The Essential Guide to a 4-Day Workweek: Insights, Results, and Considerations from Wonderlic’s Experience

In March 2024, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) evaluated the viability of a 32-hour workweek. This was the first federal discussion on weekly working hours since the 1940s when the working week was trimmed from 44 hours to 40. 

Almost 90 years later, more workers have started advocating for a four-day workweek, citing improved work-life balance, well-being, and productivity. However, despite growing support and research, many remain skeptical.

Three years ago, after being inspired by organizations overseas and then here in America, Wonderlic decided to make the switch to a four-day workweek. As early adopters, we’ve learned a lot through trial and error, and we want to share those results with you.

In this guide, we examine the four-day workweek, our results from three years of using this work model, and detail everything you should consider if you’re thinking about making the switch.

What is a four-day workweek?

In many countries, the five-day, 40-hour workweek is standard. The four-day work, in contrast, involves working only four days out of the week. These days could be consecutive, with employees having Mondays or Fridays off, or there could be a gap in the middle of the week, depending on the business’s needs.

Some four-day workweek models are compressed workweeks, where employees work four 10-hour days to fit the same amount of working hours into fewer days. Other four-day workweeks have reduced hours, where employees are expected to complete all their work in 32 hours — but still get paid a full salary. 

Pros of a 4-day workweek	Cons of a 4-day workweek
– Employee wellbeing – Work-life balance – Cost-savings for employees (commuting, child care, etc.) – Cost-savings for employers (energy, office supplies, turnover/hiring costs, etc.) – Powerful talent attraction tool – Helps reduce turnover	– It could lead to longer workdays – It could create communication/service  problems with clients and/or customers – Productivity may decrease

The business impact of a four-day workweek

In 2019, a couple of years before Wonderlic launched its four-day workweek, Microsoft Japan trialed a four-day workweek with an eye-popping 40% increase in productivity. Of course, employees had to make concessions to meet the same productivity levels. They shortened meetings and became more strategic with their time — not bad things. Interestingly, employees took 25% less time off during the trial period. Overall, the results from this trial were incredibly promising.

Fast forward to this year, and the results of a pilot program out of the U.K. confirmed numerous other studies and experiments. The 61 companies in this trial used the reduced hours model, where employees accomplish 100% of their workload in 32 hours with no reduction in pay. According to ABC News, “82% of [the] surveyed companies reported positive impacts on staff well-being. 50% saw positive effects on reducing staff turnover, and 32% said the policy had noticeably improved their recruitment.” A year after working four days a week, 89% of participants chose to keep the model in place.

While productivity gains were not a highlight of this study, one company reported that “it has not had a measurable negative impact on productivity.” Overall, 100% of the participating companies’ managers and CEOs reported that the trial had a “positive” or “very positive” effect on their organization.

So, after three years, how did these studies compare to our results at Wonderlic?

Wonderlic’s results from a four-day workweek 

At Wonderlic, we chose to have a reduced-hour workweek where our employees work around 32 hours a week with no reduction in pay with the goal of completing 100% of their usual workloads. For context, we are a small business that has employees remotely distributed throughout the United States.

After three years, here are the results: 

Productivity

We’ve seen no measurable impact on productivity, meaning the shift to a four-day work week didn’t negatively or positively affect our employees’ ability to complete their pre-pandemic workloads — which was great to see, as employee wellbeing was our primary goal, not productivity. Also, productivity gains don’t preclude profitability gains. Since making the move to a four-day workweek, we’ve been able to attract top talent much more efficiently, saving costs in both talent attraction and retention. 

Recruitment & retention

To give you an idea of how popular our job postings have become, a posting for a Customer Success Manager in March of 2024 received 6,000 applications. For perspective, one Glassdoor study places the average number of applications per job opening somewhere around 250. This job received 23x that.

