Why we permanently adopted a 32-hour workweek at The Financial Diet

A year ago, I wrote about why we were trying out a four-day workweek at The Financial Diet. As a small NYC-based media company focused on personal finance content for young women, we wanted to see if a shorter work week could improve quality of life for our team while also supporting a sustainable small business. Well, it’s been over a year since we shifted to a 32-hour workweek, and we’re not going back.

We started our 4-day workweek experiment in June 2021, when we shifted our team schedule from 40 hours/week to 32 hours/week, giving everyone Friday off, without any drop in pay. In the 12 months since then, we’ve seen no drop in revenue from the 12 months prior, and employee work-life balance satisfaction metrics, especially around workload and ability to meet deadlines, have improved. More on that below, but first, I wanted to give our team a chance to share their reflections on the change:

When I first wrote about our four-day workweek experiment, I included a list of metrics by which we’d be measuring its success as a personal finance media company. They were the following:

• Monthly and Yearly Revenue
• Growth in social followers
• Content engagement across platforms
• Impressions per sponsored campaign
• Profit margins (especially to make sure we were spending our time on the most valuable/meaningful endeavors)
• Number of meetings held weekly
• Work-life balance

Since we transitioned to a 32-hour workweek:

Revenue - We saw no drop in either monthly or yearly revenue.

Follower growth - Our Instagram followers grew by 20%, our YouTube subscribers grew by 11%, and we doubled our newsletter subscribers.

Content engagement - The average view time on our videos grew by 10%. The average attendance at our free events grew by 29%.?

Impressions per sponsored campaign - As soon as I started tracking this, it didn’t feel right to compare because every campaign for us is so different. We didn’t end up tracking this for the purposes of measuring the success of our experiment, but delivery on our campaigns has remained consistently strong.

Profit margins - We are on track to see the highest profit margins this year in the history of the company. As far as we can tell, the transition to a shorter workweek has only made our business more sustainable.?

While many companies with salaried employees may see consistent profit margins after a transition to a 4-day workweek, others will have to increase staffing in order to reduce individual work hours (hospitality, medicine, and other industries with hourly or coverage-based staffing models). Money for extra staffing can come from many sources, including executive pay (wage inequality has ballooned in the past several decades ). At TFD, our most highly compensated employees make no more than 2.5x the compensation of our lowest paid employees. If companies need to hire more employees in order to reduce the number of hours worked by each individual, they need look no further than their highest earners.

Number of meetings held weekly - Though we didn’t track this religiously, we spent much of the first few months of the experiment reducing the length and cadence of our recurring meetings. We continue to assess the necessity of our scheduled meetings and often cancel meetings, even if they’re scheduled far in advance. We also conducted a survey last year to establish “meeting days” so that our team could plan on meeting-free days each week. We settled on scheduling meetings on Monday and Wednesdays, leaving Tuesdays and Thursdays free for dedicated work.

Work-life balance - We conducted an employee satisfaction survey in the month before the experiment began and again 9 months after the transition. After the transition to a 4-day workweek, our team reported higher agreement with the following statements focused on individual work-life balance:

• I am able to meet deadlines (16% increase)
• My workload is manageable (14% increase)
• I can manage my job responsibilities in a way that enables a healthy work-life balance (7% increase)
• This company supports my efforts to balance my work and personal life (1% increase)

At first glance, these results seem counterintuitive. In fact, shortening our working hours actually increased our team’s self-measured ability to meet deadlines and manage their workload. As I wrote previously, at the start of the experiment we had “agreed as a group that if we can’t get our work done in the allotted 32 hours, we’ll move deadlines and deliverables so that we can. Instead of creating stress, this allows the TFD team to own their time and set deadlines that feel realistic instead of restricting.”

It seems that the renewed focus on assessing our workloads, setting realistic deadlines, and moving goal posts if they didn’t feel achievable, has actually allowed our team to reach a better balance than before the four-day workweek. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t surprised by this, but it’s perhaps the most pleasantly positive result to come out of the entire experiment.

Interestingly, our employee survey actually showed a decrease in the metrics related to work-related satisfaction, including a 9% decrease in agreement with the statement, “my work gives me a feeling of personal accomplishment” and a 6% decrease in agreement with the statement, “I am proud to work for this company.”?

While this may not be the ideal result, I’m quite intrigued by the idea that our team is perhaps deriving less satisfaction from their identity as a part of this company and more satisfaction from their ability to find satisfaction outside of it. An unintended consequence of our transition to a shorter workweek may in fact be that our work defines us less when we spend less hours doing it, allowing us to explore our full selves and feelings of accomplishment from endeavors not related to work.

The most surprising result of all came from the statement, “I often work extra hours in order to fulfill my job responsibilities. In our most recent survey, we saw a whopping 18% decrease in agreement with this statement when compared to the same survey before reducing our work hours.

This is, frankly, delightful to see. Similar to the data around workload and deadlines, it seems the most common result of shortening our work hours has actually been a re-imagining of how our work gets done, how we set boundaries to create better work-life balance for ourselves, and how we communicate with each other and outside partners so that we’re creating a sustainable business model both financially and for ourselves as human beings.?

In fact, I’d venture to say that the transition to a shorter workweek has been an exercise in experimentation more so than anything else. We’ve asked questions of ourselves and challenged assumptions in a way we might not have allowed ourselves to do without such an intentional focus on shifting the window of what is possible. How much work do we want to be producing? How much do we need to be available to our audience, clients, and vendors in order for our business to thrive? How much of our revenue can we be investing back into our team and their well-being while maintaining a sustainable financial trajectory??

For now, we’ve managed to strike a balance that allows us to work fewer hours with greater work-life balance than before. We have no trouble recruiting or hiring new employees and the most common talking point we have with new prospective clients is the shorter workweek. We saw no reason not to adopt this schedule permanently and have already done so. We’re excited to see the 32-hour workweek movement grow as other companies explore this as a viable option for their teams and state and federal governments start to imagine how this could become the new normal in the not-too-distant future.

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Published by Caitlin Lutsch, Director of Finance & Operations at the Financial Diet