At Bunny Studio, we are running a 4-day-week pilot . These are my notes.
For the last months, regardless of birthplace, people faced the most challenging time as a collective, potentially since 1945.
It was incredibly hard to run a business during these past months. And, my team at Bunny Studio did incredible work keeping themselves resilient. For months, we worked more than 10 hours a day (even 12 or 15 when needed), including weekends. By the end of June, the stamina, in some cases, ran low.
We had the motivation and, the results showed up: We had our highest number of unique monthly projects submitted in June. But juggling all things in life during the pandemic and the quarantine was exhausting. More hours with kids at home; increased logistics to take care of parents; reduced options to keep taking therapy or attending the gym; more hours doing home chores; more cooking; more cleaning; team members with pre-existing conditions were blocked to go out even as cities learned to open. Not to mention the stress level of those who had relatives and close ones getting ill due to COVID-19.
Furthermore, there was an increase in anxiety levels due to the slow down in the economy. Many had to take on more financial responsibilities as some of their relatives lost their jobs. For several weeks, we had to wait to collect better signals on how our business would react to the world’s recession.
Aside from that, our management team had an incredible challenge on their shoulders. None of us went to school to learn how to run a business amid a pandemic. None of us went to school to deal with the fear of extreme uncertainty for life and the economy. At Bunny Studio, we are mainly young managers, so we lack the experience that comes with time and life itself. And yet, we were able to support and learn from each other. Listen and care for our team, clients, and Pros (freelancers). We kept our business afloat with fast decisions and smart and hard work.
And as the quarter ended and we planned a new one, we discussed reducing the number of working days. While we found tradeoffs to the experiment, we put the physiological and emotional safety of our team first. And, agreed to do a 4-day-work-week pilot, with no salary reduction, stating in July until the end of August, including the potential of extending it for the remaining time of 2020.
On the one hand, we expect our team members to have an extra day to take care of themselves and their families. With that, we look forward to their stress levels and cognitive load to come down. On the other, we aim to achieve the same level of quality output by continuously learning how to be smarter with our investments and the methods we use to organize time.
We are not the first company to experiment with a 4-days-work-week. And, we expect more companies to join these organizational trials. Although each business has its traits, the learnings from one company can influence the success of others. As the quarter evolves, we’ll write and share our findings for others asking similar questions and want to learn from our experience.
If you’d like to learn how we are setting this experiment, read the announcement we shared with our team:
How we’re going to manage our 4-day-work-week experiment
