How we designed a 4-day workweek experiment

This article was written by Uncharted CEO Banks Benitez.

Two weeks ago, we announced that we’re moving to a 4-day workweek as an Uncharted company policy. Today, we’re sharing how we designed, prepared, and continuously optimized to make this work. We’ll also share mistakes and recommendations for others who might be considering alternatives to traditional workweeks.

Design

We had read about the merits of a 4-day workweek (see the assembled resources and articles in this document), but we didn’t want to adopt the 4-day workweek as immediate company policy. It was worth testing it through a three-month trial to see if it worked for our organization.

Better Prioritization > Increased Efficiency

Moving to a 4-day workweek wasn’t just about becoming more efficient. We anticipated that we could optimize meetings and workflows and probably reduce work weeks by 5–10%. But to reduce workweeks by 20%, we knew we had to be clear about what was a priority and what was not, and this meant getting better at saying no to things we historically agreed to. Before we could prioritize, we had to redefine what was essential work. We had to uncover the inputs that led to a disproportionate amount of the outputs and outcomes that moved the business forward.

Defining Goals and Priorities

At the beginning of the experiment, our executive team defined clear objectives and key results at the organizational level. Each department and person on the team created their own related goals that laddered up into the organizational objectives. We have a habit of creating too many goals and trying to do it all, so it was harder this time to drill down into what was truly essential. Even with greater prioritization on the essential work, we still didn’t get it perfect. Still, we knew — at the executive team level — that if we could not provide clear guidance about what was a priority, then the 4-day workweek would fail. Optimizing the workweek is directly dependent on leadership’s ability to communicate what is not important (and in doing so, defining what is).

3rd-Party Evaluator

Our research into other companies trying out a 4-day workweek told us that hiring a third-party evaluator would ensure the 3-month experiment yielded as accurate and credible results as possible. We wanted to use the results from our 3-month experiment to be the data that informed our decision of whether to make this Uncharted company policy. Having an unbiased third-party helped us make the best decision possible and guard against vested interests or loud voices skewing the data. One month before the experiment, we decided on our evaluation partner (Coeffect) and worked with them to design the evaluation tools to generate data we could use to make a decision.

Preparation

The Uncharted executive team began discussing the 4-day workweek six months before we launched our experiment. We announced it to our team one month before the start date of June 1st, 2020, which meant the team had the month of May to prepare and assess how to optimize individually and at a company level to work 80% time but still contribute 100%.

OKR Setting

We set organizational OKRs, and each department and individual set specific, related OKRs that connected to our organizational objectives.

Self Reflections and Team Reflections

We designed a self-reflection tool for each person to complete and assess their current working patterns, roadblocks, and how to optimize their weeks. Departments and teams that collaborated closely together also completed this reflection tool and identified specific actions to focus on the essential work.

Reading Essentialism

I had read Essentialism, the book by Greg McKeown, a few years ago. I found it to contain helpful principles, frameworks, and tools that helped people and teams progress in “the disciplined pursuit of less” and the importance of judicious prioritization. We got copies for each person on our team, and we held a weekly book club during May to discuss and explore how we can adopt an essentialist mindset.

Investing in Culture

Before COVID, we worked three days in the office and two days remotely. With COVID, we became a 100% remote team, and we made significant investments in our culture during this shift to preserve and enhance culture. We did the same for the shift to a 4-day workweek: we discussed the cultural implications openly, made intentional plans, commissioned each person to be a cultural leader in their own right, and reaffirmed that if our culture suffered, then it wouldn’t be worth keeping the 4-day workweek as company policy.

Continuous Optimization during the Experiment

Managing to OKRs

The most important thing we did was nothing groundbreaking: we managed our team to the OKRs we had co-created at the beginning of the experiment.

Weekly and Daily accountability

The Uncharted team is broken up into three teams, and for the first half of the experiment, each team met up every morning to do a daily check-in naming our goals we committed to completing by the end of the day and any roadblocks in the way. Two teams migrated away from this daily call, while one team has kept it. But each week, every person sets and shares publicly to the whole team their weekly OKRs.

Meetings

Meetings are notorious for eating time, so we put each meeting to the test and ensured a clear purpose and agenda for the meeting. If a purpose or agenda were missing, we’d cancel the meeting. We’ve also begun to experiment with the Uncharted-designed POPAS meeting check-list and structure. This has not been adopted yet by the full team, but the number of internal and external meetings we’ve canceled has dramatically increased since we shifted to a 4-day workweek, and no one seems to miss them.

Scheduling

Based on individual reflections and personal assessments, people have optimized their weeks differently. You can see how I’ve structured my week in a previous post. Still, one of the biggest shifts across our team has been to schedule not just meetings and then have the blank spaces on the calendar be time for working on OKRs, but actually, schedule in the deep-work time for OKRs at the beginning of the week. Our team has adopted two shared deep-work times throughout the week, where we don’t interrupt each other and focus on making progress on our key priority.

Shared Vocabulary

Our team has adopted a shared vocabulary that helps us to recenter around priorities and around principles that will lead to a successful 4-day workweek. Reading Essentialism has given us a set of stories, code-words, and principles that we regularly bring up to one another in conversation to help determine the best way forward.

Shortcomings

Our 4-day workweek experiment was not perfect. There were several challenges we encountered.

We asked for help less frequently

In the early parts of this experiment, we noticed that people were less willing to ask for help because they didn’t want to bother other people and divert them away from their priorities. We discussed this as a team and worked to normalize asking for help not as an inconvenience, but rather as a way to problem-solve more effectively and efficiently

Minimal buffer time for to serendipity or unexpected work

Moving to a 4-day workweek has required many of us to be more intentional about designing our weeks and scheduling our days. The upside is that the week is designed well to achieve our goals. The downside is that there is less time for the serendipitous connection with a colleague and less buffer time to address unexpected issues that arise.

