Here at Wildbit, we adopted a 4-day workweek in 2017, long before the pandemic. What started as a summer experiment ended up being so successful that we never stopped. In fact, we are passionate advocates for a shorter workweek as a people-first way of doing business.

We want to encourage more businesses to consider this way of working, so in September 2021, we brought together leaders from four companies for a conversation about how to implement a 4-day workweek. They shared why and how they switched to a 4-day week, how it’s been going, and what they’ve learned in the process. Below is the full video, plus the key insights that emerged from our discussion.

Panelist and company profiles

• Meghan Keaney Anderson is CMO at The Wanderlust Group, an outdoor tech company connecting adventurers to destinations. They’re a remote-first company with 50 team members, and have been on a 4-day week since July 2020.

• Nicole Miller is Senior People Ops Manager at Buffer, a social media management software company with 90 team members around the world. They’ve been working 4 days a week since May 2020.

• Natalie Nagele is CEO at Wildbit, a people-first, product-agnostic software company with 36 team members across 10 countries, and working 4 days a week since 2017.

• Dawn Quigg is Client Services Director at Awin, a global affiliate marketing network with 1000+ team members across the globe. They adopted a 4-day week in January 2021.

Motivations for the 4-day workweek experiment

For Wanderlust, Buffer, and Awin, the initial impetus for the four-day workweek experiment was the exhaustion and burnout caused by the pandemic. They wanted to alleviate stress and promote well-being, especially for parents and caregivers who were stretched thin trying to juggle work and family.

As a company that’s all about spending time outdoors, The Wanderlust Group thought the extra day off would give people more opportunities to spend time not just with family and friends, but also outside, close to nature. Buffer, a remote-first company with a keen interest in the future of work, wanted to give people “extra time for life” and to support employees who wished for “flexibility in time.” In Awin’s case, the pandemic made them think about how best to “offer something back to employees and improve their wellbeing.”

At Wildbit, however, the shift to the 4-day workweek happened in 2017. Our founders, Natalie and Chris Nagele, were deeply influenced by Cal Newport’s 2016 book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Newport argues that our brains can only do focused, meaningful, productive work for about 4 hours per day; the rest of our time is taken up by unnecessary distractions and busywork.

We spend a lot of our days on shallow work. Things like meetings, emails, closing tickets and talking to each other. What if we all just buckled down and got some really thoughtful, meaningful work done, could we work less?

—Natalie Nagele, Wildbit (May 2017 blog post)

Natalie and Chris decided to try a 4-day workweek experiment to see if it’s possible to work more intentionally and efficiently by removing distractions. However, the flip side of doing deep, focused work is giving the brain enough time to rest and recharge—hence the 3-day weekend. The 4-day week requires both deep work and deep rest.

The results

1. Productivity either stayed the same or improved

When Buffer began its initial one-month trial of the 4-day workweek in May 2020, they fully expected a drop in productivity due to the decreased working hours in addition to the mental burden of the pandemic. The actual results surprised them:

We’d already seen the psychological toll of the pandemic and did not expect productivity to stay the same. We expected a huge dip—but that didn’t end up happening. In fact, the numbers really leveled off and stayed that way and felt pretty sustainable.

—Nicole Miller, Buffer

Those initial results led Buffer to conduct a six-month trial until the end of 2020. They found that the productivity numbers remained consistent, e.g., the amount of code written was about the same as a similar month in 2019. Seeing no change and no drop in productivity made them realize that the fifth workday was “a bit superfluous, since people were getting around the same amount done in four days.” At the end of the 6-month trial, Buffer reevaluated and made the 4-day week permanent.

Maintaining the same output with one less workday is impressive enough, and this was Awin’s experience, too—but The Wanderlust Group even saw their numbers increase. During their initial trial, they had “the most productive six months ever,” so they made the shorter workweek company policy. After a year of working 4 days a week, their annual recurring revenue (ARR) had grown almost 100% year over year and their NPS stayed above 75.

The big takeaway is not that the four-day workweek somehow magically juiced our numbers. It’s that we were able to hit and exceed our numbers while having a four-day workweek.

—Meghan Keaney Anderson, The Wanderlust Group

Wildbit’s experience has been similar: a clear trajectory of growth despite working fewer hours, even through the pandemic.

We’ve seen the business grow more in the last three years than it has in its entire history. Not because we do a four-day workweek, but in spite of the four-day workweek.

—Natalie Nagele, Wildbit

2. Happier and more engaged employees

It should come as no surprise that the shorter workweek had a positive impact on employees: lower stress levels, improved work-life balance, greater job satisfaction, increased engagement, and more opportunities for personal and professional development.

A really direct, tangible benefit of the four-day workweek was our churn being almost zero from an employee standpoint. Morale went up. People were able to spend real time pursuing passion projects and then bring that energy and enthusiasm back to their work.

—Meghan Keaney Anderson, The Wanderlust Group

For instance, one Wanderlust employee used her extra day off to teach sailing to youth—and that passion and energy flowed back into her core job working with boaters and marinas. As an outdoor tech company that encourages people to spend time outdoors, this is exactly what The Wanderlust Group had hoped for when implementing the 4-day week.

Similarly, Dawn Quigg at Awin noticed “an improvement in our staff engagement,” which was measured continuously using an internal platform for staff feedback. Many employees were able to spend the fifth day with family, which they appreciated during the isolation of the pandemic, while others added to their skillsets, pursued further learning, or took up new hobbies.

At Buffer, they tracked metrics related to general work happiness, stress levels, and individual autonomy, and compared them at different benchmarks. The overall trend was positive—people were happy at work, felt less stressed, and experienced greater autonomy and flexibility.

Productivity stayed consistent while the self-reported sentiments of team happiness increased, and feeling that they have more balance with their family. It was a huge relief for parents in particular, especially those who were homeschooling or managing a lack of childcare or whatever situation with their kids. That’s been a really great thing.

—Nicole Miller, Buffer

3. More efficient processes and workflows

Making the shorter workweek successful means finding smarter and more efficient ways to work. At Wildbit, this meant reducing meetings and other noise to a minimum, so people could give their full attention to their most important work.

We didn’t just implement a four-day workweek. We then also had to implement different ways of working: removing meetings, removing distractions, really focusing on deep work. We had to be really intentional about how we work. It’s been a really exciting journey and it continues.

—Natalie Nagele, Wildbit

Similarly, the folks at Awin started to examine their existing ways of doing things, and began to innovate and experiment in order to improve and streamline their processes and workflows.

We’ve seen staff really challenge the way they work. For instance, looking at how the historic process has worked and challenging it, saying ‘Well, we can do that a little bit better’ or ‘There’s a smarter way of doing this particular process.’ It’s been great to see staff really challenge things and find smarter and more efficient ways to do things. That’s been fantastic, and it obviously helped staff get five days’ worth of work into four, if they find ways to be more efficient at the same time.

—Dawn Quigg, Awin

4. Attracting and retaining top talent

If the four-day workweek makes people happier and less stressed, it should be no surprise that it’s great for attracting and retaining top talent. Candidates have choices, so the flexibility and work-life balance offered by the shorter workweek and three-day weekend is a real selling point.

For a small company like The Wanderlust Group, working four days has enabled them to stand out, get more applications overall, and recruit excellent candidates who might have otherwise gone elsewhere.

It’s been phenomenal for recruiting. The tech space is very crowded and we face a lot of competition for top talent in the region we’re in. We’re a smaller company, so we don’t have the credence and reputation that larger companies have. The 4-day workweek can be a breakthrough in a conversation with a top-notch recruit. We really believe this has played a factor in closing a lot of people in roles that we really wanted.

—Meghan Keaney Anderson, The Wanderlust Group

Once those recruits have come on board, Awin’s experience shows that they’re also more likely to stay with the company thanks to this unique benefit.

Not only can you attract top talent, but you can retain them longer. We’ve definitely seen that churn has dropped amongst our staff and that’s fantastic. I think it’s two-fold: you’ve got a real USP for attracting new talent into the business, and you’ve got a benefit that many, many staff really value and appreciate.

