Diary of a CEO #8

Dear Reader, 

Rest makes better workers. 

This week I introduced a 3-month trial of the 4-day work week for my team. I planned to do this since August; researched, put parameters in place, set up ways for me to track the team’s work, and created a plan for what an effective vs ineffective trial would look like. 

Our team works very hard, the work is fast paced, and the marketing industry has a high burnout and turnover rate.  I love my team and I don’t want to see them burnt out. I noticed in daily conversations that people were exhausted by the end of the week and seemingly spending their weekends catching up on chores and rest. My team is young and I knew something needed to change.

So I decided to look at what I could change to offer a better time management plan to my employees.

At Ringlet, we use Quickbooks Time to have employees track their hours. The majority of our work is on a billable hours model which requires that Ringlet employees are logging hours and that the hours reflect the work, the client,  and descriptions of  what they did during that time. 

Weekly I pull reports on the hours, and our team members average 43 hours per week. By nature of the marketing services industry, our clients have a lot of requests, meetings, and marketing in the beginning of the week. I found in the weekly reports that team members were doing 12-14 hour Mondays and 4-6 hour fridays. 

After seeing that, I started to research companies that maintained 40 hours per week but offered 4 day work weeks. I found successful examples.  From there I started to devise my plan for the company.

The concept I came up with is a 3-month trial, buy in from each team member, flex 40 hours, closed to clients on Fridays. What this means is that; from January through March all team calls and client calls are scheduled Monday through Thursday, everyone is required to be online 9am-6pm EST those days, the additional 2 hours per day can be done either in the morning or evening, and uncompleted hours or client projects by 7pm on Thursday can be completed on Fridays. Team members are expected to be  responsive to each other via Slack and emails on Friday but not required to deliver work or be online on Fridays.

So what this basically means is that Fridays are optional to team members depending on how they choose to manage their hours. 

All team members have been encouraged to invest in themselves, their interests, and rest on Fridays. I’m hoping to create a culture that cultivates more well-rounded people. 

This was our first 4-day work week. For me, I spent Friday doing some creative projects for work, reading, and organizing my apartment. Saturday was spent resting, cleaning, and spending time with family. Today was spent on the mountain skiing and working from the  ski lodge to prepare for the week. 

Tomorrow I’ll send a review form to the team members as I’ll do weekly to gather feedback about how the 4 day week went, any issues with work, clients, or communication, and likelihood to continue with the trial. 

If this is something that’s interesting to you please let me know! I’ll be gathering data, document how we set this up, the challenges and the opportunities, and creating guides on how to make it work for your companies and teams.

I’m not sure that this will work, but if you see your team needing rest, I encourage you to start to find ways to make a change.  Learn their work styles, motivations, and interests to ensure that you can come up with a plan that works for productive work and effective rest. 

As always, thank you for reading. 

XOXO, 

Claire