For a small SaaS (software as a service) company, this is an incredible number — and strategic advantage. Keep in mind that this application rate is amidst an ongoing talent shortage where companies are competing fiercely for top talent. We are, without a doubt, attracting employees who would not otherwise apply.

In addition to attracting higher quality talent without exorbitant recruiting costs, the shift to a four-day workweek has been a way to save expenses associated with turnover (one Gallup survey estimates that the cost of replacing an employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary). With each new application, we’re building our digital bench of talent. Whenever we need to hire a new role, we have a wealth of candidates in our system (these candidates have taken the Wonderlic pre-employment assessment and received a score).

Over the past three years, we’ve had only two voluntary departures. In contrast, in April 2024, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows voluntary turnover averaging 2% per month. We experienced a 2% voluntary turnover rate over 36 months, lightyears below the average. 

But neither recruitment nor cost-savings were as important to us as the effect on our employees.

Culture

Wonderlic has always been a great place to work, but since implementing a four-day workweek, our employees strongly believe — and prove — it’s become even better. 

Every Friday morning, after we drop our kids off at school, my wife and I have our little tradition. We grab a coffee at our favorite spot. This isn’t just about the coffee, though—that time together is precious. It’s our moment to plan out the weekend, from meals to activities, ensuring we don’t eat into our family time on Saturday and Sunday. By 11 a.m., we’ve sorted everything, leaving the rest of the day open to just enjoy each other’s company before it’s time to pick up the kids. It’s our way of making sure the weekends are really about family, without the stress of last-minute planning.

Wonderlic employee

Recently, one of my neighbors offered me an extra ticket to a fundraising event for the Ronald McDonald House. Normally, I’d hesitate to commit to something on a Thursday night, but now I have Fridays off, so I jumped at the chance. So I said yes!

Wonderlic employee

These are just what a sample of our employees had to say. All of them enjoy using their Fridays for various personal reasons, whether it’s getting their car serviced, catching up on chores, or pursuing a personal or artistic passion. For the parents out there, this has been a chance to reduce childcare costs or have some time alone from the kids to work around the house, enjoy lunch with a friend, and catch up on all the things they simply can’t get to while taking care of kids.

In addition to improved work-life balance, employees reported feeling more refreshed and revitalized for their workweek, results that many other trials and reports support. Burnout is down. Mental capacity and energy are up. Best of all, our employees have the extra energy and motivation to pursue personal and professional growth, whether that’s going back to school, taking classes at the park, or developing their skills through our internal development program powered by Wonderlic Develop.

Considerations from our experience

While these results have been incredibly valuable for us, and we plan on keeping our four-day workweek for the foreseeable future, there are a few caveats we should mention. 

• Recruiters have more work. While a four-day workweek has been an incredibly cost-effective way to attract top talent, it also means our recruiters have more resumes to sift through and more candidates to interview. Thankfully, Wonderlic Select, our pre-hire assessment, helps cut down on this burden for our recruiters. Wonderlic Select assesses candidates’ personality, motivation, and cognitive ability to assign a score relative to job-specific requirements. Recruiters can optimize their time by focusing on the best-fit candidates.
• Four-day work weeks aren’t perfect. Some workweeks stretch beyond 32 hours, meaning employees have to occasionally work longer days to keep their Fridays clear. Admittedly, working remotely helps our employees have the flexibility for this.
• No one wants to leave. While we’re deeply encouraged that most employees don’t want to leave our organization, this also means we’re more vulnerable to “quiet quitting” or disengaged workers. Because of this, we had to have specific and effective performance accountability and intervention mechanisms in place.
• You’ll need to iron out PTO and holidays. There’s no hard and fast rule for holidays and PTO. For example, consider Labor Day. Everyone had the previous Friday off, but then Monday is a holiday, so do you have a three-day workweek? These scenarios were something we had to figure out along the way. Hand in hand with PTO, most employees weren’t using their PTO. At the end of each year, many of our employees have PTO stacked up, so many of our teams end up taking a couple of weeks off in December. 

