Thriving In A 4-Day Work Week: Wins & Lessons Learned

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Becca Banyard: You've probably heard of the four-day work week, right?

Sounds like an unrealistic aspiration, but what if I told you it's possible? And that a growing number of companies are successfully lowering the number of hours and days that employees have to work without reducing salaries, productivity, or profitability.

Welcome to the People Managing People podcast. We're on a mission to build a better world of work and to help you create happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. I'm your host, Becca Banyard.

Today I'm joined by Rita Wittek, the Director of People at Homerun, an all-in-one hiring tool that helps small businesses make meaningful hires.

Rita is gonna share with us her recent experience of successfully implementing a four-day work week at Homerun, how she did it, what she learned, how she measured success of the initiative, and the positive implications that this has had on the lives of Homerun's employees.

Rita, welcome to the show. It is so great to have you here today.

I'm really excited to hear how Homerun has implemented a four-day work week. Such an exciting topic. But before we get started, why don't you just tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and Homerun, the company you work at, and what you do there?

Rita Wittek: Sure. Hi, Becca! Thanks for having me, first of all. Super excited to be here.

All right, a little bit about myself. I'm Rita, and I would describe myself as a pretty hands-on people leader. I've worked in startups in mainly Amsterdam for the last, I dunno, seven plus years, and I've been setting up the employee experience from scratch. Basically, that's what I do.

I build and design processes, guidelines, all these kind of things. Everything that involves the employee experiences, it's what I do. And within those topics, the things that I'm most passionate about is generally work-life balance, mental health at work. Like that's the stuff that really gets me going.

It's just about integrating life and work in a very harmonious way. And yeah, right now I work at Homerun. Homerun is a hiring tool for small and medium size businesses. Our tool helps these businesses to organize the hiring workflow. We are a small company ourselves, so we know that it can be pretty tricky when you maybe don't have an in-house recruiter or things like that.

So we have created a tool for that. We create lots of content as well. Apart from that, just very passionate about the people space. I also co-founded the Slack community in Amsterdam, and the reason for that was that it can be pretty lonely sometimes working in HR. And I just felt like I, I needed some people around me to reach out to, to talk about like the big and small topics of HR and worked up pretty well.

We have 700 members now, and we just talk about everything that needs talking about. So yeah, that's me. I'm talking to you about the four-day work week today, and we are a super small company and in the past I was not always sure it would be relevant for other companies to hear our story just because we are such a small company.

But since we implemented it and the response we've gotten was so surprising to see how many people want to learn about it, hear about it, and then it made me realize that just because we are a small business, we are so nimble and creative and we like to challenge the status quo and just try out new things. I think sometimes small businesses are the place where these things happen quicker. Like they're quicker to innovate, and yeah, I just hope I can inspire others.

Becca Banyard: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm sure you will. Yeah. So you implemented the four-day work week, and so I'd love to just hear from the beginning how you came to this decision.

What was your process for determining the feasibility of the four-day work week? How did you come to decide that this was right for your company?

Rita Wittek: Yeah, that's a good question. I think we all know, like across the globe, that the last few years have been quite tough. So much economic uncertainty. And then between the pandemic and just economic turndown in general, people became really tired.

And for me I realized more than ever that our employees, they're just, they're juggling so many balls at the same time and they're just trying to keep everything going. So in the end, it was a quest for more work-life balance, like a personal quest for me, but also things I kept hearing over and over from our employees.

And yeah, it became very personal at some point because I decided to switch to a part-time position. I decided to cut down on my own hours and that was like before I really had heard of the four-day work week or taken note of it. I felt that in my job as like being head of people at a startup, it was, I was so emotionally invested and everything.

At some point I was quite tired and I realized that I needed more than just a weekend to recharge and like do my job again the next week. So I decided to sacrifice 20% of my salary. And I know that's not something that like everyone can afford to do. And it's also something that goes against the grain, right?

We're not taught to work less. I think we're taught to climb the career ladder and to work more hours and work harder and build a career. And that's about earning a lot of money and then spending all that money. And I just decided that wasn't for me. So I cut down on my hours and some other people at home are actually the same.

