At August, we intentionally grant ourselves a lot of autonomy over where, when, and how we work.
This summer we’re taking it a step further, as we experiment for the first time with a shorter work week!
The 40-hour work week is outdated and inefficient. Our sister companies who’ve implemented a 4-day week report greater productivity and increased motivation, not to mention happier teams. We’re excited to discover if this will be true for us as well!
Our goals for this experiment are:
Our experiment will take place over the next three months. We’ll start with half days on Fridays for the first six weeks, and then graduate to full Fridays off from mid-July through September.
At the end of September we’ll do a group retrospective to evaluate how it went. We’ll look at our leading indicators of business performance and our employee engagement scores, with particular focus on psychological safety. We want to make sure that, at minimum, the shorter hours don’t negatively impact our clients or our team – and hopefully they’ll improve outcomes for both!
This took time to plan. We discussed our concerns around equity, our contract model and client relationships. Not to mention logistics, with our team members spread across eight time zones!
As we designed this, we made a few Even Over team agreements to help this be “Safe To Try” for our team. Here are two we want to share with you.
More tensions may arise as we move forward. That’s why we structured it as an experiment. Transformation isn’t a one-and-done process. We’ll try it, learn from it, and go from there.
We look forward to sharing what we discover!