“A four day workweek? That would be amazing! But it could never work for my organization…” This is the response I most often get when I tell people that NAS practices a four day workweek. Understandably so; it’s a huge shift in how we think of the shape of our time and rubs up against established norms. And it’s a huge lift to establish, requiring a change in how we structure our time, work within the NAS team, and with external folks. Ultimately, the set-up of the four-day workweek has been worth the outcome, for us.
You don’t have to look far these days to see evidence of a four-day workweek’s benefits. The practice has now been widely researched and adopted, with organizations such as 4 Day Week Global as a leader in advocacy and movement building: https://www.4dayweek.com/.
I’m not here to recap those benefits (the website mentioned above is a great resource), but rather to share a bit about my teammates’ and my experience of the four day workweek at a small non-profit.
We were a few months into the pandemic when NAS decided to roll with this idea. Everyone was interested, though all of us were a bit skeptical for various reasons. Would we really stop working on Friday? Would the shorter workweek have implications for future salary adjustments? Would this make our Monday-Thursday a back-to-back Zoomathon with no time to think or take breaks?
First, we had to determine what a four-day workweek meant to us. Critical parts of our definition were:
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- Our new workweek would be Monday-Thursday. Everyone is required to follow this schedule, with flexibility for shifting some work time to Friday in order to accommodate an occasional commitment or appointment Monday-Thursday
- 32 hours was now considered fulltime at NAS — no expectation to work more hours M-Th in order to compensate for Fridays off
- No one was going to take a paycut as as result of this, and we committed to continue to increase salaries as per usual without using the reduced workweek as a reason to cap
Trying this out, we had some assumptions that needed to be tested. As is our practice at NAS, we committed to moving into this with a spirit of experimentation, pausing to check-in, reflect and re-adjust. Our overarching hypothesis in trying out the four-day workweek was: If we give our teammates an extra day off-work, it will contribute to their well-being and enable them to show up with greater clarity of thought, energy, focus and ability to work smarter (not harder). Because of this — as well as some tools and structural changes to support time management– we will be able to do a similar amount of work in a shorter period of time.
The moment — peak pandemic — opened our team up to new ways of doing things. We were willing to give it a go.
We are now on year three of working four days and our “experiment” has shifted into a practice. I recently asked my NAS teammates to reflect on its benefits. To list a few:
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- People with kids love having a “no kids/no work” day to get things done and take care of themselves
- Many used this time to pursue creative passions, hobbies and learning opportunities
- Team members cited more time spent with family and friends
For me, this shift has been absolutely transformational in both expected and unexpected ways.
I’m a mother of two young children, living far from the support of their grandparents and extended family. My husband and I moved to our community not long before the pandemic started — we had just started to try to find our “village” of support and connection. In between work trips, late night hours, and weekends controlled by our kids’ schedules, this was challenging. While I traveled around for NAS talking with arts leaders about the amazing ways in which they connected with their communities, there was little time or brainspace to actually connect with my own.
As the pandemic started, the need to connect with community and be part of a network of support felt ever more crucial. So when the change at NAS allowed me to have a weekday without kids or work, I made a commitment to use that time to connect locally. The actions I took were part of both formal and informal structures — everything from joining the board of our local cooperative preschool to organizing meal trains for neighbors. It contributed exponentially to my well-being, and had really practical and tangible benefits for my work, as well.
But of course, like with anything we do at NAS, there was some trial and error and iterative design to get to these beautiful outcomes. Here were some of our key learnings, including some things we are still working on:
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- We had to learn to be more efficient. In expecting our team to fit five days of work into four, we all had to skill-up in a few areas related to efficiency. This started with taking a look at how we approach our workdays. Two tools that were really useful in this were time audit worksheets to track where we spend our time and what effect it has on our energy (you can make your own or use the example here) and inspiration for more focused work practices from the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. Both of these things encouraged us to examine work habits that wasted time, prolonged a task or distracted us. We adopted project management (Asana) and scheduling (Calendly) tools, organization-wide to build more efficiency.
- We looked at our meeting culture… One of the key challenges with a four day workweek is the ratio of meetings to solo work time. When compressing our workweek, we quickly realized that we’d have to cut back on meetings or the entire week would be spent on Zoom. To solve for this, we try to continually audit our meeting load by supporting organizers to identify a clear purpose and outcome before calling the meeting. It’s made us second guess scheduling more than a few times. We’ve introduced alternative ways of collaborative work, like using Miro as a workspace and synchronous “slack-ups”.
- …and actually added some meetings.We had to be careful on the meeting auditing. We had heard about other organizations drastically cutting social time and non-work chatter in order to increase efficiency. And that just isn’t who we are. Part of the magic of NAS is that we hold relationships dear, and some of our best ideas come out of random, off-topic exchanges between teammates. We didn’t want to overcorrect the meeting situation to the point of losing this dynamic. So we introduced both structured and unstructured moments for these exchanges to happen. One such practice is that – as a mostly remote team – we decided to all come into the office together on Wednesdays, and we have lunch together. In this way, the connection and community feel both spontaneous and contained. And to compensate for a very social Wednesday, team members might block off an entire Tuesday from meetings and slack.
- If everything’s a priority then nothing is a priority. The process of dropping Fridays prompted us to think about where we really wanted our focus to be as an organization. Were we expending effort in places that mattered a lot less than others? As part of our strategic planning, our team used tools such as the Mission/Money Matrix to help us make decisions about where to prioritize. And to guide the whole team in thinking about where they should be spending the bulk of their energy, we leaned into our use of OKRs (check this great guide to OKRs from Fractured Atlas).
As we continue on with the four-day workweek, we reflect and make adjustments as-needed. In sharing our lessons, we recognize that what works for our organization won’t necessarily work for others. In that spirit we invite you to envision how you and your organization could build off the lessons we’ve learned, both in how they apply and how they wouldn’t.