And after a while, I realized that something interesting was happening because I really started to thrive again, like I realized I was doing a great job. Again, I was motivated, I was well rested, and we hadn't hired any people to fill the gaps or something. So, the two or three people that did the same as me, they were still doing their job.

They were just getting paid less. And that felt kinda crazy at some point because yeah, why should the people that still do the same job get paid less, right? So that's actually what kind of got me going and talking to people in one-on-ones. We're struggling with, you know, these live questions. Should I, you know, maybe work a little bit less than I have to less money.

I don't have to pay for daycare on that day, and all these kinds of things that made me realize there's something kind of wrong with the way we look at work. And if you read up on it, then you might have, or you probably read about it somewhere in the news about the four-day work week. The five-day work week is a pretty outdated relic because it was invented a hundred years ago.

And it was invented actually for the second industrial era. So Henry Ford started to have people work five days in his factories, but that's not at all the way we work today. And all the other parameters have changed. Right? There was so much innovation. So we are already more productive than back then in the way, especially with knowledge work.

So I think for us, when we looked at all that, the four-day workweek wasn't even like a radical departure or anything. It was just a logical next step because the pandemic showed us you can innovate quickly. People had to work from home. All of a sudden you trust them. It worked out. The four-day workweek, we didn't have the same pressure with it.

But I just thought, if we can't shift away from like presenteeism so quickly and work in a way where we focus on output and we focus on results, why couldn't we do the same just with working a few hours less? And yeah, that was kind of what was happening in my head.

Becca Banyard: Yeah. Wow. That's so interesting that you are able to go to a part-time position, yet still succeed in all the work that you had before. So how did you then bring this idea to Homerun? What did that look like?

Rita Wittek: Yeah, so what I did next, because I mean, there was something I was thinking about, I was reading about it, but I didn't know if anyone else was. So what I did I went to the founders of a company.

I went to my manager, I was COO and I just kind of floated the idea. They also said, obviously they'd noticed that I'm still doing my job in four days. So they were open to having me like think about it and write a proposal. And I think the one thing that helped was that one of our founders actually also had cut down on his hours because he'd become a father recently and he wanted to spend time with his son, which, yes, that's a great example too.

And he was also still doing a full job being the CEO of the company. So he said, yeah, actually it makes a lot of sense to think about it. So I started working on a proposal. I didn't involve the team yet because I didn't wanna give anyone false hope. So I read up about it. I talked to people who'd implemented it in different countries.

I talked to a lawyer about it because there's a few like nitty gritty details. I just wanted to know how it would look like, like really down to every detail. Because imagine you just give everyone off suddenly every Friday, and then there's no one to talk to your customers on Friday or these kind of like things that you maybe don't think about at first, you really need to have a plan.

So I came up with a couple of overarching goals that I had, and then I just wanted to have an idea of how to handle that. I was saying, why do we wanna do this? And my main goal has always been, and always probably will be is improve overall wellbeing of our employees. So I just want people to have time to spend on other aspects of their life.

And then I think this will always have a positive impact on mental health, on family life, all these things. And by that I was thinking this would always probably also boost engagement and motivation within our team, getting them to feel more excited about Homerun, about coming to work, and then also become more productive.

And I don't like saying more productive, and I'll probably tell you all about that, that later. Because I have a lot to say about productivity, but I thought, I made the assumption also from my research that a shorter work week would streamline the way we work and that people would be more mindful about the time they actually spend at work.

Then another point I wrote down was I wanted this to be like a very inclusive benefit because I think everyone should be treated the same way. But I also thought about, you know, all the people that maybe have caring responsibilities or that have something else they kind of need that time for. But it also helps think society at large.

You know, if men spend more time at home with their children, it also helps women in general, and it normalizes the fact that everyone in the end works four days. So everyone has the same chances to get a promotion or to, you know, just do their work. Because yeah, sometimes you see women get left behind because they switch to part time once they have children.

So in tech, there's predominantly a lot of men working there. So I thought that would help with that as well. Not sure I'm explaining this in a way that's very clear.

Becca Banyard: Yeah, no, it's great. I'm curious, so if I understand correctly, you first ran a test of the four-day work week and now you've officially implemented it?