Your Guide to Implementing a Four-Day Workweek

Now that we’ve shared our results, it’s time for you to decide if you want to implement a four-day workweek. Below, we’ve created a comprehensive guide to help you assess your readiness for a four-day workweek and also plan specific steps for implementation. This guide includes input from organizational leaders whose companies have thrived with four-day work weeks.

Let’s get started. 

Planning your pilot

Before implementing a four-day workweek, we recommend running a pilot to test its viability for your business. Our pilot was 10 weeks long, but these can be a year or longer. Before implementing a pilot, here are some critical factors to consider.

Decide early how you’ll meet the support needs of your customers and partners

Understandably, many business leaders’ first concern regarding a shortened work week is the negative effect it might have on their customers and partners. After all, you’re available one less day a week. So, it’s important to think through the accommodations likely to be most tolerable to those groups.

To do that, you’ll need to audit when customer support needs are heaviest. Specifically ask:

• When is customer call volume the highest?
• Are there times of the week, month, or year when support requests are more urgent than others?
• What have customer expectations regarding response times been during any prior company-wide shut-down periods?
• How would they respond if they knew you would be available one less day a week?

We decided to eliminate Fridays as opposed to Mondays after identifying our clients’ expectations for follow-ups were lowest right before a weekend or a holiday; hence, Fridays were an easier “day to miss” than Mondays.

It’s also okay to modify the schedule based on seasonal needs. Awin, a media company, for example, has “peak weeks,” in which managers can tell their team that they need them to work five days per week for a six-week burst, such as the finance team at year-end or client-facing teams during the holiday shopping season. This type of flexibility works as long as you set expectations in advance.

Run a similar analysis of your partners’ needs and expectations

If you’re evaluating the effect on partners, take a look at not only response time expectations but also when periods of collaboration tend to be the most intense.

If you’d like some external feedback early, consider doing what Art Shectman of Elephant Ventures did: Send an email to a core group of customers and partners early on to take their temperature on your consideration of a shorter week and explain your plans for delivering the same high-quality end product they expect.

After your audit, decide on the best way to accommodate both groups

Most companies we’ve seen succeed with four-day workweeks maintain five-day-a-week customer and prospect coverage by staggering the schedules of certain teams. For example, Wonderlic asks sales reps and customer support team members to work one Friday a month and gives them a Monday off in return. At PDQ, a software company, some people work Tuesday through Friday, and some work Monday through Thursday. Elephant Ventures, another software company, occasionally drops its usual Monday-Thursday schedule to meet a core client’s needs.

One thing worth noting is that, across the board, successful companies are usually concerned about how their decision to pilot this schedule will be received. However, many are pleasantly surprised at how supportive their clients are once they share their intentions.

Decide on the specific type of four-day week

As we mentioned earlier, there are a variety of ways to implement a four-day workweek. But at a high level, you’ll first want to decide whether you’re going to ask your employees to work 40 hours over four days or whether you’re going to reduce the workday to 32 (or 36) hours. The latter model, subscribed to by Andrew Barnes, author of “The 4 Day Week,” is sometimes described as the 100/80/100 model, in which staff receive 100% of their contractual compensation and only need to work 80% of the time, provided they deliver 100% of the agreed-upon productivity.

The former could minimize the stress some employees feel about the pressure to improve efficiency and maintain production in less time. But, 10-hour days can also create conflicts with people’s existing personal schedules. The latter, more common approach requires the ability to accomplish tasks more efficiently, but it’s a much bigger draw to candidates and can lead to higher engagement scores.

There are various ways to approach which days people can take off, too. Most companies take Fridays off, but at some companies, any day goes. At Wonderlic, we work Monday to Thursday, with employees in our most public-facing departments taking turns covering Fridays.

Decide on the finer details of your pilot

Now that you have decided that this new work model might be an option for your business and you’ve decided on the overall schedule, you have a few additional questions to ask yourself and your decision-makers.

