Why we wanted to prototype a reduced work week

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For a moment there, it felt like everyone was moving to a 4 day work week. (I’m not sure how trendy that is now, or whether it was a bit of a flash in the pan.)

These quotes from a recent Culture Study piece resonated with me when thinking about the culture we are trying to build at MM and the reduced workweek experiment:

• By “diversify your meaning-making portfolio,” I mean finding places outside of school and work to center our self-reflexive projects.
• We should be asking: How can we shrink the footprint of paid employment in our lives?

The idea of ‘reducing the footprint of paid employment’ and 'diversifying our meaning-making portfolio' in our lives connects with me at a gut level, and is very much in tension with my workaholic, perfectionist tendencies. (Also, hello scarcity mindset, thank you capitalism, insidious protestant work ethic etc.) So in 2023, I set out to see if we could prototype a reduced work week for Made Manifest Inc.

I was super inspired by the 4-day week movement I saw around me. Companies like Juno College of Technology, August, as well as reporting in outlets like the CBC and The Globe and Mail were leading the way and showing it was possible, with promising results from trials like 4 day work week. For a moment there, it felt like everyone was moving to a 4 day work week. (I’m not sure how trendy that is now, or whether it was a bit of a flash in the pan.)

I’m sharing the story of how we did that and what we learned along the way here, to add to the body of work and evidence around this being a possibility and in case it helps someone else to try it too.

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How It Started: Kickoff, Jan 2023

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In 2022, I had been doing some reading and research on 4 day work weeks in order to get inspired and think a bit about the model I’d like to try for Made Manifest. I also chatted to my team to gauge their interest. (Needless to say they were into it!)

In mid-January 2023, we hosted a team kick off to talk about our first prototype. I shared my perspective on the vision and goals for a reduced work week, and as a team we talked about how we would define success, possible metrics and hopes, dreams and risks we saw.

Our overall vision included:

• More space in our lives for non-work activities (hobbies, caregiving, 'self care', appointments, volunteering, rest, time with friends and family, being in nature, other!).
• Prototyping new (anti-capitalist!) models of working and running a business.
• A comfortable, focused pace of work that is satisfying.
• Trust in team - responsibilities are being met while honouring individual systems of work.

We defined success with the following 'must-haves':

• Team members feel level of work / intensity is at a sustainable level.
• Maintained sales and revenue.
• Maintained productivity (e.g. project timelines don't extend).
• Work quality maintained or improved.
• Feeling of collaboration maintained or improved.

Some of our hopes and fears included:

• Fear: more 'crunched' or intense feeling days just to get to that day off.
• Fear: less time for connection and team fun.
• Hope: better rest, more creativity, feeling even more proud of the studio we are building.
• Hope: showing that another way is possible!
• Hope: clients think we are cool 😂
• Hope: feeling more inspired and time together is more intentional.

We did a pre-mortem activity as a team to talk about what we saw as the biggest risks, imagining that the reduced workweek experiment failed and asking ourselves what the reasons would be. We took time to individually jot down our risks, we then did a lightweight synthesis into some key risk themes, and we then each ranked those risks from the ones we were most to least concerned about.

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The top five risks / concerns that surfaced were:

1. Team disconnection / impact on culture.
2. Impact on the quality of work.
3. Client pressure / the constraints of collaborating with external stakeholders.
4. Time / project management challenges and not sticking to the reduced work week.
5. Overwhelm / stress - less flexibility and more crunched days.

We also talked as a team about our dreams for this effort, and found lots of shared desires like wanting to feel creatively inspired, energized and engaged, spending intentional time together as a team, and having time for things we don’t normally do. Two key principles we agreed on as a team for trying this were:

• Client work even over Internal work: As we are learning, we know we may need to make tradeoffs. When we need to make tradeoffs to reduce workload, we will compromise on internal work only, and deliver for our clients at the same level of quality and commitment as always.
• Importance of a shared, set day and time off: We felt it was important and would help us to stick to the reduced work week to all have the same day / time off. That way it was something we were all accountable to each other for - and meant we were not worried about another team member working or sending messages while we were off.

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The First Prototype: Half Day Fridays - Q1 2023

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Based on all of this discussion and reflection, we identified the prototype we wanted to try and the things we would measure.

Prototype #1

• Half day Fridays in Q1 2023: For all of Q1, we blocked off Friday afternoons from 1pm - 5pm as the studio being closed. We still worked on client work and took meetings on Friday mornings as needed.
• Time tracking: in order to understand how much we are working and where we are spending our time, we implemented time tracking using Harvest.
• Qualitative scorecard: we built a qualitative scorecard which looked at stress, quality of work, team connectedness, whether we stuck to the Fridays off, and our overall feelings about the prototype.

We didn’t communicate explicitly to clients for this first round, with the hypothesis that it wouldn’t have much impact on clients that we were unavailable on Friday afternoons.

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Prototype 1: Learnings - May 2023

The initial prototype period was intended to be Q1 2023, from Jan - March, but ended up running to the end of April due to client work and other priorities.

We came together in May 2023 to discuss how it went and what we would like to try next. For our retro and reflection, we looked at three things:

1. A quantitative company overview, including hours worked, and revenue, profitability and number of clients in Q1 2023 compared to Q1 2022.
2. Our qualitative scorecard that we set up based on the prototype kick off and design.
3. General notes and reflections, retro style.

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Some of the key learnings included:

• Our stress levels felt fairly balanced which was very positive.
• Team connectedness had the biggest spread across different members, which was mostly to do with resourcing on projects (e.g. some people working more solo or with external collaborators at times).
• We all felt that the quality of our work was something we were able to maintain. Yay!
• I (Linn) struggled the most with sticking to Friday afternoons off, and gave myself a B- on this front.
• We learned some valuable lessons around what was doable from a scope perspective, especially during heavier research periods on projects.
• We also identified the challenges of working with other collaborators on projects who had different workstyles, hours or constraints.
• Clients didn’t notice that we were off on Friday afternoons, as suspected.

Something I was very surprised about as a leader was that we all felt some hesitation around reducing the work week further - I had assumed everyone would be hungry to try to move to ‘true’ 4 day week, but we had discussions as a team about the ways in which we felt squeezed at times and hesitant to reduce the work week further.

Some other reflections included:

“It made me more efficient during the rest of the week especially since I knew I didn't have the extra hours to depend on to get work done.”

“Overall I really enjoyed the pilot especially on weeks when I was beginning to feel burnt out because of the pace of the sprint, the Friday afternoons off gave me something to look forward to.”

“I liked the idea of synchronous time-off. Great for consistency and scheduling my week.”

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The Second Iteration: Alternating Fridays Off - June - Sept 2023

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We explored a couple of different possibilities for how to iterate and what to try next, and ultimately landed on a bit of a hybrid between keeping only the half days and trying to move to a full four day week.

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Prototype #2

I proposed the following to the team:

• Keep half day Fridays in June, to allow us some time to smooth the transition to the next iteration.
• In July and August do 'Summer Fridays' : The studio is 'closed' to client work on Fridays (we would communicate this to clients) & we alternate being fully off, with a half day morning on internal stuff - team 1:1s or team social time - for example:

1. Friday morning #1–1:1 meetings, internal work
2. Friday morning #2 - fully off / studio closed
3. Friday morning #3 - team hangout / coffee / lunch / outing
4. Friday morning #4 - fully off / studio closed

• We would then go back to half day Fridays in Sept and do a retro on how we felt it went, and decide on our next iteration.

It seemed that having client work on Friday mornings led to a bit of a rush or crunch to wrap things up by the afternoon, so we decided to try to move the ‘end of the week’ to Thursday end of day, and then keep some dedicated time on Friday mornings twice a month to connect as a team.

This felt like a good compromise between not crunching the week further by trying to get team 1:1s and socials in during the week, while also creating additional time off.

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Prototype #2: Learnings - September 2023

In late September, we came together to reflect once again, using our qualitative dashboard, a check in on company metrics, some overall reflections and a ‘stop start continue’ exercise.

Some of our key learnings included:

• As a team we were once again very aligned overall in our perceptions of stress, work quality, team connectedness, sticking to Fridays off, and how we felt about the prototype.
• The team really liked the balance and rhythm of the alternating half day Fridays for 1:1s and team socials, and voted to continue this pattern.
• With more stat hols and long weekends in the summer, we found things got really crunchy during extra short weeks, e.g. being off on a Friday and the following Monday for a stat holiday like Canada Day.
• We talked about setting boundaries and expectations with clients - overall this had gone well, but continuing to be clear about what to expect felt important to the team to not stress when clients continued to email on Fridays.
• We had also organically ended up prototyping some additional asynchronous comms - mainly a priorities of the week email coming from Linn to the team, and an overall ‘MM Dashboard’ with updates on pipeline and internal projects ahead of 1:1s.
• We had some issues with consistently time tracking, leading to some gaps in our data on hours worked.

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One of the really interesting conversations that emerged when reviewing company revenue, profitability and hours worked was talking about what types of metrics were meaningful for us, and what our overall vision and desire for the studio was. This actually led to another prototype (Day of Dreaming) in order to create dedicated space to explore those conversations, but that’s another story.

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How It's Going

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Following the Summer Fridays prototype, we decided to keep the alternating half day / day off Friday pattern.

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One important tweak was to attempt to plan more strategically around the statutory holidays so that we wouldn't end up with 3 day weeks. Otherwise, the main next step was continuing to set clear expectations with clients via our proposals and project onboarding that the studio is closed to clients on Fridays.

We’ve been working in this pattern since July 2023, and it seems to be working well for us, the studio and clients.

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Reflections

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It’s been interesting to document this for sharing and to reflect back on our prototypes and learning. Here's what I'd offer for consideration if a reduced work week or 4 day week is something you'd like to explore:

• Experiment with the model that works for you - copying something exactly from somewhere else might not get you the results you need.
• Ease into it - I would recommend starting out with cutting back a half day for a period and seeing how this impacts your rhythm.
• Qualitative and quantitative data matters - looking at it in these different ways gives you a holistic picture. For example: One big learning for me with time tracking - I thought I actually worked waaay more hours which says something interesting to me about my stress levels and the quality of those hours.
• An ongoing tension is around flexible hours vs 4 day week - for example, is this about time boxing work into a set pattern in order to create more open and spacious days off, or would you rather be able to run errands during the day or take time off for a doctors appt mid week and make up the hours later?

In the end I think we have landed somewhere in the middle - we use  the Fridays off and half days as a commitment to ourselves and each other to create space for other things in life, however there is at times (what feels like) inevitable spill over, and discretion that we all exercise.