How to transition to a 4-day workweek without sacrificing productivity

3 critical steps to implementing a 4-day workweek

June 23, 2022 2:00 PM

In 2020, when digital marketing company Feathr transitioned to a four-day workweek, it wasn’t just to give time back to its employees. It was out of necessity.

The company, which provides marketing support to non-profits, saw business halt as COVID made its impact. Rather than conserve cash with a round of layoffs, co-founder and CEO Aleksander Levental decided to implement temporary 20% pay cuts for his 160 employees — and soften the financial blow by cutting work hours, too.

“As business slowed, it wasn’t like there was more productivity we could get out of our team,” he says. “So the 20% pay cut — which happened on a sliding scale, with high earners bearing more of that burden — along with a broad reduction in working time, felt like it wouldn’t cut too deep into our close culture at Feathr.”

Of course, there were still challenges ahead: Getting buy-in from employees who just lost a portion of their pay and squeezing forty hours of work into a 32-hour week would both take focused attention from the leadership team. With a mix of forward-looking planning and transparency, Levental carved out Feathr’s new path toward success.

“In 2021, we saw our best growth ever,” Levental says, noting that salaries have returned to pre-pandemic levels. “I can’t say that the four-day workweek is the only reason things are going well. But I think the more important metric is, nothing is worse because of the four-day workweek.

Here are three steps Feathr took to successfully adjust their work schedule while maintaining morale and productivity.

Set (and over-communicate) goals

When Levental originally introduced his plan to his team, there was a mix of gratefulness and fear, he says.

“COVID made everything uncertain, and it’s never a good thing that the company you’re working at is cutting pay,” he says. “But people understood that the pay cut was for a specific reason. Still, I think most people would have rather worked on Fridays and received full pay.”

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To keep his workers feeling secure and calm, Levental knew he needed to keep his team looped in at each step. The cut back in pay and workdays kicked off in July of 2020, but Feathr immediately started inching its way back toward 100% pay, while maintaining its new four-day week.

“We set moderate goals to reach by Q4, and told our team that if we could hit those, we’d go back to 90% pay,” he says. “And when we got to 90% pay, we started to organize around new targets, and this was as COVID was starting to thaw a little bit, and customers were starting to get back to normal budgeting.”

As Feathr started to hit those new sets of goals, it became clear that the company’s pay and business demand would return to normal — and it did, by Q1 of 2021, along with 100% salaries — but it would never return to a 40-hour week.

Keep boundaries flexible

For Levental, the four-day workweek always meant a 32-hour workweek — he was never interested in cramming 40 hours into fewer days.

“Best of luck to all the companies who are trying that, but it felt disingenuous to me,” he says. “We want to move those hours to the weekend, and let people rest or decompress.”

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He also knows that, just as people often work more than 40 hours in any given week, members of his team may continue clocking more than 32 hours. But that’s OK, too.

“People are professionally motivated, and sometimes putting in two hours of focused work on a project on Friday might really give someone peace of mind,” he says. “We know that people will work more than eight hours on some days, and some people will chip away at projects on the weekend. We’re not saying that it’s illegal to do work on a Friday. But we’re creating guidelines to help their normal week feel better.”

Find smarter ways to work

Squeezing a full week of productivity into 32 hours would take some effort, and Levental and his team started looking for tech tools and scheduling systems to help the Feathr staff make better use of their time.

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“We talked a lot about focusing on the two or three most important things that are critically necessary to meet our goals,” Levental says. “We trimmed certain meetings from an hour to 30 minutes, and we looked at the tools we were using to find more efficient workflows.”

The sales team, for example, started using PandaDoc for its digital contract management, and found it boosted efficiencies.

“Having our sales team do demos and talk to customers, those are really worthwhile uses of time,” Levental says. “Being able to save them time with software tools that could streamline efficiencies when it comes to things like paperwork, that all adds up."