What is the goal of your pilot?

The main goals of your pilot may seem obvious to the core group of stakeholders. But take the time to get alignment on which outcomes really matter the most and write them down. Doing so will help you assess the success of the pilot with more confidence.

Think about the ideal employee experience you’re looking to deliver. Then ask yourself which adjustments get you closest to that target — and which adjustments are viable but might compromise the original intent in a way that makes it a non-starter.

At Wonderlic, our primary goal was employee-experience-related: We wanted to give one extra weekend day to the entire company, both to reduce burnout and to enable them to have more options for enjoying their weekends. Every tactical decision we made during our pilot was influenced by that North Star.

How will you measure success?

Decide well in advance how you’ll measure success — and collect as much baseline data as you can before you start the pilot, so you have something solid to compare new data against.

You’ll likely want to track and compare:

• Key performance indicators (KPIs). These might include sales figures, gross revenue, and EBITA (Earnings before interest, taxes and amortization) data.
• Customer satisfaction. Comparing your net promoter score (NPS) from before the pilot and after, for example, provides a useful metric for customer service; also, don’t discount qualitative data (feedback from customers in emails and phone calls).
• Overall productivity. How this is measured may vary by team and is likely best determined by managers. Engineering teams, for example, might measure success in terms of meeting project milestones on schedule, whereas a sales team may measure cold call volume, meetings held, and so on.
• Employee engagement. Send surveys to employees before you announce the pilot, in the middle of the pilot, and then after the pilot. Your survey should go far beyond asking “Do you want a shorter week?” and instead include questions that help quantify overall sentiment.

Ask employees to rate their feelings about the pilot on a scale of one to five. Decide what approval rating merits a green light. For example, Elephant Ventures felt that a strong majority of employees — 80% or higher — would have to approve the new schedule to move forward. Also, consider tracking the types of reviews your company is receiving from current employees on review sites like Glassdoor.

Who will project manage the pilot?

The small group of leaders who decided to implement the pilot shouldn’t have to do all the legwork. Consider creating a pilot task force of people from various departments with different competencies to assist in gathering and aggregating feedback, brainstorming solutions to challenges, and championing the initiative internally. You might tap a group of managers exclusively or a combination of managers and individual contributors.

Involving a group that’s representative of the whole company at this stage will help you identify challenges and potential solutions you might not have anticipated and send the message that ownership for the success of a potential four-day week is shared by everyone at the company.

How long will you run your pilot?

When looking at companies who succeeded in four-day workweeks, we found there were two overall philosophies to pilot length: run the pilot for roughly a quarter or stay in pilot mode for at least a calendar year to see how changes in seasonality might affect things.

It’s also worth noting that some companies plan to have a longer pilot and see such early success that they end the pilot early to make the policy official — and some intend to have a shorter pilot but then extend it because they feel they need more feedback.

So, regardless of how long you decide to run your pilot, remember that you’re allowed to change the plan on the fly if necessary.

What tools and technologies help your employees work more efficiently and productively?

It may seem daunting to reduce your work hours by 20%, but there’s likely more slack in a traditional five-day workweek than you realize. In fact, in one study, British workers reported being productive only 2.5 hours per day.

Also, keep in mind that your company has already figured out ways to work with the constraints imposed by holiday workweeks, summer hours, and parental leave coverage. So, you may already have some unofficial best practices you could implement in a four-day week.

Here are a few ways you can adjust company policies, processes, and project management approaches to reduce busywork and distractions:

• Start by making hour-long meetings 45 minutes, then see if they can be further shortened to 30 minutes
• When you do have meetings, include short agendas and goals to keep people on track
• Encourage more asynchronous communication, such as email and Slack check-ins
• Adopt project management software such as Asana, Trello, or Basecamp
• Institute “deep work” times so employees get used to practicing sprints, or concentrated hours with no meetings or interruptions so they can focus on important tasks or getting the maximum work done during busy seasons
• Continue offering the remote work options you likely rolled out during the pandemic. Studies show that remote workers are more productive because they have fewer work distractions.

If you’re considering some sort of reduction of your workweek, you probably don’t need to hear this, but we strongly discourage using invasive productivity monitoring tools that track keyboard strokes and employees’ active and idle time on certain applications or sites. Doing so will likely erode the mutual trust all our experts say is necessary to make this approach successful.

Will you change PTO policies?

You may want to adjust your paid time off policies to align with the new schedule and ensure balanced coverage throughout the year. For example, the company Awin doesn’t allow three-day weeks. If a holiday creates a four-day week, that holiday is considered the employee’s weekday off. At Wonderlic, we also encourage people to use PTO earlier in the year to avoid everyone taking time off simultaneously at the end of the year, which is more likely to happen with a four-day week.

How will you prioritize professional development?

Companies that transition to the four-day week must reconsider their policies on professional development. For example, if you previously allowed employees time to take classes during work hours, this may not be possible with a shorter schedule. Be sure to communicate the expectation, such as saying, “Coursework should be completed outside of the 32-hour work week.”

How will you talk about the pilot with job applicants?

Consider how you’ll talk (or not talk) about the experiment you’re running in the recruiting process. You don’t want to bait and switch anyone if it doesn’t pan out.

When software company PDQ ran a four-day trial, their pilot lasted a full year. During this time, they continued to hire new employees, but they didn’t advertise the shorter work week. Instead, at the end of the hiring process, they told new employees the good news about their pilot schedule.

How to run an effective pilot

Careful preparation will set you up for a successful pilot, but refining your approach will likely require taking an iterative approach to problems and optimizing processes while the pilot is in progress. Here are a few things to consider as you dive in.

Announce your intentions to the company well in advance

At least a month before you launch the pilot, officially announce your plans to the company at large — beyond the initial champions and task force. This will give managers and their direct reports ample time to prepare for the change.

Managing expectations up front is crucial. Frame the pilot as an experiment, not as the inevitable ramp-up to a new normal. Be transparent about the benefits you hope it will deliver to the whole company and the ways you’ll determine whether making the transition is viable for your company.

Explain how you’ll gather feedback, what results you’re looking for, and when you expect to know whether you’ll go forward.

Finally, make it clear you’re open to suggestions at any point during the pilot experience.

Announce your intentions to your partners and customers

Just as you would prepare for a sales pitch, work with managers to brainstorm potential objections that your clients and partners might have that your initial task force might not have foreseen.

Then, proactively reach out to clients and explain your plan for solving those potential issues before they arise. Obviously, make clear that you’re only piloting the idea, not instituting it permanently. And reassure them that they shouldn’t see any degradation in the service they receive — and encourage them to come to you directly with any feedback.

Review and adjust to feedback regularly

As we mentioned earlier, consider polling employees at least three times — at the beginning of the pilot, halfway through, and at the end. (If you run a year-long pilot, you’ll likely want to increase this number.) Weigh the potential benefits of anonymous feedback (more honest feedback) against more transparent feedback (a clearer sense of team-specific or personality-specific concerns).

Schedule time for important decision-makers to meet regularly to share and discuss feedback as it comes in. Most importantly, make adjustments as needed. The goal of your pilot is to find out which elements of this experiment work best for your company, and the best way to find out is to have an iterative process that assumes you won’t get it right on the first try.

Assess the pilot’s results — and make a decision

A few weeks before the end of the pilot, assess the data you’ve gathered (both quantitative and qualitative).

Keep all of your goals top of mind, not just your central goal.

Then, gather all your insights, review your original plan for measuring success, and compare your results. Did you hit your benchmarks? Which ones were reached or exceeded, and which weren’t quite met? Were there any surprises? Systematically look at how the results sync up with your main goals.

