Although successful pilots of the four-day workweek have been widely publicized around the world, the four-day workweek is still an uncommon work arrangement.
“Most companies have a traditional mindset about the four-day workweek and there’s a lot of resistance from managers,” said Leslie Joseph, a principal analyst at Forrester.
Joseph said companies that experimented with a four-day workweek saw more positive results the more systematic support they had within the company. “We found that employees actually evaluated the four-day workweek positively and were more productive. Individuals’ mental health and work-life balance also improved.”
But the perception remains that a 32-hour workweek doesn’t get as much done as a 40-hour workweek. Regardless of whether traditional work practices hold true, automation and new AI tools, particularly generative AI, are proving to be key to making a four-day workweek a success for some companies.
Working asynchronously with the help of AI
Cobry, a UK-based Google Cloud partner, introduced a four-day workweek two and a half years ago. This was months before ChatGPT and other generative AI tools emerged, so the company had a clear view of the before and aftermath of the move.
Research on four-day workweeks has found that gradual transitions—where multiple departments within a company switch to the new schedule—often don’t work well because companies fall into a kind of “analysis paralysis.”
“Usually people get scared and end up changing direction, so if you’re going to do it, just do it,” advises managing director Colin Bryce.
When Cobbly introduced a four-day workweek across the company, Bryce asked all employees to remember a few principles to reduce work hours while increasing efficiency: Automate what can be automated, eliminate what can be eliminated, outsource or delegate, and train where learning is needed to improve efficiency.
In addition, the advent of ChatGPT and other tools has given rise to another principle: “How can we make better use of the four-day workweek?”
This principle was crucial because Cobbry’s approach to the four-day workweek presented some operational challenges. The policy, internally called “20% time,” allows employees to take 20%, half, or full days off each day of the week. But if two colleagues take one day off on different days, that means there’s only three days of overlap in the week, which inevitably leads to more asynchronous work.
But Cobbree was fortunate to have existing tools at its disposal. “We have a very modern, cloud-based tech stack,” Bryce explains. “We use Asana for task management, Notion for knowledge base, Hubspot for CRM, and Looker for business intelligence, all built around Google Workspace. And with the addition of Google’s Gemini AI models, each of those components now has a significant amount of generative AI built into them.”
According to Bryce, AI is used across the tech stack to help employees do face-to-face work during shared work hours, and is particularly useful for documentation or low-level tasks. Cobbry uses AI to transcribe meeting notes, write strategy documents, and even share information with a custom-built bot. Available 24/7, it supports asynchronous work by providing a variety of useful data to internal teams, such as the latest updates from Google Cloud, a list of employees currently on vacation, and birthday reminders.
This use case fits well with the four principles that Cobrey emphasizes to realize a four-day workweek: automate, eliminate, outsource or delegate, and train.
“With the introduction of AI tools, Cobbly immediately gained an incredibly powerful fifth way to a successful four-day workweek,” Bryce said. “We were able to tackle, and in some cases solve, problems that previously required a lot more work and outside expertise. Using AI tools has eliminated a lot of the repetitive work, making us more efficient.”
As time to think increases, businesses grow
John Reedman, CEO of Ask Bosco, a UK-based marketing AI company, has been implementing a four-day workweek since he founded the company in 2019. Employees are given a day off, either Wednesday or Friday. Reedman says the advent of AI has allowed his business to grow without adding more staff or working hours.
“We’ve been able to get more projects done in a given workday without having to add more staff, which has allowed us to maintain a four-day workweek,” said Reedman. “AI tools have also improved the quality of our work by allowing us to slow down and have more time to think.”
Current applications of AI at Ask Bosco are diverse, including using ChatGPT and Midjourney to create content for search engine optimization, AI meeting notes to coordinate to-do lists and agendas, automated expense reporting, and replicating the voices of technical experts to create technical guides without audio recording.
AI was so valuable to Ask Bosco that they actively solicited new AI use case ideas through a company-wide contest. Employees had to figure out which tools to use, how to use them, and how much time they could save. Three winners received prize money for their ideas.
While Reedman is bullish on AI and automation across all areas of the enterprise, there are some areas that Ask Bosco won’t touch. “We don’t use AI to monitor and monitor what our employees are doing,” Reedman says. “I know some companies do, but I find it counterintuitive.”
A four-day workweek that promotes information exchange
Safeguard Global, a U.S.-based workforce management software company, has a flexible work policy called “Work Your Way.” Chief Technology Officer Duri Chitayat says the policy allows employees to work when and how they want, and is evaluated on performance rather than hours worked.
