scheduling to the days we work.

There have also been some adaptations that we’ve needed to make to some of our working patterns. Interestingly, where Mondays and Fridays were often default days for starting/ending blocks of work, we’ve shifted to mid-week instead. It turns out that this would have been better all along.

Telephones still exist.

It turns out that the phone still rings on a Friday. We caught one important call in the first couple of weeks as one of the team had popped into the studio purely by chance to collect something. We’re adding a remote receptionist service for incoming calls to ensure that this is covered when we’re not around. Most of our clients call us on our mobiles, but we don’t want to leave the phone ringing unanswered if they do call. And of course if someone new tries to contact us and doesn’t realise we work a 4dw, voicemail doesn’t create a great impression.

Not a massive issue for us, but it could be a tricky area for some types of company considering this move.

Unexpected upsides.

Our clients have reacted brilliantly: I think most consider it a progressive move, and some have just come out as plain jealous! A couple have said that they love the fact that we get clear thinking time on a Friday now and are trying to adapt their own work weeks to enable more of that. So far, we’ve not had a negative reaction - I assume because there has been nothing but a positive impact on our team and work. Had there been, things might have been very different, but we’ve not had to change a single milestone or delivery date as a result of this change.

We are definitely all managing and using our time better. Shorter and fewer meetings, better organised when we do have them. More focus on who really needs to be in each session. Much better planning of the week ahead to ensure that we optimise our time (everyone time-blocks their calendar for the week ahead now, reliably). Morning stand ups are shorter and sharper, as everyone is much more conscious of only talking about what’s relevant to the team. You get the idea: many small improvements, and, crucially, we’re sticking to them.

A better way to work.

All in all, so far, we’re really happy with how this is working for us. The type of work we do certainly favours this model more than a company that is more volume or production-focused: our clients will always gain more from a qualitative improvement than a quantitative one. I suspect the challenges for many types of business may be greater than ours have been, but I think most could be overcome with a combination of lateral thinking and careful planning.

Make it everyone's problem.

Next week is our second quarterly awayday, where we have our Friday together to focus on improving the company and our work, and engage in some activities that help us build our team capabilities. I’m sure some more improvements will come from that session that we can apply in the coming months.

If there is one key learning from this so far for me, it’s that if you trust your team, they'll figure out how to make it work. Our team has been brilliant at identifying and killing off little habits we had that ate more time than they should have, and have all made small improvements to the way they work that are making a big collective difference.

Surely, five awesome days would be even better?

Of course, you could argue that if you apply those improvements to a 5dw, we'd be even better, right? I'm certain already that this would not be true. Quite aside from the increased per-day productivity levels gained by working one less day, I believe the shift in pattern is actually a far more important factor.

I've certainly seen this benefit me personally. My time often gets heavily fragmented during the week, so Friday is now a day where I can dedicate time to deeper thinking, reading and writing. I’ve actually done quite a bit of project-related work, but none has been to catch up on something I didn’t have time for in the week. Having the time to think about something with my brain in a different ‘mode’ is making Fridays really valuable for me, and it also helps to clear my brain more for the weekend, which is making them more restful.

This is far from a defensible finding at this stage, but I really do feel like none of us are getting the inevitable energy dips we used to get in the afternoon – or certainly not as much. That bears out what much of the research into 4dw has shown, and that’s really encouraging.

We set out to achieve four awesome days and while we still have some more adapting to do, I think we're closer to that than we expected to be at this point.

So far, so good. Tune in for the next instalment in three months.