—Dawn Quigg, Awin

Advice for implementing the 4-day workweek

The benefits of the 4-day workweek certainly make it worth considering—but it’s a major change, and various details need to be worked out to make it successful. During our live conversation, we got a lot of audience questions through Slido and through the Zoom chat, and asked our panelists to respond and share their advice based on what they’ve learned so far.

Be intentional about which day to take off

A popular question that came up was which day of the week do you take off, and how did you choose? A related question is: should it be the same day for everyone? Customer support teams often provide week-long coverage, so how does it work for them?

The Wanderlust Group ended up taking Mondays off because Fridays are typically a busy day for the marinas and campgrounds they work with, so they wanted to be available for them on Fridays. They also found that having Monday off allowed the team to plan and reflect on the week ahead—especially for parents of young children who may have busy weekends—and start their week strong on Tuesday.

Buffer and Wildbit experimented with allowing people to choose their day off, but it became hard for teams to keep track of who was available when. So they eventually settled on Friday as the common day off, which allows for consistency and ease of collaboration, especially with team members spread across multiple time zones around the world.

Awin decided to give people the flexibility to choose which day they wanted to take off—as long as it’s clearly communicated to their manager. Each department or team works out a rotation system internally so that there’s always coverage for their client-facing work to continue uninterrupted. This rotation system has worked out well for them, but it does require planning and coordination (as a reminder: the company does employ 1000+ people!).

Customer support teams are a special case since they often need to provide coverage 5 days a week, or even 24/7. At Buffer, this is handled by rotating the days off to ensure week-long coverage while still working four days. Similarly, the folks on Wildbit’s customer support team work either Mon-Thu or Tue-Fri so that we have 5 days of coverage, but everyone still gets 3 consecutive days off.

Allow flexibility, but within limits

Another question we got was: what if somebody wants to work five days a week? It’s really a question about flexibility and being able to choose, since some people might prefer working 5 shorter days rather than 4 full days. Or there might be folks who do their best work in the evening. Or someone might feel inspired and want to get going on a project during the weekend.

Awin’s Dawn Quigg says it’s important to give people choice and flexibility rather than dictating how and when they should work. Similarly, Wanderlust’s CEO told the team they can choose their hours as long as they’re not emailing people or booking meetings at odd hours or off days. That way, one person’s choices don’t end up putting pressure on other people to be logged in outside of their working hours.

Here at Wildbit, Natalie used to feel strongly about people not working on Friday, but she received feedback that they wanted flexible hours. So now we have a 32-hour workweek with flexible hours. Ultimately, it’s not about tracking or policing the number of hours worked, but whether the work gets done.

Keep salaries the same, based on output not hours

One audience question that got upvoted by a lot of attendees had to do with salaries. If people are working fewer days, should they get a pay cut? Also, does working 4 days mean four 10-hour days?

The answer from our panelists was a clear and unanimous no. All four companies kept salaries the same because they’re paying for the output or the results, which have either stayed the same or improved. They also did not try to fit 40 hours into 4 days, but maintained an 8-hour day.

As Wanderlust’s Meghan Keaney Anderson puts it, “We still pay the same full-time salary that we paid before because we’re paying for output, not for hours in the chair.” Awin’s Dawn Quigg agrees: “We’ve very much tried to move away from the idea of how many hours you work in a day. Rather, what’s the output of your role and what deliverables are you working towards?” She says focusing on output rather than hours also enables people to get their work done efficiently within the four days.

Natalie, our CEO at Wildbit, says she’s often been asked whether a 4-day week means 40 hours crammed into four days. So she now describes it as a 32-hour week to clarify that it’s four 8-hour days. Salaries at Wildbit remained the same during our transition to the 4-day week in 2017. In addition, we recently rolled out location-agnostic pay, because if compensation is based on output, then where someone lives shouldn’t affect their salary either.

Review vacation and PTO policies, adjust if necessary

Another great audience question had to do with vacation and time-off policies. Technically, a shorter workweek means people are already getting more time off than before—but on the other hand, if they’re producing the same amount of output, then they’re still doing the same work. So what impact (if any) should the four-day week have on vacation and PTO?

The Wanderlust Group and Buffer decided to keep their vacation policies the same, since that fifth day should be properly considered part of the weekend, and not really a day off. Awin, on the other hand, felt that with bank holidays usually falling on a Monday and people typically taking Fridays off, there would often be 3-day weeks. So, after much debate, they decided that if someone wanted a day off during a week that already includes a bank holiday, they should request a vacation day.

At Wildbit, we used to have 25 PTO days, or 5 full weeks. After moving to the 4-day week, we ended up lowering the PTO to 20 days because that still translates to 5 full weeks. In other words, the number of full weeks off stayed consistent, while the number of PTO days changed because a ‘full week’ is now counted differently.

Clearly, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to the vacation and PTO question, so each company has to decide what will work for them.

Model change from the top

Getting everyone on board with a new idea can be challenging, so it helps to model change from the top. When implementing the 4-day workweek at Buffer, it helped that their CEO was a champion and a pioneer. “It’s really important that he set the example and set the tone for the company as a whole,” says Nicole Miller. It also helped to frame the pilot as an experiment so that people felt invested in making the experiment a success.

Dawn Quigg of Awin agrees that leadership and management have to buy into this new way of working first, so they can model it for the team: “When the management lives and breathes it, that sets a nice example for the rest of the staff. That’s what our CEO did—it was something he pioneered. It’s important that the vision comes from the top.” There might still be pushback at first since you’re asking people to change longstanding habits and ways of thinking. But it’s important to get everyone on board, since a rotational system (like they have at Awin) won’t work unless everyone is in it together.

Emphasize communication, documentation, and async work

Nicole Miller at Buffer emphasizes the importance of good communication and strong documentation practices in order to work efficiently within a four-day week. Especially for companies that are remote and distributed, you don’t want people to be stuck in their work because they’re missing a key piece of information or input from another person. Hence the vital importance of communicating clearly, documenting everything, and working asynchronously.

At Awin, for instance, they rely heavily on the project management tool Asana. People document their work in it so that someone else can pick up where they left off, and the tool acts as a knowledge bank and a repository of handovers or ways of doing a certain process. Having this central tool enables things to run smoothly even while different people are off on different days.

Similarly, at Wildbit, we enable each other to do deep work by defaulting to async as a remote work best practice. We use communication, project management, and documentation tools like Basecamp, Notion, and Dropbox Paper to collaborate effectively across time zones and avoid disrupting people’s schedules with unnecessary meetings or calls.

Be patient and set realistic expectations

Longstanding habits and workplace norms can’t be changed overnight. Getting used to a different way of working requires a mindset shift, so you have to give it enough time. It takes effort, practice, and careful planning.

Part of the mindset shift is to actually think in terms of fewer hours, and not try to cram 40 hours of work into four days. This means not just minimizing distractions and working more efficiently, but also being realistic about what can be reasonably accomplished in four days. If you adopt a four-day week but are demanding more than is possible in four days, then the work will start to creep into the fifth day or the weekend—which defeats the purpose.

If the projects are really big, if the deadlines are really tight, if the client’s expecting work in a certain way and you’re not stepping back to ask, ‘How long is this going to take?’ or even just reflecting on that, it’s kind of unfair. Because you’re asking folks to work fewer hours, but you’re not changing the way in which you work so that you can still accomplish what you want to accomplish in less time. That’s usually where failure happens when people experiment with four-day workweeks.

—Natalie Nagele, Wildbit

In other words, it’s not enough to simply tell people to work 4 days. You have to ensure that the structures, processes, and expectations are set in a way that sets people up for success in a four-day workweek.

At the end of the day, however, no amount of pre-planning will be enough. “There is only so much prep you can do before going into a four-day week. The biggest learnings come from being in it,” says Awin’s Dawn Quigg.

Measure progress

Another audience question had to do with measuring progress. How do you track or measure the success of a 4-day workweek?

There are various quantitative and qualitative ways to do it, including:

• productivity metrics, e.g., the number of lines of code written, the number of tickets resolved, etc.

• measures of subjective well-being, such as self-reported stress levels or autonomy at work

• feedback forms or surveys to assess employee engagement or job satisfaction

• metrics related to revenue, growth, customer satisfaction, etc.

