Leaders: is the four-day week right for your organisation?
It’s the week after Easter, and that means we’re all enjoying our second four-day week in a row (or perhaps not enjoying, if the bank holidays have left your to-do list looking even scarier than normal…)
It might even have prompted you to think what it would be like if your organisation worked four days every week. So in this post, we want to help leaders considering a four-day week to work out whether it’s right for their organisation. In it, we’ve drawn on our experience both of running a four-day week pilot as Forward Action’s co-CEOs and now advising other leaders on the four-day week as part of Modern Change.
We’ve seen first hand the power of the four-day week to drive big change, raise staff wellbeing, and improve productivity and motivation. But it’s not right for every organisation (yet). And even leaders who are four-day week-curious are understandably nervous about making such a big change.
So - let’s dive into the potential benefits and risks (with strategies for how to mitigate them) of a four-day week.
How a four-day week could benefit your organisation
1. It’s an unbeatable opportunity for change
For us, this is what makes a four-day week so uniquely valuable for leaders.
To make a four-day week work, you need to be able to keep delivering the same key outcomes as you do now. That means five days’ worth of impact and income generation squeezed into four.
Most organisations can’t simply click their fingers and make that happen. It requires making significant changes to how you work. It means getting smarter with how you spend your time, and better at understanding what it is you do that really moves the needle on your goals.
So a four-day week creates a powerful and highly credible change moment. And this is the crucial thing: if staff want the four-day week, they’ll buy-in to making big organisation-level changes. What’s more, they’ll be up for playing an active role in shaping and driving that change. That’s incredibly valuable, because co-created change is far more sticky than change that’s driven top-down.
At Forward Action, this allowed us to rapidly drive through a series of major changes, improving our structure, our productivity, and our culture. In a matter of months, we resolved issues around burnout and an inefficient team structure that had seemed intractable for years. It may well have been possible to do that without the change moment created by four-day week, but it would have been much more difficult and, counter-intuitively, more disruptive.
2. It can transform staff wellbeing and retention
Unsurprisingly, most pilots have found that the four-day week has a highly positive effect on staff wellbeing. A year on from the UK-wide four-day week pilot, 96% of staff say it has improved their personal lives. At Forward Action, 80% of staff felt it was a net positive for their experience of work, with the remaining 20% neutral.
It was the qualitative data we received at Forward Action that was most striking, though. Colleague after colleague reported higher energy levels, better mental health, and being more focussed and productive at work. We even saw people more willing to take on new responsibility - e.g. this anonymous feedback we received:
“I can't remember when I last felt so motivated and optimistic about work for this long! I'm no longer sulky about additional responsibility or trying to do things at pace, because I feel the benefit every week.”
As you might expect, this boost to wellbeing and motivation translates through to better staff retention. 50% of organisations in the UK pilot reported reduced staff turnover. Indeed, at Forward Action, in the 18 months to date since we began work on our four-day week pilot, not a single member of staff has left the organisation.
A four-day week can also play a significant role in your recruitment strategy, too. We’re currently working with a small charity that struggles to compete on salary in the hiring market. Instead, they’re planning to use the offer of a four-day week to help them attract the best people.
3. Higher efficiency, more strategic clarity
If you’re going to make sure you deliver the same outcomes in four days as you do in five, first you need to know how to measure those outcomes. This might seem like an obvious point, but it’s a deceptively powerful strength of a four-day week pilot.
Setting unambiguous success criteria that are tied to your key outcomes (impact, income etc.) gives you an opportunity to 1) make sure everyone understands what your shared goals are and 2) give people a shared, laser-like focus on hitting them.
The undertaking of achieving those goals is where the opportunity for efficiency and smarter working comes in. To prepare for our four-day week pilot at Forward Action, we involved our whole team in co-designing improvements to how we worked. Using a lean working framework, we scrapped low-value meetings, streamlined our processes, and moved into smaller, more agile cross-functional project teams.
Doing this not only enabled us to maintain or even improve our key outcomes under a four-day week, it also did a lot to future proof the organisation and make it better able to adapt to change down the road.
The risks of a four-day week, and how you can mitigate them
1. You might need to roll it back
Let’s start with the biggest risk: your four-day week might not work out. That is why you start with a pilot, of course - that’s your key mitigation. But if your pilot doesn’t meet its success criteria and you need to go back to a five-day week, it’s very possible there will be a dent to staff morale and a short-term increase in people leaving.
To reduce the chances of this happening, it's crucial to invest time upfront in properly planning the pilot, communicating clear success criteria that need to be met for it to continue, and only going ahead if you're confident you can make it work. You also need to make sure staff are crystal clear that success criteria are red lines and that the four-day week will not become permanent unless they are met.
You should also run a pilot for a decent amount of time - at least 6 months, ideally 12 - so you have a chance to iron out issues as you go.
2. Reduced organisational slack
Even with the productivity improvements a four-day week can unlock, your organisation will likely have a bit less "slack" to absorb peaks in workload. This risk can be mitigated in three ways:
cross-training staff so that people can more easily step in to cover other roles if needed
setting the expectation that in rare circumstances staff will need to work late or on the fifth day
embedding a culture of continuous improvement, so that everyone is always looking for ways to work smarter and more efficiently.
3. Some teams may find it harder than others
Depending on the nature of their work, some teams may find adapting to a four-day week more difficult - for example, a frontline service delivery team that needs to provide full time cover.
The key is to remember that there's no one-size-fits-all model for a four-day week. As long as people are doing an average of 32 hours for full time pay, exactly how that's achieved can vary. You could take a flexible approach, with each team adopting the model that works best for them. Even the number of hours isn’t a hard and fast rule; some companies have gone down the route of a 36 hour four-day week, with staff working 9 hours a day rather than 8.
If helpful, we’d be happy to talk you through the different models other companies are used.
4. Getting the external narrative right
Clear external communication is important too. You'll need to craft an honest and appealing narrative for donors, beneficiaries and other key stakeholders about why you're adopting a four-day week.
That should emphasise that it won't lead to any reduction in your impact and that you are carefully measuring the outcomes of the pilot. You may also want to position it as a bold, progressive move that will make your organisation stronger and more sustainable for the future.
5. Sustaining the benefits
Finally, there's the risk that initial productivity gains from a four-day week don't stick, so that as time goes on inefficiency creeps back in and your performance starts to drop.
At Forward Action, we mitigated this by putting our core impact and income metrics front and centre in how we all make decisions and measure success. Everyone understands what these key numbers are, what they mean for our mission, and why it's so important that we sustain them. It also meant we’d be able to quickly catch and address any slide in performance before it became embedded.
Conclusion
Moving to a four-day week involves significant organisational change. But when it works, the benefits can be transformational - your organisation will become more resilient, your teams more effective, and your staff happier. You'll be able to address deep structural or cultural issues such as burnout, and it can also equip you to navigate major coming shifts, such as the rise of AI.
For Forward Action, it was absolutely worth it, and we'd make the same decision again in a heartbeat.
If you'd like to explore how a four-day week could work for your organisation, we'd love to help. You can book an intro call with us here or email us at hello@modernchange.uk.