“Teams make business agreements,” says Chitayat. “For example, one colleague prefers to have Fridays off, whereas I like to schedule meetings that might otherwise run past closing time on Fridays.”
According to Chitayat, AI helps in some way because it reduces the time and effort required to exchange information. In the past, it took a lot of time to collect the right data and get it to the right person, and there were many bottlenecks in the process. “AI eliminates the delay in information and the queues in the system,” Chitayat said.
Safeguard uses a variety of generative AI tools, including open source projects like Langchain and Langgraph for agent orchestration, the Versell AI SDK for UX and developer experience, and LLM from OpenAI and others for natural language processing. The use cases are diverse—recruitment, knowledge management, workforce analytics, spend analytics, customer service management—but they all make access to and exchange of information more efficient.
In fact, the exchange of information has become so efficient that “highly skilled people (where you want to get information) are becoming the new bottleneck,” Chingtaayat said. “They are like the wall outlets that everything is plugged into. AI makes it easier to get that information.”
The danger with such efficiency is that employees can burn out and leave the company. Chitayat says flexible work arrangements, such as working from home or a four-day workweek, give employees time to recharge and are more likely to stay with the company.
The idea is that by giving employees the freedom to take a day off when they need it, you can communicate to people the value of performance, not just what’s on the surface.
Flexible working as a valuable recruiting tool
Flexible work arrangements help with both retention and recruiting. For Bryce, Cobbly’s four-day workweek is a “joker card” that allows the company to compete with other companies.
“People are really shocked,” Bryce said. “When I tell them in interviews that we’re going to do a four-day workweek, they’re like, ‘Wow, what do you mean by that?’ They’re incredulous. They also ask if we’re going to cut their pay by 20 percent.”
These advantages set Cobbrie apart from other companies in a competitive market. “There’s no other Google Cloud partner that does a four-day workweek,” Bryce boasted.
Ultimately, Cobb’s four-day workweek policy is an extension of the employee experience. “We’ve been very deliberate about not working evenings or weekends,” Bryce said. “It’s an extension of our commitment to respecting our employees’ lives and providing them with a work-life balance.”
In an era of “hustle” culture, where work is life, some predict that employees will freelance or work part-time in their spare time. However, Reedman found the opposite from Ask Bosco’s experience. Ask Bosco conducted a happiness survey of anonymous, general employees and found that most employees use their extra vacation time for “life management” tasks such as housework, errands, and other maintenance.
Reedman said the four-day workweek benefits both companies and employees. He also said having a weekend off helps with mental health, and it helps employees focus during the four days they work because they have enough time off from personal and corporate work.
The Four-Day Workweek as a Litmus Test
Bryce says Cobry’s four-day workweek has become a barometer for the business as a whole. For Cobry, the four-day workweek has been a magnifying glass for how well the company is doing overall. Chitayat says the question, “If we can’t get this done in four days, why not?” has been a big driver of focus. “Is our process broken? Is everyone using their own tools? Is it a skilled workforce issue? It’s a very provocative question.”
Cheetahyat says that Safeguard Global is working in a similar way, and that the old way of hiring people and having them come to the office is not a very good management strategy. The old way of working can produce dramatic success, but the focus now is on data. “Data allows us to see performance in more detail and we are learning how to ask the right questions about who is successful and who is not,” he says.
As a result, more leaders are making data-driven or data-informed decisions.
Forrester’s Joseph argues that a data-driven approach can help companies that don’t currently have a four-day workweek gradually achieve their goals. One Indian company that Forrester worked with was aiming for a four-day workweek, but didn’t make the switch all at once. Instead, it started a three-month pilot and solicited feedback from both employees and customers.
At the end of the pilot, customers rated the company’s performance as a 4 or higher on a 5-point scale, and employee satisfaction scores rose from the usual 3.2 or 3.3 to well above a 4. At that point, the company made the four-day workweek permanent.
Joseph urged other companies to consider a pragmatic shift as well, asking: “What should we measure? How can we collect metrics that will help us understand the long-term health impacts of a four-day workweek across a range of issues for both the company and its employees?”
Joseph said the four-day workweek should not be considered on its own, but as part of a broader program aimed at improving the overall employee experience. And companies need to think carefully about how they work.
One example is Amazon, which is famous for minimizing meetings by asking employees to express their thoughts in six-page memos instead of PowerPoint presentations.
“All of this is a signal that companies need to shape their culture and align their collaboration tools, their automation tools, their AI tools, to create a specific work environment where people come to work, do their best work, are most productive, and use the time saved to do other things,” Joseph suggested. “Let’s take a holistic approach.”
editor@itworld.co.kr
Source: www.itworld.co.kr