Impacts on Culture

If left unattended, culture can suffer in a 4-day workweek. As measured by our third-party evaluator, the data suggested that workplace culture did not change significantly during the experiment, and we’d consider that a success, as our concern was that our culture would suffer from less time to practice (virtual) togetherness. People on our team reported that moving to a fully remote working environment during COVID had a bigger impact on our team culture than the 4-day workweek.

Pace is fast

People on our team reported that the pace of a week could feel fast in 4-days. Time can feel scarce, and it can feel like you’re racing to get it all done.

Are meetings the enemy?

We entered this experiment committed to reducing the number of meetings during our weeks because we believed that meetings were often unproductive and frequently a poor use of time. But is that always true? By putting every meeting to the test of efficiency and effectiveness, we elevated a specific type of meeting (the meeting that gets to a decision with specific action steps and outcomes) while unintentionally deprioritizing other valuable meeting types (the brainstorming meeting, for example). We’re beginning to think about defining meeting types to frame expectations for participants at the beginning, so they know they’re walking into an unbounded, creative brainstorm meeting instead of a meeting designed around a specific agenda with outcome decisions.

Recommendations

For those considering exploring alternatives to traditional workweeks (like the 4-day workweek), here are a few suggestions:

• Before making it permanent company policy, consider a trial period to experiment with the new structure.
• Before starting the trial period, give the team a few weeks to prepare for how their lives will change, how they can optimize their weeks, and how they can retrain themselves to make it work. We found it valuable for people to work through a shared book (Essentialism), do some guided reflections, discuss with peers, and meet with their respective internal teams to determine how to make it work around specific workflows.
• Management should hold itself accountable to setting clear goals and outcomes. If you’re moving to a 4-day workweek where some things will have to be deprioritized, then what is a priority needs to be unambiguous and clearly communicated to everyone.
• Because people work differently and have different life circumstances, it’s valuable to give as much ownership for each person to identify specific ways to make it work for them. In other words, be prescriptive on outcomes, but not on the process or how staff will achieve those goals.
• Discuss with your team if you want to have the same day off for everyone (we chose Fridays) because we wanted to optimize the amount of time the entire team collaborated. If all of us took different days off during the week, then people would feel behind and spend too much time catching up. That said, we didn’t want the 4-day workweek to be less flexible than the 5-day workweek, so consider ways to balance the shorter week with flexibility for people on the team.
• Evaluate the human resources and benefits implications of moving to a 4-day workweek. We are happy to share more specifics here based on our experience.

Caveats

• We want to acknowledge that our specific type of business lends itself well to a 4-day workweek, and this is a privilege we don’t take for granted. Many values-driven, employee-friendly businesses cannot move to a 4-day workweek simply because it doesn’t work for their specific operating model. We are not suggesting this should be the new model for everyone; simply that it worked for us.
• Being fully remote might have helped us to achieve the results. Being in person in a physical office might have created more distractions for our team.
• Because the nature of our work shifts year to year and our revenue is very lumpy, we could not compare OKRs completed during this experiment period with the same period last year. In an ideal world, we’d be able to.

From our team

Check out our last post to see how our team is spending their Fridays.

Cristina

I remember the day that the team was told we were going to 4 day weeks. I was personally in the middle of a very time-intensive project and was terrified by the fact that I would be pushed to work fewer hours. After the initial news, our leadership team took the time to equipped all of us with tips and tools before the experiment started. The first few weeks of the experiment were tough. I remember convincing myself that it was ok to secretly work a couple of hours on a Friday to ensure that my work was getting done. After a couple of weeks in this routine, I started to feel confident enough to cancel meetings where I was not needed and block uninterrupted chunks of time off in my calendar instead of leaving them open for potential meetings. I began to learn how to better estimate deadlines and set expectations with teammates. Planning took a lot of discipline and I had to practice how to stay on task and not procrastinate by switches tasks too frequently.

Zach

To optimize for the 4-day workweek, I’m shifting my focus to working on the most important things rather than the easiest things. For me, this means starting from my goals, instead of my inbox. I’m also moving from a mindset of “I have to do everything” to “I need to prioritize” based on what’s most essential. Realizing I’m also sharpest in the morning, I’m also attempting to do my most mentally taxing work at the start of each day.

Lindsay

My preparation for the 4-day workweek was less about adopting essentialism (I have been practicing this for some time) and more about finding the balance between the energy and hours available each day. I shifted the majority of my evening commitments to Friday to work on them with the full focus they deserved. Monday to Thursday have been filled with focussed, meaningful work, and I have had more time in the evenings for family. I have a full Friday morning, I am more diligent in completing tasks, and I make sure I wrap up my to-do list before my daughter gets home from school on a Friday afternoon. Our weekends are now devoted to family, friends, and fun.

Anthony

I learned that utilizing the first hour of my four-day workweek to set OKRs, schedule meetings, and block off deep work time to complete my tasks is the best way to set myself up for success. I’ve also started preparing for meetings 24-hours ahead of time by setting agendas and sharing notes to be as focused and efficient as possible. These tactics have enabled me to manage my workload and accomplish my goals in 32-hours.

Nicole

To optimize for the 4-day workweek, I spent two weeks tracking my time to see how I was utilizing it in a 40 hour work week and then evaluated which elements could be adjusted. Specifically for me, this meant streamlining meetings and consistently evaluating which were nice for me to be in, and which were essential. I also spend my Monday mornings in a self-planning meeting to optimize time toward my OKRs for the week. Finally, I started to more consistently block sections of my day for meetings, responding to communications like emails, and deep work. During deep work time, I turn off distractions and Slack to focus!

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