Rita Wittek: No, that's correct. I did my whole research. I wrote down a proposal. I was also telling our founders and COO that I thought this would help us retain people. It's a big point. It's very challenging to attract talents in this market. And then I also thought, yeah, it would help you hire people in future.

And also find the people that met your company in a way that align with your values. One of our values is actually keep your balance. So I thought that's a nice way of tying our values in with benefit like the four-day work week. So I wrote all that down and then I presented it to the founders and to our COO and they were pretty impressed by everything.

Also, the results that I showed them that other companies had and they basically gave me the green light to start a pilot. And that's when I started involving the team because for me, the team is the most important part of this. I try to treat our whole employee experience like a product where my team is, they're my customers. So I have to talk to them to continuously like improve their experience at Homerun and to, yeah, to change if they're not happy, and to just make sure that they wanna subscribe to our product.

In that case, my product is their experience. So I just wanna make them happy in a way with something that fits them, right? So I involve them and I ask them all kinds of questions. How they thought this would impact their productivity? Would they still be able to get their work done? Would they even like this benefit?

You know, a lot of people told me in one-on-ones, they would like to work less, but then, yeah, I still needed to know. And I asked them what they would do on their day off because I was pretty curious about that too. And also if they maybe saw ways that they could improve their weeks, like if there were any time wasted, if they had too many meetings and all these kinds of things.

I had one-on-ones I ran a focus group, I sent out surveys, all these kinds of things. And then I documented everything before we started to just yeah, be as prepared as possible.

Becca Banyard: That's amazing. So once you kind of started running this test, how did you determine that it was successful? What kind of criteria were you looking at? And also you mentioned surveys. Was there any other way that you were collecting data or way that you were analyzing the data to make sure that your success metrics were being met?

Rita Wittek: Yeah, definitely. So I think in a way it's very important to know what data you wanna compile and what you're measuring, right?

I told you before, for me, the overall wellbeing and happiness of our employees was the most important. And then I was sure that out of that good work would follow. So I did get all kinds of different data points and I would actually try to find out as much as possible. But I think, you know, if you only measure productivity, because that's what you see a lot when you look at the four-day work week in the news, they say, Oh this company has become 40% more productive. I'm just not sure it's true.

So for me, it depends on what productivity is and what your goal is by having people work less. So for example, we work in six week cycles, and then the projects are different every cycle. So they can be more complex than one week than the other. And sometimes it's a really creative cycle, so it's difficult to measure.

So it's much more about looking at how productivity is perceived and measuring outputs. So I would ask them the same questions every month and I would ask about their mental health. I would ask about life at home. I would ask about how they're getting on with their work. I would ask managers how their teams are getting on with their work.

And just by combining all these different questions and giving it some time as well. Because some of these things like mental health, it's not something that you change in two weeks. I was pretty surprised that quite often companies trialed before they work for like a month or two, even though it's very difficult to measure because it's a long term impact that you want.

Right? And for example, for us, if you compare company performance year on year, the last few years have already been quite different because of the pandemic. And then last year was also a pretty strange year. So if you only look at that, you won't know if it's a success and you can tie everything in together.

So I really looked at focus, at teamwork, flexibility, happiness, all these kinds of things, and just asked every single month how that was going. And then if there were things that we thought we could improve on, we would. So we did change it a lot and we adapted a lot of things. So we cut out lots of meetings and we also, for example, changed how rigid we would be in having people change days, because I also didn't want the situation where everyone is off a different day every week.

So you need to find a way that people can collaborate and yeah, I think that's what happened. So the pilot kind of kicked off this conversation about productivity and it had all the teams thinking more consciously about how they work and when they work and all these kinds of things.

Becca Banyard: I'm curious what you decided in the end with allowing people to have flexibility in the day that they chose to take off, but still making sure that there were days that people overlapped. What did you decide in the end?

Rita Wittek: Yeah, so like I mentioned before, I asked them in the beginning, before we started, like what they would like just to gauge what kind of, because if everybody would say Friday and I was like, now we're gonna have a problem.

Then I already saw that there were quite a few different answers. So I saw some people wanted Monday, some people wanted Friday, some people wanted Wednesday. And then we just decided that Tuesday and Thursday would be company days so that everyone works on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

And then between the other days, people could choose, but once they chose, they needed to stick to that day. And also make sure with their team that they don't all choose the same day. So for example, for customer support, now one person is off on Monday, one on Wednesday, and one on Friday. So then there's always somewhere there.

