In September, Search Engine Journal employees voted to approve a dry run of a four-day workweek program!

We’re working this system in partnership with 4 Day Week International as a six-month pilot.

One of many key tenets of the inner research is that it’s staff-led – which is why management requested for a employees vote to start out the research. Administration additionally appointed a committee of workers to listen to issues and implement coverage associated to the research.

We’re midway by way of our examination and I needed to put in writing about a few of the successes and challenges we now have encountered thus far.

In case you’re fascinated about launching a four-day workweek trial for your enterprise, I hope this data may also help you put together!

The four-day workweek program

The four-day workweek experiment has a number of key tenets:

• It has to work for everybody.
• Individuals should not attempt to squeeze extra time into their week in different methods. It needs to be 100% wage, 80% time and 100% productiveness.
• The top end result needs to be making life higher and fewer nerve-racking throughout the workweek – no more nerve-racking.

The largest challenges in a four-day work week

In case you’re studying this text, I am assuming you are already satisfied of the potential advantages of a four-day work week.

We have skilled many advantages and I will go over them in a future article.

Let’s dive proper into the challenges we uncovered with the pilot program and the options we have carried out thus far.

A four-day work week has completely different results on completely different groups

Groups coping with exterior folks might have a tougher time adjusting to four-day workweeks.

Outward-facing groups like gross sales, account administration, and media lose a day when their contacts might ship vital or time-sensitive messages.

When your organization’s schedule is not communicated successfully, it will probably result in frustration and missed deadlines.

These groups might have further issues in regards to the KPIs they’re answerable for and whether or not they want on-call obligation to take care of pressing points that come up on non-working days.

We have determined to withstand the temptation to seek out workarounds that can guarantee we preserve protection for the whole week.

This will likely not work for your enterprise. As 4 Day Week International says, there isn’t any one answer that works for each enterprise.

We mentioned at size the opportunity of having completely different groups or completely different folks engaged on completely different schedules.

Nevertheless, four-day weeks is a tough adaptation, and the extra sophisticated you make it internally, the extra probably it’s that you just will not get a full implementation throughout the group.

Many corporations have workers who really feel the necessity to work additional time.

With a view to hold issues truthful and to stop some workers from taking over further burdens, we determined that everybody ought to take the identical day off and implement it as a closing time – at the least all through our course of.

There have been a number of conditions the place folks would put in additional time on a Friday (I did, albeit solely twice), however usually we discover that the temptation is much less when everyone seems to be watching on the identical day. Simpler to take care of the cultural message that we’re closed in a single day.

So how do you remedy the issues that exterior groups will encounter?

Clear communication is our reply. Make your new schedule public and attain out to any outdoors stakeholders to allow them to know.

It’s worthwhile to hold sending reminders. It is good to put the data in your website, in electronic mail signatures, and in any boilerplate messages you ship externally.

This requires the help of management and every worker to make sure that outward-facing groups are usually not careworn greater than others.

We’re nonetheless within the technique of implementing this. Completely different groups have completely different communication duties.

A four-day workweek impacts part-time, hourly, and contractor staff in a different way

For workers, the calculation of the four-day week is pretty easy: 100% wage, 80% time, 100% productiveness.

SEJ employs folks around the globe and has a wide range of completely different contracts and agreements. We have now some full-time contractors, some part-time contractors, and even some hourly agreements.

Guaranteeing that the four-day workweek is equally useful to all stakeholders is a problem we proceed to rise to.

Our precedence is an employee-led strategy to those points.

As a result of we now have so many several types of employment agreements, how finest to manage this system for every sort of worker is an ongoing dialog, and contract workers are represented on the inner committee, which makes coverage selections all through the method.

We discovered completely different opinions on how finest to deal with the completely different laws and the works council introduced some choices to the administration.

We used current data from 4 Day Week International, particularly a few of their case research, to information our conversations.

Do public holidays create three-day weeks?

Within the second week of testing, we ended up with a three-day week.

This precipitated fairly a little bit of frustration and concern. This extension of short-time work places a whole lot of stress on workers who want to fulfill efficiency metrics.

A part of the issue is that we had a coverage that moved observance of holidays that fall on weekends to weekdays. We stored Saturday holidays on Fridays and Sunday holidays on Mondays.

With the four-day week, we determined to alter this coverage.

Public holidays that fall on Fridays and Saturdays are now not noticed throughout the working week. Public holidays that fall throughout the week and those who fall on Sundays nonetheless lead to non-working days.

That means workers can nonetheless profit from the occasional additional brief week, however we do not create too many nerve-racking weeks with much less time to get issues carried out.

4-day weeks exacerbate current productiveness issues — which is definitely factor

You probably have issues along with your workflow or productiveness, experimenting with four-day weeks will make them pressing.

And that is good.

It is easy to get so caught up on day by day chores and vital deadlines that your housekeeping suffers. Whether or not particular person worker, staff or firm, it’s tough to seek out time to enhance effectivity and take away obstacles.

The lack of a day makes this work pressing and crucial. It additionally exhibits you the place the most important ache factors are.

That may be a little bit of a shock. When you might have a particular course of that takes a whole lot of time (like, I do not know, conferences), it abruptly turns into much more problematic for everybody concerned.

We discovered this very informative and it was an amazing enhance that all of us wanted to handle inefficiencies as a staff.

We’re nonetheless engaged on it. The issue with much less time is that you’ve much less time.

However that is the place we really feel our employee-led efforts are vital: Our worker committee, which oversees this system, has been empowered to make selections and set objectives. All workers have been invited to share their experiences, issues and solutions through an nameless suggestion field.

For this program to work, you want the reality:

• Who feels they need to work additional time?
• Who’s extra careworn about this system and why?
• Does anybody really feel the implementation was unfair?

These are usually not truths that everybody will give their title to or take direct management in.

Due to this, SEJ felt it was vital to have a multi-level employees committee with the authority not solely to listen to employees issues, but in addition to make selections about this system.

How does the SEJ four-day work week work?

As you’ll be able to see, we had many challenges! The above is just not an exhaustive listing of the obstacles and obstacles we encountered alongside the way in which.

We’re about midway by way of this system and whereas we nonetheless have many points to resolve, the final temper is optimistic.

We undoubtedly have some large inquiries to reply and a few large workflow points to unravel.

The four-day work week not solely offers us extra management over our private lives, but in addition pushes us to unravel current issues that we would not have prioritized in any other case.

We’re continuously gathering suggestions from all staff members on this system. I will be posting an replace quickly to debate a few of the findings.

Extra assets:

Featured picture: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal