This past week in news about the 4-day week:
Companies
- Automation Made Simple writes about how they moved to a 4-day week. Not surprisingly, “we’re using automation to reduce our workload and simplify the day-to-day running of our business.”
- Coconut Software cofounder Katherine Regnier wrote in December about “Why We Created Cabana Days: Our Version Of A Four Day Work Week“
- DNSFilter started piloting a 4-day week in August 2021
and I just found out about it. In October, they made it permanent, with some tweaks. - Fairway Homecare has introduced a 4-day week in its head office.
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Pros
Several new articles look at the 4-day week a year, two, or three after it was implemented, at business consultancy Wilson Fletcher, tech company Buffer, and Canadian municipality Guysborough.
I talked about the 4-day week on Cheddar News:
I was also a guest on Connecticut Public Radio’s “Where We Live.”
Cons
Some skeptical coverage is only to be expected when you get a lot of press.
- Emily Peck argues that “The needle isn’t moving on four-day workweeks.” She points to a combination of job numbers, along with some reportage from McKinsey, to argue that it’s still not really a thing. I have some thoughts on this.
- Peter Crush asks, “Does a four-day week undermine true flexibility?” He writes, “suggestions have been made that this model could actually strip away employees’ ability to work more flexibly across the entire week, by shoe-horning them into an even more rigid routines.” However, he also notes that these suggestions “have been rejected by organisations that have already made four-day weeks permanent.”
- In Morning Brew, Katie Hicks recently wrote, “in agency settings, where business is often subject to client whims and schedules, it’s less a question of why the need for a four-day week and more a question of if it’s even possible.”
- RedSprout CEO Olivia Webb writes about why her company abandoned its 4-day week experiment. Personally, I really appreciate these pieces, because it’s a lot harder to find companies willing to talk about their failures than their successes.