And obviously we are a flexible company. If you need to switch your day, there's always a way of doing it. It's just not the norm. So you have one day and that's just your fixed day off. But within that, obviously there are exceptions.

Becca Banyard: That's awesome. Obviously, we know that it positively impacted their personal lives, their home lives, their mental health. But you said most people were keen to do the four-day work week, but was there any pushback from your team at all about not wanting to do this?

Rita Wittek: Not really. No. I think, I mean, I didn't say that, but I think it's implied. But the way we did the four-day work week is also at full pay, so nobody was sacrificing any salary. So it's working a day less. Obviously some people were concerned about would we still be able, you know, to get our work done?

So I think that was the biggest fear. What are you expecting of me actually in those four days? So I got some questions from people. Would I have to work 10 hours a day? You know, if I am not done with my work, do I have to work on my day off? Will I be contacted on my day off? So I did get these kinds of questions, and that's something that I took into account.

There was no one that didn't want it. There were some people that were saying, I have no idea what I'm gonna do with my day off. But those were also the people that came back to me like a few months later and said, wow, this like I took up a new hobby. There's someone that is like in first aid course and now as a first responder and all these kinds of things, they didn't even know they wanted.

Becca Banyard: So good. I love that.

Rita Wittek: Yeah. Apart from that, I think it also helped kind of reinfuse the company with more creativity. Just because you are well rested, you're a bit more motivated and that's also something that surprised a lot of us. And it creates a special bond, because it makes people feel like, you know, we're part of a company where we try new things and they like talking about it.

Obviously we've written about it too on our blog. So it has created like a situation where people, yeah, they look out for each other. Even, you know, if someone is off, then another person might be more prone to take a decision or to, you know, fill in or something like that. So I think in terms of team bonding and teamwork, it's actually helped us quite a bit.

Becca Banyard: That's really cool. So you mentioned some questions that your team were concerned about when you started talking about the four-day work week. What were the answers to those questions? Particularly if they didn't get their work done, would they have to work on their day off and would they have to now work 10 hours a day, but have one day off? How did that all end up?

Rita Wittek: Yeah, so we made sure to let them know that we didn't expect, you know, a sudden hike of productivity. Like I told you before, some, I think Microsoft reported that they were 40% more productive. And I still, I dunno if that's even possible. So we mainly talked about that we want them to feel good, that we want them to enjoy this and be happy and that like, you know, the work will follow.

And that we were actually, so believing so much in this that we don't want anyone to work 10 hours a day. Also, we still believe that, you know, flexibility comes first. So some days people will still do a workout in the middle of the day and then work in the evening when they're more productive. I ask the question of how much they think, how many hours a day they feel productive.

And the answers are so different for every different type of work too, you know, and I feel the same. Some days I can, you know, do great work for eight hours and some days like I don't get anything done. So in the end, we just assure them that this is a trial, that we will talk to each other and that we'll figure out a way.

And I also firmly believe that, you know, the last few decades have brought us so much progress in form of like the just digitalization and the rise of the internet and AI and so much more. And we are already more productive than we've ever been. So I think in the end, what I just told my team is that you have to let go.

And if you can embrace that productivity is not sitting at a desk from nine to five from Monday to Friday, and that people work in different ways, then that's when the magic kind of starts happening. And that's also what we've seen.

Becca Banyard: That's really exciting to hear. And you know, with all the positive things that you've seen since making this change, is there anything that has not been good about this change? Anything that is a big challenge or something that you had to really work on since implementing the four-day work week?

Rita Wittek: I mean, sure there's hurdles along the way. And I think sometimes, you know, with staffing vacations, it's, you have to be a bit more creative and look at your roster. And then I think the one thing would be communication and documentation.

That's definitely when a bit of a rocky road, because you need to document way more. You need to get better at async communication, and that's something we didn't do a lot previously. We have people in different countries, sometimes in different time zones. It's definitely a challenge. It's one that you can tackle.

And yeah, sometimes there's people that said, whoa, I started my day on Monday and the person on Friday didn't, you know, leave any handover and now I am stuck. And that's something that we had to deal with, but we've gotten better at it. It's definitely an uphill battle, but it's one that I think is worth taking.

Becca Banyard: Yeah, absolutely. And I guess we've also seen since the pandemic and everything, going to remote work, hybrid work, a lot of people have already had to learn that asynchronous work life. So I'm sure that's helped. And it's shown too that it's possible to learn how to work asynchronously

Rita Wittek: Yeah, totally. I agree.

Becca Banyard: Okay, so I'm curious if there is anything surprising that you learned throughout this process. If there's anything that you went into it thinking it would be one way and then found out it was the complete opposite or anything that surprised you when you started this journey?

Rita Wittek: I think maybe what surprised me most is just how different we at Homerun seem to look at things like the four-day work week. Because my research just showed me that it's a lot about, a lot of companies just think about increasing productivity and they want to make data informed decisions, but they don't take the softer parts into account as much as I would've thought. And I think our founders, when we discussed this over and over, they said, yeah, but so our main goal is wellbeing.

And so productivity is, it's not even in top. It's not that we don't wanna be productive because we are more productive than ever actually. But it wasn't the way we went into this. And I think just measuring things like stress and burnout, it's not easy and there's no silver bullet for that, right? So, you need time and you can't rush it.

But the likelihood of lowering things like anxiety and stress in the long term by having people work less is the chances are quite big. So in a way, I just think when I talked to some other people, they said they would measure how many lines of code they had risen the year prior and things like that.

Then I don't think those other things you need to measure. Because for us that are not really the things that count.

Becca Banyard: Employee wellbeing is such an important thing to focus on and to consider in all of this. So for somebody who is looking at the four-day work week, exploring it as an option, interested in trying it out at their company, what's one piece of advice that you would give them?

Rita Wittek: I think the one piece of advice I would give anyone is to not optimize for cost of productivity, but really think people first. And with that also think people first, admin second, because there's a lot of stuff you need to do. There's a lot of nitty gritty details. So you need to measure the right things because happy employees just tend to be more focused.

In the long term they will suffer more illness, and I think it's important to get the leadership on board from the get go. Because otherwise I don't think there's any chance that this will work. So, starting with a project like this without the backup of your founders or like the actual belief that they wanna try it, doesn't make any sense.

And when you do that, push for a long trial period. Because I see a lot of companies just trialing something for one or two months and there's no data that will indicate if it works or not. So yeah, I think the longer the trial actually, the better the chances of succeeding at this.

Becca Banyard: We're about to wrap up, but before we do, I just have a few questions that I ask all my guests.

The first one, what do you think is the number one thing that keeps employees happy in the workplace?

Rita Wittek: That's a good question. I think it's flexibility. I think being a flexible employer and treat your employees as people and every person is different. I think that's very special and that will help a lot.

Becca Banyard: Love it. Okay. And the last one, what is the one thing that you need in order to be a successful leader?

Rita Wittek: The one thing I need to be a successful leader. Yeah. For me, that would be support from my leadership team. Because I think the people function is not always at the center of the company where I believe they should be.

Like at Homerun, we look at a little bit like a butterfly and the people function is like the heart of the butterfly and then the people are all in the wings and we are kind of a supporting function. But without the support from the leadership team, the founders, there's a lot of initiatives I couldn't have implemented.

So for me, that has always helped a lot.

Becca Banyard: Well, Rita, it has been such a pleasure having you on the show. I've loved hearing all about Homerun's successful four-day work week implementation. And I am excited to hear more in the future about how it's been going. And if people are interested in getting in touch, learning more from you, learning more about your company, how can they reach out?

Rita Wittek: Totally. Yeah, so they can find me on LinkedIn or just reach out to Homerun, hello@homerun.co. That's something we have written lot posts about it, so have a look at those as well. Yeah, happy to talk to anyone. This is a topic I'm so passionate about, so reach out.

Becca Banyard: Thanks folks for tuning in. If you liked this episode, please leave us a review and subscribe to get notified every time we release a new episode. And if you wanna keep in touch and up to date with all things HR and leadership, head over to peoplemanagingpeople.com/subscribe

And until next time, have a great day!