The important thing is to be thoughtful and intentional about your goals and metrics. Dawn Quigg of Awin warns that it’s not enough to simply ask, “Do you enjoy a four-day workweek?” because no one is going to say no. Instead, you have to think deeply about what you’re trying to accomplish, identify the relevant goals and metrics, and then frame the questions in a way that allows you to gauge what’s actually important and relevant. Only then can you get data that’s useful and can help move things in the direction you want.

Some challenges of the 4-day workweek

Our overall discussion painted a pretty positive picture of a 4-day workweek, but an interesting audience question we got was: are there any drawbacks to the 4-day week? Our panelists responded that yes, it does come with some challenges.

Being efficient and productive in a shorter workweek means reducing meetings and other disruptions to a minimum: that’s what enables people to engage in deep work. However, the flip side of it is that there’s less social interaction than before. Everyone is working more efficiently, but there are fewer opportunities for social contact between people.

Part of the reason you can move to a 4-day week is because there's so much fluff in a standard 5-day week. There are so many standing meetings. There’s so much talking around the water cooler. To make the 4-day workweek possible, you have to very deliberately cut out that fluff. But there’s also some nice stuff in that fluff. There’s chatting with your friends and colleagues at the virtual or actual water cooler. You lose some of that.

—Meghan Keaney Anderson, The Wanderlust Group

Similarly, there’s less time and opportunities for team engagement or team bonding. Buffer’s Nicole Miller says it’s been a challenge to figure out how often to schedule team engagement activities or hangouts. They already cut back on those events due to the Zoom fatigue of the pandemic, but how do you facilitate team engagement without in-person retreats, without adding to Zoom fatigue, and without cutting into those 4 days of focused work? Buffer does have deep relationships being formed through pair calls and peer mastermind sessions, and of course there are all-hands and town halls, but just fewer of the big social events.

Here at Wildbit, Natalie agrees that a culture of deep work can create isolation, especially for a remote team. Sometimes, people might also feel pressure to get things done because they have fewer days available. And that also makes it hard to find time to connect with the rest of the team. She says it takes time and practice to “find space and say it’s okay to give up an hour to just connect.” Figuring out the right balance has been an ongoing process, but it’s also very necessary in order to make the 4-day workweek sustainable in the long term.

Continuing the conversation

Are you considering implementing a 4-day workweek at your company? If so, I encourage you to watch the full discussion here. In addition to the webinar recording, you’ll also find a list of useful links and resources.

If you’d like to follow Wildbit’s journey as a people-first company, you can do by signing up for our monthly newsletter. Or if you have questions or thoughts about the 4-day workweek, just send us a message.
We look forward to continuing the conversation.

PS: Special thanks to Nausheen Eusuf for her help researching and creating this article.

By far, the most commonly asked question we receive at Wildbit is how we continue to provide stellar support to our customers while every person on the team only works 32 hours a week. Does that mean no more customer support on Friday? Do customers notice? How is it even possible?

Well friends, let me help you answer those questions. Hey, what’s up? I’m Jordan, a customer success agent at Postmark and doughnut superfan, and I’m going to share my experience plus some insight on how other 4.D.W.W. businesses handle support, so you (and your customers) can fully enjoy the 32-hour workweek without sacrificing customer support.

A bit of background on our 4-day workweek

Let’s start from why you’d want to try a 4-day workweek in the first place.

Here at Wildbit, we started a 4-day workweek experiment that never stopped back in 2017. The goal was for us to work more meaningfully and thoughtfully, cutting out unnecessary practices, distractions, and busy work, and building a happier and healthier team in the process.

We accomplish this by having (almost) everyone work Monday through Thursday, with a certain number of hours dedicated to deep work each day. Having every Friday off allows the team to go out and enjoy long, three-day weekends and come back to work on Mondays energized and ready to go. Some of us use that extra day off to work on personal projects, do laundry, or catch up on some work we didn’t get to earlier in the week.

Support is the outlier to that practice, because it would be unfair to ask customers to hold off on their questions and issues each Friday. As glorious as it is for our team during the 3-day weekends, it would be a torturous waiting period for customers in need.

How to ensure Monday to Friday coverage with a 4-day workweek

If you’re familiar with our Postmark support hours, you’ll note that we offer support between 3am and 7pm EST, Monday to Friday:

This schedule was put in place long before we started the four-day workweek, with a lean team of customer success agents all over the world (from the corny fields of Iowa to the land of 40 shades of green) to help ensure we’re available as much as possible for our customers.

But once Wildbit moved to a four-day workweek with everyone on the team able to take Friday off, we knew we couldn’t ask our customers to do the same. So we decided that the best way forward would be to have a few support agents work Tuesday to Friday. Those few support agents still get a three-day weekend, enjoying each Monday off instead.

This way, we were able to accomplish three things at once:
1) Keep our traditional support hours as we shifted into a 32-hour workweek,
2) Give everyone three glorious days off in a row, and the real kicker
3) Make sure our customers have the exact same support experience whether they write in on Monday or Friday.

Does this mean then that these few support folks are the only line of defense if the product runs into an issue on a Friday? Are you nuts? No way! We have procedures in place that make it incredibly easy for our Friday crew to ping the on-call developers and other support agents whenever needed, and without the worry of bothering someone during their Friday off.

So whether it’s an issue with a product, a support question in need of a second pair of eyes, or just asking for a break for a few hours, we’ve set things up so there’s always an easy way to get in touch with the rest of the team.

When we reached out to a handful of other cool companies who practice four-day workweeks, we found that the fine folks at Piktochart follow a similar schedule:

“Coverage-wise, our CS team covers from Mondays-Fridays. We have 2 team members covering from Mondays-Thursdays while another 2 team members covering Tuesdays-Fridays.

We also set clear expectations to our users about our working hours and response time e.g. Mondays-Fridays, 8am-6pm CT, typically reply within a few hours. Sometimes, when users see a reply within a few minutes, they get pleasantly surprised and feel delighted!”

How to keep your skeleton support crew happy

The next common 4.D.W.W related question we get is: what is working on Friday like for the skeleton support crew—those sad, lonely souls who have to work support while everyone else on the team is off enjoying the beach, seeing a Star War, or using the day to just Netflix and chill?

Well, being a member of the “Skeleton Support Crew” here at Wildbit, one of the Tuesday through Fridayers, I can happily admit that the arrangement works perfectly for me and my lifestyle.

I’ve found those quiet Fridays to be a real treat. If you’ve ever worked in an office building, you’ve likely experienced the child-like wonder of running sock-footed through the cubicles while no one else was there, the harsh overhead fluorescent lights turned down to a soft glow, and the eerie silence of a large empty space only occasionally interrupted by the janitorial staff vacuuming out in the hall (..or was it just me?)

I find the same sense of wonder working with a small crew on Fridays, even remotely. It’s just me, myself, and the customers, and I can confidently say I provide some of my best support on these quiet days.

Of course, what works for me might not work for you; and the Skeleton Support Crew approach could be disastrous to a certain type of person or support team set up. Our Buffer buds recently published a great post on how they serve their customers on a 4.D.W.W schedule, and even created a nifty lil’ table that shows how many support agents are working each day, including weekends.

“We set up our team schedule so that some teammates are online every day, including Saturdays and Sundays, while ensuring that every teammate is able to have three consecutive days off each week.”

The real takeaway is to first listen to your team and ask what they think will work the best:

• How will they be able to provide the best support?
• Are people willing to work by themselves with no direction for an entire day?
• Or does your team thrive best when working together in groups with constant communication to keep on track?
• Does everyone want to do a rotating schedule to share the load, or would some agents happily work on the skeleton crew?
  
  

There is no right or wrong answer, as long as you’re meeting the needs of your team.

