Doing the Four-Day Week Right

For starters, don’t try to fit in five days of meetings

- Rebecca Penty and David Rocks

Back in pre-pandemic times, when a company wanted to switch to a four-day week, it did the obvious: delete a day and see what happens. This meant cramming five days of meetings into four, inevitably jeopardizing focused work time. But amid all the lockdowns and isolation of the past two years, businesses have done a lot of experimenting, and their ideas are starting to better reflect the intent behind the concept: improved work-life balance. “Four-day workweek” now means a condensed schedule, stripped of inefficiencies, says Brian Gorman, a principal at Do-Be Associates, a consulting company that helps businesses transition to fewer hours. “It’s a metaphor for flexibility,” he says.

Common variations are parents who work Monday to Friday but only on six-hour shifts, or coders who do three 11-hour days. The overarching goal should be 100% pay and 100% of the effort in 80% of the hours, says Charlotte Lockhart, co-founder of 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit that’s helping more than 100 organizations in six countries pilot shorter schedules. “At its core,” she says, “this is about changing a business’s productivity culture so that the business doesn’t lose any revenue, but its people are able to take time off without losing pay.”

Do-Be sees so much promise in a condensed schedule that it trademarked the term “4-Day Work Week” in the U.S. Transitioning normally takes six months, Gorman says. “It’s worth going through the process even if you decide not to switch the work schedule,” he says, “because what you’re doing is rooting out all the inefficiencies and nonvalue activities.” Here are the general steps: