I felt like posting and commenting on this because I work for a company of 300 people that has made the shift to the 4-day workweek (with no loss of pay) almost 4 years ago. As some people comment in the article linked, it was hard!

Not everyone was on the same page or communicating well. Some departments were just super disorganized and stressed. In the first few months people actually reported MORE stress and our sales results tanked. Some people also thought it was super unfair because some of my colleagues fully enjoyed the day off while others felt that they still had to catch up on their work because their results were time-dependent (eg: salespeople having a fixed number of calls to make every week).

However, after 6 months of adjustments it just started to work wonderfully for everyone. For instance, at the beginning anyone could pick any day but Monday but we now restrict it to Wednesday or Friday so that the teams work more easily together.

I haven't worked a single Friday in 4 years and could not go back to a 5DWW easily now and I don't think any of my colleagues would.

I think this is really interesting as a whole lot of people currently entering the job market are starting to doubt they'll ever retire, so if we can find ways of making work more sustainable during our careers we might achieve something even more interesting than "escape the rat race as early as possible" and start enjoying life at 70.

The following submission statement was provided by /u/berlinparisexpress:

I felt like posting and commenting on this because I work for a company of 300 people that has made the shift to the 4-day workweek (with no loss of pay) almost 4 years ago. As some people comment in the article linked, it was hard!

Not everyone was on the same page or communicating well. Some departments were just super disorganized and stressed. In the first few months people actually reported MORE stress and our sales results tanked. Some people also thought it was super unfair because some of my colleagues fully enjoyed the day off while others felt that they still had to catch up on their work because their results were time-dependent (eg: salespeople having a fixed number of calls to make every week).

However, after 6 months of adjustments it just started to work wonderfully for everyone. For instance, at the beginning anyone could pick any day but Monday but we now restrict it to Wednesday or Friday so that the teams work more easily together.

I haven't worked a single Friday in 4 years and could not go back to a 5DWW easily now and I don't think any of my colleagues would.

I think this is really interesting as a whole lot of people currently entering the job market are starting to doubt they'll ever retire, so if we can find ways of making work more sustainable during our careers we might achieve something even more interesting than "escape the rat race as early as possible" and start enjoying life at 70.

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/11f6b10/the_uks_4day_workweek_trial_is_hailed_but/jahsn2h/

I appreciate this share, especially regarding difficulties as the pain points are where management will bristle on this topic. One additional question I would have is how are your sales people earning now? I assume they are comission focused. How are those commissions looking? Would be fascinating to me if they had similar performance.

Would you say part of the stress was due to people being used to slack a lot during the week, but now when time to get the same amount of work got cut, it became a bit difficult to work intensely?

They do. We conducted an audit to find out exactly that and sales number went back on track after only 4 months. Now we actually have much better performance than we did before the test was implemented.

Serious question. As 50% (guess) of work is essentially being paid for your time, you can't be more productive as a care assistant or a fireman, are the rest of us willing to pay 25% more for these things so they can have a 4 day week?

Some of that, some of people just stressing about not meeting their objectives or suddenly having a lot of meetings concentrated on fewer days. One of the answers was actually to cut the amount of meetings by 20+% to make up for it.

That is the real figure that I think sells this better than most metrics. If sales goes UP, then how can the efficacy be denied? I suspect that was one of the main selling points that pushed your company to continue 4 day. Think sales is where the movement should focus, because if they can prove more successful than the choice is obvious. Thanks again for sharing.

Many startups have so may meetings it's crazy. My current workplace has a daily meeting and numerous other one's where often times only attendance is expected. But the problem is people loooove talking in circles about some shit without making a decision.