For example, the amazingly awesome folks at The Wanderlust Group follow a rotational schedule that allows their support team to flexibly swap shifts as they see fit:

“While the company operates on a four-day workweek, our customers are out working on the docks every day. In order to support them, our Support Team operates on a rotational basis to provide coverage 7 days a week. This schedule allows our agents to be flexible with their days off and swap shifts as needed with other agents.
The time spent away from the phones and support tickets allows them the time needed to disconnect and come back to work energized to support all of our customers’ needs and requests. The change to the four-day workweek has helped to prevent agent burnout and has led to an increase in team productivity YoY.“

Whether it’s 3-day weekends, Wednesdays off for half the team, or a rotating schedule for working Fridays, the only thing that matters is that your team is happy and comfortable with the setup. Once that’s figured out, you can then focus on how to best help your customers within the parameters you’ve set up.

Focusing on deep work to elevate your support team

Implementing a 32-hour 4.D.W.W. does not mean your support team should now have to work X amount harder or answer X more tickets. Pfft! Don’t be gross. It’s just about working smarter.

For example, we here at Wildbit prescribe a good dose of deep work (don’t know what deep work is? Check out this awesome blog post by our CEO, Natalie): some dedicated time each week completely outside of the support queue to work on… well, just about anything you like! The time is yours to settle down and focus on a task or project that removes you from the monotony of answering ticket after ticket.

For example, I’ve been able to use my deep work days to create a slew of videos that range from authenticating domains, announcing huge product updates, working on a comic about email, and introducing our Postmark Office Hours. The team has also built internal training and tips for our support friends, and created monthly support reports where the whole company can see how well we’re supporting our customers.

Each member on our customer success team gets 8 hours each four-day week to focus on something that betters us, our team, and/or our customers. Some of us take a full day off from answering tickets to focus on such deep work, while others split that time up across several days. However we do it, the goal is to remove ourselves from distractions (answering tickets, Slack, answering company emails, etc) and just dig into some work.

Not only does this help prevent burnout by only focusing on answering tickets, but deep work projects elevate us to be well above a typical support team. We’re a customer success team, who get some pretty gosh-deng rad stuff done while still answering tickets on the side.

So there’s a choice. Focus on just chugging away at that huge ol’ queue that never ends, or set your support team up with a schedule that allows them to get out of the queue and work on some proactive, long-lasting projects that in the end can help your customers better, and get you closer to that elusive inbox zero!

Helping customers help themselves

Something a support team should always aim for is implementing ways for customers to better help themselves (and this is actually true regardless of how long your team’s workweek is).

So how do we help our customers help themselves? We use some of our deep work time towards building and maintaining our Postmark Support Center, where we have hundreds of well-written support articles, blog posts, and guides that cover the whole kit and kaboodle when it comes to using Postmark for sending email. This is all searchable within the site or by using the handy green help popup tool right within a Postmark account. It’s too easy not to use!

On top of that, we have 30+ eye-popping support videos and webinars, incredibly in-depth API documentation, wikis for each of our official API libraries, and so much more. All content that we make readily available, plump-full of information that we are constantly updating.

All of this helps our customers get answers to their questions faster. This helps keep our support queues lighter, giving us more time to provide better, meaningful help to our support tickets... which in turn boosts our CSAT scores, provides us in support with a more meaningful job, and frees up lots more time to work on non-queue related deep work.

The more resources for customer self-help → the less tickets in your support queues → the happier your support team → the more meaningful work is accomplished. Get it?

We’ve had Postmark customers who have been with us for years who have never had to write into support because we make sure all the information they need is right there within their grasp.

Our friends at Volt HQ have a similar experience:

“Since transitioning to a 4-day workweek, our support team has maintained a 4.7-hour median first reply time (mFRT) to our customers, and a customer satisfaction rating (CSAT) of 96%. Our mFRT prior to the transition was also around 4 hours with an average CSAT of 95%, so to our customers, we never skipped a beat.
We learned from our customers early on that they tend to prefer self-help resources before talking to us directly, so we have continued to leverage our support CRM's automation tools to create a more robust self-help experience for customers. And truth be told, we do still step in on occasion for that 5th day, especially around new features and product launches, but that's just the nature of Customer Support.”

Using async tools to stay on the same page

Okay. I’ll admit it: being off Mondays while the rest of the team is working… I sometimes get the FOMO. What adventures or opportunities am I missing out on? What inside jokes am I not being a part of?

But those feelings are pretty rare, because Wildbit has done such a great job focusing on a number of tools to increase team communication and bonding, while making sure said tools don’t cross the lines into distracting unnecessities.

Take Slack for example. At past jobs, the support Slack channel could quickly accumulate hundreds of thousands of posts on any given day, with conversations ranging from best guac recipes to heated debates about personal opinions (hot dogs are just hot dogs, yo!). This constant stream of jokes and timely gifs could be fun but it didn’t really help us do our jobs any better. Usually, it made us more distracted—the mortal enemy to true deep work.

Compare the above example to Wildbit’s support Slack channel, which may have two to three posts… a day. This limited communication over Slack may seem a bit sterile and rigid, but I’ve grown to love and appreciate it so much more. Not only does this lend to a better environment for deep work, but it keeps the communication lines open for when discussions are truly needed, and helps such conversations be easily found by those on the team who were not present when they first took place.

We approach internal documentation in a very similar way. Using tools like Basecamp, Notion, and Paper we post personal and professional updates and achievements in a way where everyone is able to read and digest the information at their own leisure. We’re able to keep a pulse on our workmates, updates to our products, and ongoing support-related conversations whether we’re working on any given Monday or not.

This focus on asynchronous communication is key to our productivity and deep work, and we’ve heard from the peeps at Buffer who share a similar view:

“We also put even more focus on asynchronous communication, comprehensive documentation, and setting specific and clear individual goals to support the team to provide great customer support while working 4-days a week."
Juliet Chen—Senior Customer Advocate at Buffer

Are you still curious?

So there you have it, my friends. Hopefully, this has given you a small glimpse of what’s possible with your support team while implementing a 32-hour workweek.

But this is just one way of many, and to be honest I’m pretty keen on learning more about how other customer success support teams manage the 4.D.W.W. So please Tweet at us what has (or hasn’t) been working for you and your team as you minimize work hours and maximize output. And for those of you who are still skeptical or have more questions, heck ask away!

Give us a Tweet or contact our customer success team directly and got deng it, we’ll get you an answer faster than a greased up bunny on a ski slope.

If you’re part of a team who is deciding to join the growing ranks of companies running on a 4-day workweek, you have to make an important decision: Which day should you cut from the work schedule?

While this sounds like a simple question, deciding which day to take off is almost as big a decision as the choice to transition to a 4-day week in the first place. Finding a schedule that works for your business, team, customers, and partners is crucial to make the 4-day week a success.

In this post, we’ll explore the different ways you can structure your 4-day workweek, with the benefits and drawbacks of the different approaches; we’ll also look at four real-world examples of companies that have adopted 4-day workweeks and, more importantly, why they chose the days they did.

Fixed day vs. flexible 4-day workweeks: Which is better?

There are two main approaches to implementing a 4-day workweek: taking the same day off every week or keeping the schedule flexible and taking a different day off from one week to the next. Both approaches have benefits and disadvantages. Let’s take a look.

Pros and cons of a 4-day workweek with a fixed day off

If you’re opting for a fixed-day-off approach, you’ll settle on a specific day as the extra day off for all your team members. A fixed day off helps maintain a consistent routine: everybody—your team, your customers, your partners—knows exactly what to expect, and it’s easy to schedule cross-functional meetings.

When we conducted an informal poll on Twitter and LinkedIn to determine which days people would prefer to take off, Fridays were the overwhelming winner:

Of course, a 4-day workweek with a fixed day off can be challenging for customer support and customer-facing teams who want (or need) to be available throughout the week. This is why many customer success teams end up taking a staggered approach, in which some team members cover one part of the week and others cover the remaining days to ensure continuous availability.

Another downside to the fixed-day-off approach is that it doesn’t allow for much spontaneity. Sometimes, a day off mid-week can be really handy for running unexpected errands or taking care of personal obligations on the fly. So if your ultimate goal for introducing a 4-day workweek is to maximize flexibility, a fixed day off may not be the right decision.

Pros and cons of a 4-day workweek with a flexible day off

With a flexible 4-day workweek, team members can choose their free day flexibly and spontaneously. You’d like to spend this Monday with your family to celebrate a birthday, but next Monday you’re working heads-down on a project and are taking Friday off instead? A flexible 4-day week makes this possible.

