A 4day workweek doesn’t mean low Productivity. Here’s how to do it right

The 4-day work week was a pipe dream just a few years ago. It was mentioned in reports, but few people took it seriously. For many managers or business owners, it was a scary idea whose implementation would affect their performance. Their position should come as no surprise.

How can you do the same amount of work in 20% less time without affecting results? And how it is possible for remote-only companies?

Is your company ready to attract the best candidates?

Working from home may not be enough to attract the best candidates. Certainly, not every company today is suitable to introduce a 4day work week. As with remote work, some companies have adapted to this change faster and better, while others have suffered a drastic drop in efficiency and other problems. 

However, it seems that this trend is inevitable. The employee market (especially in some industries) will force companies to offer a new work model to attract the best candidates. People prefer work-life balance and remote work over a higher salary.

VC-funded 4day workweek

I recently came across a story of a VC-funded remote-only startup that is introducing a 4day workweek model. Why do investors go for it? Why aren’t they trying to change the CEO?

More and more companies are introducing this work model, and their managers insist that it does not affect the efficiency of their work. Can any company introduce this work model? What do these companies have that they are not concerned about reducing working hours? Is it a better project management system?

Modern organization qualities

Companies that implement a new model of work do not abandon the goals they set earlier, and do not stop setting KPIs. They simply try to do it with less time. According to Parkinson’s Law of 1955, ‘work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion’.

However, there are a few characteristics that these companies have in common:

– Trust and delegation of responsibility to team members. Micromanagement requires a large amount of time commitment from the manager to control employees. When long-term efficiency counts, employees must make their own decisions.

– Highly motivated team, working for other motives than just financial. Team members motivate each other. We wrote more about that in this article: https://focusity.space/blog/social-pressure/

– SMART goals and KPIs. It means that every employee knows what should focus on.

– Choosing the right tasks to work on. Effective teams work not only quickly. Above all, they work on what matters. Smart teams know what to focus on instead of chasing many rabbits.

– The team gets paid for output, not for working hours

– Asynchronous work. Companies that effectively manage within a 4day work week avoid inefficient long meetings. Employees prefer async work and asynchronous communication. Teams tend to motivate each other instead of attending long motivation calls.

Tools for the future

Massive adaptation of the 4day workweek will not be possible without solutions to boost remote productivity. At the same time, let’s remember that remote work has resulted in the weakening of social ties in workplaces. Reducing working hours is likely to further strengthen this process. 

Using modern psychology’s research on productivity and our experiments, we want to create the remote coworking space of the future – https://focusity.space/

This allows remote teams to increase their efficiency by working in sprints, sharing their achievements with the rest of the team, and being accountability buddies for each other.