After doing all that, it’s time to make a decision. But don’t think in terms of all or nothing:

1. You may feel confident and decide to move forward with the implementation.
2. You may feel you need to extend your pilot before committing to a four-day workweek.
3. You might decide a four-day week isn’t a good fit for your organization, and that’s okay, too.

However, if you choose option three, it’s important you don’t just fall back into the status quo. Discuss whether there are different methods of moving toward your original goal. Consider offering other work/life balance benefits your employees will appreciate, like:

• One Friday off a month instead of every week
• No-meeting Fridays
• Extending summer hours by a month
• Instituting deep work periods so people can get in a flow and avoid constant context-switching

How to “make it official”

It’s important to be as strategic about communicating whatever change you’ve decided to make as you were in designing and executing the pilot. Here are three steps you shouldn’t skip.

Communicate thoughtfully to employees, customers, and ownership or the board of directors

The announcements should emphasize that you’ve found an implementation that sufficiently satisfies your original goals. Send a mass email to all customers, ideally coming from your CEO. Consider recording a short video explaining the move and including it in the email. Equip customer service teams with talking points about why you’re making the change, and preemptively answer any concerns about availability.

Tell people beyond your inner circle

Next, announce the news to the world. This opportunity not only allows for new talent recruitment but also provides long-term marketing benefits as your brand becomes associated with a more progressive workplace. Whether you work with a public relations firm or handle PR internally:

• Draft a press release with quotes from leadership and use a PR wire service to distribute it
• Share the news on all your company’s social media platforms
• Encourage the CEO, head of HR, and other leaders to share their own posts endorsing the exciting announcement
• Provide employees with prewritten posts they can use as a foundation for their social media platforms as well; the more people share this exciting announcement, the better

Update your website, recruiting content, and internal policies

Lastly, mention this incredible new benefit in your job descriptions and the Careers and About Us pages of your website. Don’t forget to update employee manuals, agreements, and other relevant internal documents to reflect the policy change.

How to optimize for long-term success

As your company and the world of work evolve, be on the lookout for new ways to make your four-day week continually deliver on your intended goals.

Reach out to the four-day week community

Remember, you’re not alone in this effort to adopt a new way of working. There’s a growing community of four-day workweek companies. Connect with other business leaders who have adopted four-day weeks and join the Foundation for the Four Day Week.

Consider the employee characteristics that align best with four-day workweeks

Leadership commitment and strong organizational structures are important to making a four-day approach work. However, the long-term success of your shorter week will ultimately depend on the performance and happiness of your workforce.

So, as your company designs recruiting and employee development strategies, take stock of the work-related competencies or characteristics that correlate to successfully handling a shorter work week.

We consulted experts who switched to a four-day workweek on the characteristics that correlate with success, and four stood out:

A focus on outcomes over process	“It’s absolutely critical, this idea of being outcome-focused. We’re not interested in any idea of presenteeism, people needing to be seen working hard, or being seen as close to the senior people in the organization.”— Adam Ross, CEO of Awin
Dependability & time-management skills	“There’s a bunch of discipline needed in terms of timeliness and your calendar management and sort of maintaining the intensity of the work day. So we look for very disciplined, very dependable people. Types that when they say they would get a thing done, it gets done. Not employees that need the “didya-do-it” police to get things done.”— Arthur Shectman, CEO of Elephant Ventures
Strong communication and collaboration skills	“We’ve found that if you’re truly working collaboratively and communicating what you need from each other, you’ll find ways to get everything done, and make sure you have coverage every day of the week.”— Victoria Bacon, former HR Director of PDQ
The ability to prioritize	“You have to prioritize about how to leave things undone and ask what your relationship is to incompleteness. Are you okay closing your computer on Thursday night knowing that you didn’t get all your work done but knowing that you got your most important work done?”— Banks Benitez, former CEO of Uncharted

On the recruiting front, using pre-employment assessments like Wonderlic focused on measuring stable competencies (like cognitive ability, motivation, and personality) can help provide a picture of whether your candidates are strong in these areas or not.