This approach is ideal for companies and teams that prioritize flexibility above anything else. But the flexibility that’s great on an individual level can bring its own challenges for the larger team: if everyone takes different days off, and schedules change from week to week, this approach can be confusing and complicated. Scheduling meetings with different team members can become difficult, as it’s harder to stay on top of who’s available when. Plus, team members who prefer predictable schedules to optimize their deep work times may find this approach disruptive.

How have other companies structured their 4-day workweek?

We know several companies, ourselves included, that have been engaged in a lot of experimentation with 4-day workweeks to see what works best… and this means you can learn from our trial and error and see the real-world impacts of choosing specific days for your third day off every week.

Wildbit: Fridays off (with an exception)

We first cut Fridays from our workweek in May 2017, and what started as an experiment simply never stopped.

Why Fridays? One of the major drivers for this choice was our focus on the concept of deep work. We believe that creating space for deep, focused work is vital to the success of our business, and a fully flexible approach or a mid-week break would make optimizing for deep work a whole lot harder. We also knew we wanted to give our team three consecutive days of rest—and since Monday historically is one of the busiest days for our Customer Success team, we chose Friday as our primary day off for the team.

“Deep, focused work doesn’t work if you don’t have the other partner to it: Rest. And we realized that our current two-day weekends weren’t really cutting it. Most of us don’t fully disconnect. We spend our weekend being weekend warriors. And by Sunday night, we’re all still exhausted.

So we started dropping one full day so we can have four days of deep work and three consecutive days of rest to recharge. Now, Mondays are no longer grueling. A lot of us feel energized coming on Monday because we had a three-day break. Our brains really rested.”

— Natalie Nagele, CEO at Wildbit

The only exception to our fixed Fridays-off approach is our Customer Success team. To make sure that our customers can reach us all week, we have a part of the team covering Tuesday-Friday. That way, everyone can enjoy a three-day weekend while still making sure our customers can reach us throughout the workweek.

The Wanderlust Group: Mondays off

Outdoor travel technology company The Wanderlust Group (TWG) chose Mondays as its third day off in June 2020.

Many of TWG’s customers are campgrounds and marinas. For recreational businesses, Fridays are typically very busy, which ruled out Fridays; instead, TWG chose Mondays as its third day off to give employees more breathing room to prepare themselves for their workweek.

“I’ve heard from team members that having Monday to themselves—with no family obligations and no work obligations—gives them time to think heading into the week. Whereas Friday acts as a jumpstart into the weekend, Monday can give people the mental break to start off their weeks strong.”

— Mike Melillo, CEO at TWG

Welcome to the Jungle: Flexible initially, Wed/Fri today

Welcome to the Jungle, a media and technology recruitment consultancy headquartered in Paris, went to great lengths to quantify, test, and evaluate its approach to a 4-day workweek between June and October of 2019 (we recommend reading their 82-page booklet.)

Initially, the consultancy adopted a flexible approach: employees were given the choice to take any day of the week off with the exception of Mondays, which remained a mandatory workday for team meetings.

However, it soon became apparent that the approach wasn’t working:

“During the first months, it was a real mess: it was impossible to know who was off when, impossible to plan a meeting and synchronize agendas… We were less efficient and less reactive.”

— Camille Fauran, General Manager at Welcome to the Jungle

After examining the data from five months of experimentation, the team found that Wednesdays and Fridays were by far the most popular choices: 25% of employees chose Wednesdays, and 50% chose Fridays as their day off. So Welcome to the Jungle decided that employees could choose between Wednesdays or Fridays for their third day off, a structure that remains in place at the agency today.

VERSA: Wednesdays

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) agency VERSA, which is headquartered in Melbourne, introduced a 4-day workweek in 2019.

Rather than experiment with different days, the company chose to give all employees Wednesdays off, a schedule that continues to this day. The reasoning for doing so was to give employees a break in the middle of the week to spend time with their families and take care of mid-week errands, but also to approach the remainder of the week with renewed focus.

“Rather than creating a long weekend, a break in the middle of the week also means they can get on top of work by Tuesday afternoon and hit the ground running on Thursday morning. This allows for staff to spend time with their families, whilst also remaining on top of work for the duration of the week.”

— Kath Blackham, CEO at VERSA

Buffer: Flexible initially, Fridays today

Social media management platform Buffer first introduced a 4-day workweek in May 2020. The team had long suspected that the traditional five-day week wasn’t the best approach to the workweek, and COVID-19 gave it an opportunity to test its hypothesis while also accommodating employees who were navigating the stress and uncertainty of the pandemic.

Initially, Buffer gave individual teams the freedom to choose their own third day off each week; this offered individual teams a lot of flexibility, but it created the same problems with meetings and collaboration between cross-functional teams that Welcome to the Jungle had also experienced.

Ultimately, Buffer settled on Fridays for the third day, with the exception of the Customer Advocacy (CA) team, which rotates its third day due to Buffer’s 24/7 support service. To determine which days support staff worked, Buffer asked the CA team which days they preferred to take off and created a system that maximized the number of people who could enjoy a three-day weekend while ensuring continuity of support and regular scheduling for those employees:

How should you decide which extra day to take off?

No two companies’ needs are exactly alike, and what works well for one company may not do so for another. There are, however, several steps you can take to identify the best additional day to take off in ways that benefit your company, your customers, and your team.

1. Define your goals

Reducing the workweek by 20% should be a goal-oriented decision. It’s vital to examine why you’re considering transitioning to a 4-day week—and then picking a schedule that best supports your goals.

The examples above show how different goals and priorities can result in very different schedules. Some companies, including Wildbit, optimize their 4-day workweeks around rest, whereas VERSA wanted to create the energized Monday-buzz two times a week. This is why setting tangible goals before making any firm decisions is crucial.

2. Involve your team in the process

While your team will likely be thrilled to hear about plans for a 4-day workweek, not everyone will agree on the best day to cut from the schedule. Before you finalize your decision, ask the team about their preferences and concerns: you can then use this information to design the first iteration of your new 4-day schedule.

There are different ways to invite this kind of initial input, including:

• A company-wide discussion during an all-hands meeting
• An informal Slack poll
• An anonymous survey
• A working committee

Encourage everyone on the team to add their input, and allow people to voice their opinions in ways that align with how they prefer to communicate. The more responses you have to work with, the greater the likelihood of arriving at a decision that satisfies as many people as possible.

3. Ask for feedback early and often

Several of the companies featured above approach the 4-day workweek as an ongoing experiment, and some have adjusted their schedules over time. This is normal: what may have seemed like a good idea initially might turn out not to be as practical several weeks into the new routine—which is why soliciting feedback early and often is important to understand what’s working and make adjustments if needed. Find the feedback channels that work best for your team, whether that’s a regular check-in via email, an anonymous survey, or encouraging your team to share feedback with their managers.

4. Keep your customers and business partners in mind

Transitioning to a 4-day workweek isn’t just a major shift for you and your employees: it’s a change for all constituents, including your customers and business partners, too.

However you choose to structure your experiment, know that a reduced workweek will impact customer operations and working with partners and vendors. This might mean implementing team-specific exceptions to ensure continuity of support (as Buffer and Wildbit did), having uncomfortable conversations with partners, or having to find a new routine for working with vendors. Framing those discussions in the context of your goals may make it easier for partners to understand the rationale behind your decision.

What else would you like to learn about implementing the 4-day workweek?

Are you interested in exploring a 4-day week for your team but aren’t sure where to start? We’re here to help you start your 4-day journey on the right track. Join us for our upcoming webinar on September 1 and ask leaders from the teams who’ve already made the switch to a shorter week all your burning questions.

Learn more and save your seat →

1. Increased employee wellbeing

Businesses should be designed to support human beings—and the 4-day workweek is a powerful way to improve your team’s wellbeing. Companies that have adopted the 4-day workweek say their team is...

• Happier (78%)
• Healthier (62%)
• Less stressed (70%)
  

“Switching to a 4-day week helped improve our employees’ lives and, consequently, their job satisfaction.”
Dan Giuliani, CEO at Volt Athletics

“We’ve always wanted to maximize our team's ability to have a life outside of work.”
Natalie Nagele, CEO at Wildbit

2. Positive impact on the bottom line

“But doesn’t a cut in work hours hurt your business?” No. It doesn’t.

Companies that have adopted a 4-day workweek see a positive impact on the bottom line.

• 51% say they’re saving costs
• 64% say productivity has improved
• 62% say they see fewer sick-days

“After having the company’s three best consecutive months, the 4-day workweek was set permanently. And to date, Wanderlust Group had its strongest six months of growth and productivity, with profits up by 121% year over year.”
Mike Melillo, CEO at The Wanderlust Group

Case study: Microsoft Japan

After closing its offices every Friday in August 2019, Microsoft Japan found that productivity grew +39.9% compared to the previous year. Switching to a 4-day workweek also helped the company save electricity and office resources:

• The number of pages printed decreased -58.7%
• Electricity usage decreased -23.1% compared to the previous year

3. Hiring and retaining talent

Brands that offer a 4-day workweek have a competitive advantage in finding and keeping great team members.

Job postings offering a four-day week:

• Receive 15% more applications
  
• Help 63% of employers attract and retain the right talent
• Help 71% of employers attract and retain employees with children or caring responsibilities

4. The number of companies switching to a 4-day workweek is growing

• In 2016, there were fewer than 20 roles offering a 4-day workweek per 10,000 postings.
• In 2020, that number had grown to 60.
• In the first quarter of 2021, there were already seen >60 4-day workweek roles per 10,000 listings.

5. Some companies have been running a 4-day schedule since 2015

For an up-to-date list of companies offering a 4-day week, check out our company directory.

The 4-day workweek visualized

Is your team ready to embrace a 4-day workweek?

Learn more about how Wildbit and other people-first businesses adopted a 4-day workweek and what we learned along the way.

Learn more about the 4-day week →

Special thanks to Chase Carpenter for the beautiful artwork for this infographic. 💚

One of the biggest misconceptions about the 4-day workweek is that it’s as simple as cutting a day from your company’s typical schedule. It’s not that easy. If you want to move to a 32h week and still be successful, you’ll have to master one thing first: Deep work.

You can’t cut a workday without changing how you work

Most businesses can’t expect to reduce their working week by 20% without fundamentally rethinking how that business operates. If you keep doing what you’re doing but just cut a day, your 4-day workweek experiment will fail.

You can’t shift to a 4-day work week without rethinking how you do work.

Successfully implementing a 4-day workweek requires a shift in how we perceive and approach work itself. It may sound harsh, but a significant amount of the “work” we do during an average week is perfunctory at best and performative at worst. This can be hard for some people to accept because, culturally, subjective value judgments about “work ethic” are often intrinsically linked to our sense of self. Hard work is perceived as virtuous, whereas seeking to work less is often interpreted as “laziness.”

Recent data shows that most salaried employees do only three hours (or less) of meaningfully productive work per day. That same data also shows that working longer hours often has a detrimental impact on the quality of work produced. Some companies struggle to recognize this and respond to these challenges by enforcing draconian measures that track employees’ computer use, limit breaks, enforce mandatory overtime to compensate for “downtime,” and other controls that punish workers in the pursuit of productivity gains.

Some companies, however, come at this from the opposite angle. Rather than focusing on the number of hours worked—or the time you spent in your seat—they’re focusing on outcomes or the quality of work produced. For many of these companies, the concept of deep work is fundamental to this mindset.

In his 2016 book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, author Cal Newport describes deep work as:

“Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

Deep work is the work we hire people to do; the specializations and expertise that define careers and helps businesses grow. Deep work is what a writer does when they write or an artist does when they paint or, in the software world, what a developer does when they write code. By contrast, much of the work that detracts from deep work—the emails, the meetings, the tedious but vital administrative tasks—could be considered “shallow” work. There’s no getting around the necessity of shallow work, but it’s not why we hire people. When you’re looking to reduce work time, you have to figure out how your team can use the remaining time in the most efficient way, and optimizing for deep work is the key.

Periods of uninterrupted time to think and concentrate is crucial to the concept of the 4-day workweek. This cannot happen accidentally—it must be treated as an organizational priority.

Enabling deep work is crucial to the success of a 4-day workweek

Wildbit first started experimenting with a 4-day workweek in 2017, and since then, it’s become a fundamental part of who we are as an organization and how we work as a team. People ask us about our experiences with a 4-day week all the time, and—understandably—one of the most common questions we get is how other companies can implement a 4-day week and succeed. We’ve learned a lot about ourselves and our work over the past few years, and we’ve found that there are five main strategies that have laid the groundwork for our success.

1. Give your team the flexibility they need

Different people work in different ways, especially when it comes to prolonged periods of focused concentration. This is why flexibility is critical in creating an environment in which deep work can happen.

If people do their best work early in the morning, they should be able to do so. If other team members are night owls who find it easier to focus later in the evening, let them. There may be some administrative considerations to think about, such as how much overlap there should be between the schedules of team members across different time zones, but generally speaking, your team should have the freedom to set their own hours and do their work in a way that aligns with how they work and the rest of their lives.

This kind of flexibility isn’t just about scheduling, however. It’s about trusting your team to get the job done, and that they know best when and how that should happen. This can be a difficult transition for managers used to rigid schedules and top-down management. That said, many people respond positively to having greater agency over their work, and more autonomy often translates into greater job satisfaction and higher productivity. Trust your team and give them the support they need to create their own schedules.

At Wildbit, we believe that we can expect individuals to be responsible for their own productivity only if we create an environment where they can maximize their focus. It's a mutual agreement. We promise to give you all the flexibility you need if you promise to do really good work when you can.

2. Avoid the day-to-day distractions that interrupt your team’s flow

Constant distractions are one of the major impediments to deep work, which is why you should be ruthless about trying to minimize them. This doesn’t just mean being deliberate about scheduling meetings. It also means being mindful about which situations require immediate attention—and which don’t.

Is this question worth a Slack message that might interrupt your coworker? Or could this be an email that your colleague can respond to later? Plus, to protect your own deep work times, be disciplined about when and how to respond to external distractions, such as email.

This will only work if your team is encouraged to set firm boundaries. Employees need to know that it’s okay to delay responding to an email if they’re in a period of deep work, not left to guess or infer. We’ve found it’s important to be just as intentional about communicating these values as we are about limiting distractions, so be sure to demonstrate these behaviors as a manager and proactively let employees know that such boundaries are positive.

3. Plan intentionally and consistently

Leaders aren’t always aware of how their actions can contribute towards chaos and confusion. Robert Sutton, a professor at Stanford University, observed that leaders often—and unintentionally—waste employees’ time: “They make offhand comments and don’t consider that their employees may interpret them as commands.”

When we evaluated what needed to change as part of introducing a 32-hour workweek, we realized that we, too, created noise for our team without realizing it. It would not be uncommon for one of us to send a Sunday-night email with that next great idea, leading the team to wonder, "Am I changing direction now? What's going on here?". These distractions and feelings of uncertainty are the nemesis of deep work.

As we introduced the 32-hour workweek, we also implemented a company-wide cadence of strategic planning and deep work time. At the beginning of each quarter, we come together to plan and prioritize. During this time, no actual work is getting done. We’re focused on strategy, collaborative planning, and resolving questions in real-time. By the end of the planning phase, the entire team is on the same page about what we want to achieve—and for the rest of the quarter, we focus on executing the work.

4. Empower small, independent teams

Deep work manifests differently from one team to another and from one person to another. If you’re working in a big team, it’s much harder to find a rhythm that accommodates everyone’s deep work preferences.

That’s why here at Wildbit, we create small, independent project teams that focus on the different goals we’ve set for the quarter. Depending on the type of project, we might have team members across engineering, design, QA, or marketing and customer success come together, but in general, those teams are no bigger than 5 people. These small autonomous teams can move quickly and make decisions independently of other teams. But most importantly, they can set their own terms to facilitate deep, focused work.

5. Prioritize what really matters

Cultivating a culture in which deep work is sacred means being comfortable saying “no.”