Additionally, if you feel your existing workforce could benefit by improving in these areas, consider offering development resources that both give employees awareness of their strengths and weaknesses, and practical recommendations for improvement. Wonderlic Develop is a great tool for providing employees with scalable, self-led, job-specific learning.

Keep a feedback loop going, long-term

Even if you feel like you’ve landed on a four-day formula that works well, invite employee feedback on a regular basis. Specifically, ask questions like:

• Do you feel you’re being asked to do an unreasonable amount of work in four days per week?
• Is the accelerated atmosphere creating undue stress? What might the company do to improve the situation?
• Do you feel you have enough face time with other members of your team? If not, what recommendations might you make?

If you ran a shorter pilot, make sure to ask these questions at least through the first full calendar year so you’re accounting for any seasonal variables you didn’t anticipate.

It’s important to remember that the 40-hour, five-day workweek is not set in stone, and neither is your plan for a four-day workweek. As long as you’re meeting your company goals and your employees and customers are happy, you really are free to create whatever work culture you want.

Addressing challenges and drawbacks

Workload management

According to Banks Benitez, former CEO of Uncharted, in order to come up with a fair plan for executing 40 hours of work 80% of the time, managers need to trust their direct reports’ assessments of how much effort and time projects will really take — and which tasks are truly essential. Likewise, senior leadership needs to trust managers to manage their resources wisely to ensure critical work gets done on time.

When this shift is made, Benitez says, “Employees have the language to be strategic and to hold you as leadership accountable. In some ways, it really shifts [the] power, and it also creates more equitable workplaces.”

Less team bonding

Reducing schedules to prioritize only crucial tasks can result in reduced interaction among teams. This can lead to a decrease in both planned team-building activities as well as informal conversations that occur outside of work-related discussions. These informal conversations can be crucial in fostering relationships between employees. In fact, one Gallup study found that while four-day workers report better well-being and less burnout, many reported slightly higher levels of disengagement.

To promote team bonding even on a tight schedule, Elephant Ventures earmarks the first few minutes of every meeting for socializing and casual conversation. For the same reasons, PDQ schedules regular company-wide break times, where employees can drop what they’re doing, grab a beverage (alcoholic or not), and hang out.

Reduced time with managers

To protect the time needed for mission-critical work, managers may block off more “unavailable” time on their calendars. However, this mentality can potentially lead to direct reports not getting the amount of face time they want — and need — from those managers. At Uncharted, the leadership team solved this problem by asking managers to build-in buffer time to their calendars so their direct reports had adequate opportunities to interact.

Increased deadline-related stress

The prospect of having to do the same amount of work in 80% of the time may intimidate and stress out some employees at first. However, this is an opportunity for management to audit workloads and make changes.

For example, when Awin started a four-day workweek, people initially struggled with workloads. So, management worked to resolve this issue by analyzing and distributing work in a fairer way, investing in a workplace management tool, automating tedious tasks, and cutting down on time-wasting in meetings.

In particular, people who are prone to perfectionism may struggle under the pressure of a compressed timeline, says Uncharted’s Banks Benitez. He recommends dealing with this by providing training and messaging from management that emphasizes how to distinguish between important and unimportant tasks. He explains that prioritizing work has always been part of any employee’s skillset, and now it’s more essential than ever.

Is a Four-day workweek in your future?

We hope you found this guide useful as you consider switching to a four-day workweek. This work model has been incredibly impactful to our organization — improving talent attraction and retention —  and to our employees — benefiting their personal and professional lives tremendously. We hope the four-day workweek has similar results for your organization.

Unlock the potential of your talent at every stage of the employee journey with insights that offer the greatest prediction of on-the-job success.

If you’d like to learn more about using Wonderlic Select’s pre-hire assessment to find qualified talent faster or using our employee development tool to train your workforce and improve their job-critical skills, schedule a demo.