Just as individual teams should be given the autonomy to make decisions that facilitate deep work, they should also be encouraged to prioritize what really matters. This might translate to opting out of meetings that aren’t essential or focusing on one project over another. This may feel uncomfortable initially, but it’s not about “skipping” work—it’s about identifying what really matters to specific teams and giving them the freedom to do what’s best for that team and focus on work that will have the biggest impact.

Prioritization also matters at the organizational level. Just as individual teams can and should prioritize what really matters to them, companies need to think strategically and focus on priorities that will help the business succeed; if a company is focused on the wrong things, it doesn’t matter how lean, smart, or productive individual teams might be.

Looking over the five points above, some people might think that their company already does all of this within the context of a traditional workweek. Why not optimize for these factors and stick to a five-day week? Because doing so overlooks one of the most important aspects behind deep work and the four-day workweek: rest.

Rest is a crucial aspect of deep, focused work

Just as we need to be intentional about creating space for knowledge workers to engage in deep, uninterrupted work, we also need to be just as intentional about giving workers the time and space they need to truly rest and recharge. This isn’t just about productivity. It’s about prioritizing an individual’s whole self, not just their work—a vital aspect of people-first operations.

Adequate rest is the direct counterbalance to deep, focused work. You cannot have one without the other. Acknowledging this means recognizing our limitations as human beings.

We’re not built to focus intently for 50 or 60 hours a week—it’s just not practical or realistic.

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Watch Natalie's full talk on the Tugboat Institute's website →

In addition to facilitating deep, focused work, a third day off every week can have a range of positive impacts for both employers and employees, including increased productivity, reduced costs, healthier employees, and improved employee happiness and satisfaction. But there’s another, often-overlooked benefit of a third day off every week–time for our brains to subconsciously tackle the most difficult, vexing problems we encounter during the course of our work, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “intelligent cognitive rest.”

Different parts of the brain handle different cognitive functions depending on whether we’re actively focusing on the task at hand. Neuroscientists refer to the part of the brain that handles unfocused thought as the default mode network. This part of the brain is most active during times when the mind isn’t actively focusing on a specific task, a state known as wakeful rest. The default mode network consumes a full 20% of the body’s energy while at rest and is responsible for forging connections between ideas and memories, stimulating creative thought, and subconsciously analyzing information gathered during periods of active focus.

Perhaps surprisingly, actively focusing on a task only uses 5% more energy than intelligent cognitive rest, which reveals just how hard our brains are actually working when our minds are supposedly wandering. Giving our brains time to rest and process information can have a powerful impact on our problem-solving capabilities, and a three-day weekend allows us to take advantage of this subconscious thought when we return to a focused state of deep work. This is why we advocate for four days of work followed by three days of rest, as opposed to taking an additional day off in the middle of the workweek.

When we talk about rest, we don’t just mean in the context of three-day weekends. It can be just as important—and beneficial—to rest during the course of a workday. Giving ourselves time to think away from the distractions of a screen can stimulate creative thought and help us solve difficult problems. This is because actively focusing on a problem or task deactivates the default mode network, which is why we often have “breakthrough” ideas while showering or walking.

Work hard, rest hard

If deep work is fundamental to the concept of a 4-day workweek, then “deep rest” is just as important.

Challenging the five-day workweek—a paradigm that has dominated and shaped workplace culture for the better part of a century—will take time. Making the decision to actively reduce the length of the workweek can be difficult, and the financial and economic pressures are very real for new and established companies alike. But the fundamental nature of work is changing rapidly, and systems first conceived during the Industrial Revolution are simply no longer fit for purpose in the world of knowledge work.

We’ve proven that companies can approach work in a different way while building growing, profitable businesses that put people first, and there are dozens more that have done the same. We want to encourage other businesses to do the same, and we hope you’ll join us as we continue to learn, grow, and support one another.

Learn more about the 4-day workweek

What other companies have already moved to the 4-day workweek? And should your team do the same?

Learn more →

Special thanks to the folks at Animalz for their help creating this post.

Here at Wildbit, we've often experimented with how we work. Three years ago, we decided to try a big change: 4-day workweeks.

We’ve always wanted to maximize our team's ability to have a life outside of work. That started with only working 40 hours a week, which wasn’t typically something you bragged about in the tech space (in fact, it's usually the opposite). Then, after reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, our CEO and co-founder Natalie Nagele wanted to take it a step further.

Newport talks about how our brain is a muscle that gets fatigued after heavy use. He believes that each person can do four hours of deep, focused work in a day. If that’s the case, then what happens in the other 20 hours of the standard workweek? Could we shorten the workweek and focus on maximizing what human beings are really good at (creativity, collaboration, problem-solving) and offload everything else?

Three and a half years later, we appear to have the answer. What started as a short-term experiment has evolved into the regular way of doing things here at Wildbit.

The initial experiment

We started our experiment with 4-day workweeks in the spring of 2017. Basecamp had already implemented their summer hours, which let staff take every Friday off from May through August. With Basecamp as inspiration, we decided to give it a try for a few months ourselves.

You could describe the initial reaction from the team as “cautious optimism.” A long weekend every week sounds inviting. But could we actually get all our work done in less time? We didn’t want to lengthen the other four days to “make up” for having Friday off (four 10-hour days), so everything needed to fit into 32 hours (four 8-hour days).

During the rollout, there were a lot of candid discussions. Every few weeks, Natalie checked in and asked how the team was feeling. If there was any anxiety about completing a task, we talked through it as a team to come up with a solution.

At the end of the experiment, we felt more productive and believed the quality of our work had improved, so we kept going with it.

You have to have your priorities straight if you want to have the same impact in fewer days a week. We began to ask, “what are we working on, and why?”

What we’ve gained

We wouldn’t still be doing 4-day workweeks if they weren’t worth it. Before sharing how to be successful with a shorter workweek, it's important to point out why you'd want to in the first place. Here’s what we’ve gained from working less with more intention.

Work/life balance

It's a cliché term now, but a balanced life is critical to functioning at your best. Unsurprisingly, working less frees up time for the team to experience more outside of work. Our company exists for our team, and everyone's better off when they have time to do what they love with the ones they love.

Higher-quality work

Something magical happens when you consciously choose tasks and create space for uninterrupted work — more gets done.

Not only do we get more work done now, but we also do better work. Your brain gets to recharge when there’s a consistent three-day rest period. Since problems marinate in our minds over the weekend, we usually come in on Monday morning with an idea of how to solve it.

Recognition and community

We don’t do 4-day workweeks to get a pat on the back from others. However, it’s always nice to connect with people on something you’re passionate about. We’ve found that our customers respect how much we care about our team, and we’re able to share our experiences to help others.

Fulfilling work and progress

As CEO, Natalie believes a vital part of her job is to create an environment where people can get their best work done and push themselves past their comfort zone. When you support your team in every way you can and give them space to grow, everyone is more fulfilled. That commitment to excellence then radiates into the products we send out to the world.

How you can successfully move to a 4-day workweek

The idea of a 4-day workweek sounds romantic, but like any great relationship or project, you have to put in the work to make it work. There are several key things to consider in order to keep a company healthy while working only 32 hours a week.

Be purposeful with everything you choose to work on

You have to have your priorities straight if you want to have the same impact in less time. We began to ask, “what are we working on, and why?”

This isn’t a one-and-done process, either. We continuously reflect on the larger purpose of our work, and what type of work is meaningful to our customers, our communities, and ourselves. If something is no longer serving the team or customers, then it’s time to reevaluate.

Embrace asynchronous communication

Meetings are disruptive, period. Sure, they’re sometimes necessary and valuable. But anyone who’s thought “that meeting could have been an email” already understands the value of asynchronous communication.

The time spent preparing, having the call, and getting back into a state of deep work can lower productivity, not to mention mess with someone’s day. Meetings can be especially disruptive when you’re planning across time zones.

Instead of meetings, we use emails, Slack messages, and automated check-ins. We have guidelines for how to request feedback and when it makes sense to interrupt someone with a direct message. It's not perfect, but by defaulting to async, our team is mindful of the attention of others.

Find your procrastination enablers

Distractions happen, but we’ve learned that sometimes the biggest threats to deep work are hiding in plain sight. During a team retreat in 2018, Slack kept coming up in discussions about what takes us away from focused work. So we ditched it.

For a week, we stopped using public or shared channels. We realized that Slack was a procrastination enabler, driving a constant itch to check-in or update the team. While we’re back to using Slack, the break gave us some much-needed perspective on habits that interrupt deep work.

Automate tasks that don’t need a human perspective

Time and attention are valuable resources. That’s why we aim to empower humans to do essential work and automate the rest. If we automate something small, like expense reporting, it can save someone an hour a week. While it’s small, that adds up.

Create the right environment

We don’t do open floor plans, and remote teams can’t work out of a coffee shop four days a week. For a 4-day workweek to work, you have to create a quiet space. As more families work at home together, the emotional dynamic is just as important. Creating space for conversation and committing to flexibility are a few ways that companies can be people-first during COVID-19.

Wildbit provides a home office stipend to help our team build the right kind of environment that enables focused work.

Challenges and pushback

Let’s take a moment away from the sunshine and rainbows of 4-day workweeks to talk logistics. There have been some adaptations and lessons learned since we first started.

People don’t know what to do with their free day at first

The 4-day workweek at Wildbit is something that new hires are aware of and excited about, but might not necessarily believe until they experience it. During new hire onboarding calls, we sometimes hear, “I’m going to work on Fridays because I love my job. What am I supposed to do with that day off?” After talking about their interests, we usually find something they get excited about.

And it’s not just about having more leisure time. That fifth day is huge for parents who have been hit hard by COVID-19. And as Wildbit is a people-first business, we encourage our team to use that fifth day to make an impact in the communities they care about. Both a three-day weekend at the lake cabin and volunteering with a favorite charity are perfect uses of that additional day off.

Some functions, like customer support, need Friday representation

Just because we have a 4-day workweek doesn’t mean customers stop needing us on Fridays. So, we’ve adopted a policy where the customer support team trades off between Mondays and Fridays off. That way, there’s support in essential functions five days a week.

Extra communication is required to get through busy periods

We still occasionally question our shorter workweek, even three years in. It’s made us realize how important communication is. If someone is concerned about getting everything done, they need to talk to their team to shift priorities or share responsibilities.

How our workflow might evolve

The past few years of shorter workweeks have been fulfilling, and it won't be the end of our experiments. What else will we try down the road?

Even shorter or more flexible hours

As long as work gets done, it doesn't matter how long it takes. Ideally, we set clear goals, and we work on them as our brain and ability allow us to. Perhaps that looks like working on Fridays, but fewer hours each day. Or maybe it's an eight-hour day, and then a day off, and then a two-hour day. We don’t know what the future holds, but we know we want to empower each individual to be productive, in addition to us as a company.

A greater commitment to impact

Black lives matter and climate change are real, and as humans on Earth, it's our responsibility to address both. Last year we measured Wildbit’s environmental impact and set forth steps to reduce our carbon footprint.

What if we can take it a step further? Imagine if everyone at Wildbit used a bit of their time off each week to give back to their community. What could teams and companies achieve if they took on the responsibility of making their cities more inclusive, safe, and conscious?

Adopting a people-first perspective is something we’re passionate about at Wildbit, and we hope to see more companies embrace this approach. We've shared a little more about the topic as well as a list of other companies who have also adopted the 4-day workweek.

If you're interested in hearing more about this, Natalie has shared on the topic on various podcasts and publications like NPR, Escape Velocity, Mailchimp's Courier, and Rework. Check out our Press page for those and a lot more!

At the beginning of the summer, we set out to experiment with 4-day workweeks. Recently, we iterated on the way we do things and I wanted to share some updates.

Why are we doing this again?

Just as a reminder, I want to recall why we’re doing this experiment in the first place. I believe that we can do the same amount of work, at a higher quality, in four workdays instead of five. Why? Because we can spend the four days more focused, and then have three full days of rest.

As a team, we need to continue to strive to be as productive and focused as possible. We have to always ask Why, and make sure that we’re working on the right things.

The 5th workday is not a time to work on a side gig. It’s a time of reflection and recuperation. Whether spent with family or organizing a closet, it’s important to not take this day for granted.

This will only work if we continue to prove that we can ship our product and support it well. And that we can continue to deliver on our promises to ourselves and our customers. If it starts to fall apart, we will revert back to 5 days and think of other creative ways to work/live better.

How’s everyone feeling?

Right now, we have some mixed emotions about 4-day work weeks. On the one side, the team loves having the extra day off to think and regroup. I’ve heard from almost everyone that they look forward to Monday. These three consecutive days leave us refreshed, recharged and pumped to start back at work.

At the same time, a lot of us are feeling more pressure during the four days we are here. The goal is 32-hour weeks. So we have to make sure we’re doing the right work. While the pressure is there, it’s starting to subside as we’re seeing our output maintaining the same as before. But we feel like the work is getting better.

We’ve been communicating openly and honestly about how it’s going for a while. We’ve decided to extend the experiment through the end of Q1 2018.

Some policy updates

We have made some explicit updates to policies that we hope will make this experiment more long-term and sustainable.

PTO

Moving to a 4-day work weekends up adding 52 days off each year. Together with 25 PTO days, we end up having over 15 weeks off of work. I think that’s equally awesome and super scary. We’ve agreed to reduce PTO days from 25 to 20. Our thinking is we would have five full workweeks off with 25 PTO days, but now we don’t need to mark the Friday in each week as off. So we still effectively have five full weeks of PTO.

Swap

At first, we were swapping mid-week days off with Fridays. This way, folks didn’t have to mark the day as PTO. We're now going to stop doing the PTO swaps. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s disruptive to the team. Taking a mid-week off and then working on Friday does not help us move the products forward. In a swap, you’re the only one working that day. If someone does want to work Friday because they want to catch up on your work, that’s cool. But really, if you take a mid-week day it will count towards PTO. The other way to look at it: If you take a day off, you wouldn’t swap with a Saturday or Sunday. Our goal is to treat Fridays the same.

[Note: Our customer success team gets an exception on swapping since they are alternating days to ensure we have full coverage of the week for our customers. It’s only relevant if they’re moving days where someone has to work double.]

Working only 40 hours a week has been something I take a lot of pride in at Wildbit. I want to make sure our team has plenty of time to do the stuff they love outside of work. Unfortunately, a lot of companies have built environments where it’s expected, or at least the workload encourages, working much longer days.

A while back I read the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. I learned that our brains can’t actually do more than 4 hours of really deep, thoughtful work a day. The best writers and thinkers, who have trained their minds over a long period of time, max out at 4 hours a day. And for the rest of us, getting to 4 hours is the holy grail that is very difficult to achieve.

This means that we spend a lot of our days on more shallow work. Things like meetings, emails, closing tickets and talking to each other. I’ve been wondering for a while, then, is even 40 hours a week necessary? What if we all just buckled down and got some really thoughtful, meaningful work done, could we work less?

Now, I’m not saying the shallow work isn’t super important. We need to plan, to communicate, and to build relationships with each other and to bond. But even with that added to our focus work, can’t we still do it all in less than 40 hours?

So starting next week, we’re going to give it a shot. The entire team will work only 4 days a week. We will not be tacking on an extra hour to the other 4 days. We will just be working 32 hours. We’ve time-boxed this experiment to the summer, but we hope we can extend it, so long as there are no signifcant impacts or consequences.

In order to make this a success, we must be even more diligent on what we work on and how productive we are during the 32 hours. We must always make sure that we start with why on anything we take on. We will question our attendance in meetings, challenge our productivity time and make sure that we work as closely as we can to accomplish all the work we set out for ourselves. We’re challenging ourselves that by limiting our time, we’ll produce more thoughtful and important work than when we had 40 hours to get it all done.

As a practice, we’re mostly all taking off on Fridays. But obviously, that’s not practical for the entire team, especially on the support side. The entire Customer Success team has an alternating schedule between Mondays and Fridays off. The development team also has an on-call rotation for Fridays to make sure emergencies and support requests get dealt with quickly.

I’m pretty excited about this change. Many companies I respect have 4-day summers or even 4-day workweeks. I’m hoping we can be another example of the success of working less.