We Shifted to a Four-Day Work Week. Here’s What Happened.

Like most of the world, we took Volt Athletics remote in response to the pandemic in early March and committed to staying remote through at least the end of 2020 (before it was cool 😎). You can read about our decision to embrace the distributed work model in Part I of the series here.

A little primer on our company, for context:

Volt builds software that helps athletes, firefighters, soldiers, and everyday people work out safer and more effectively. If you want to check out it out, start here. We have 24 full-time employees and a few part-time contractors, most of whom are based out of Seattle, where we founded the company.

As Volt navigated the numerous challenges of building and maintaining a vibrant company culture as a distributed team, I began to feel a shift in my own thinking about the classic 5–2 structure of the American work week. And as the pandemic wore on, I found myself waking up on Monday morning exhausted and feeling a sense of dread about the five-day gauntlet in front of me. Even worse, I realized that I was wasting my Fridays. My motivation was lacking after four straight days and it was difficult to bring my whole self to the virtual office on Day Five.

After checking in with my colleagues, I quickly realized I was not the only one feeling this way. There’s just something different about work and life in 2020. Maybe it’s the Groundhog Day feeling of working from home or the accumulating stress of dealing with BOTH a global pandemic and an immensely fraught political climate at the same time. Or maybe there’s a fundamental difference in each hour of remote work as compared to the equivalent hour of work in the office.

Here’s one thing I’m certain of: before the pandemic, a million years ago, Fridays used to be fun at Volt HQ. There was an energy and a levity around the office as we cruised towards the weekend. We had drinks in the afternoon, swapped stories, and generally enjoyed each other’s company while we finished out the week. But Fridays are not so fun when you’re burnt out and stuck at home. So we made a change.

As of six weeks ago, Volt switched to a compressed four-day work week and we’re not going back. Friday was declared a flex day, meaning that employees could use that day however they wished. Our team could use Friday to relax, go for a hike, hang out with friends and family, work on projects, catch up on emails, or even write Medium posts like this one! All we asked was for our team to do their best to maintain the productivity levels of a typical five-day work week.

Personally, I felt an immediate and significant shift in my own mood, energy, and productivity. I am able to focus on crushing through four intense days in the virtual office and then recover for three days. Sure, I end up doing some work on Fridays (just like I do on most Saturdays and Sundays), but the day is mine to do with what I wish. I just like working 😃.

In order to get a pulse on the rest of the team, we sent around a little internal survey. Here are the results:

Disclaimer: we have 24 full-time employees, so the sample size is small and the variables are not isolated. This is a real company (or “a living lab,” as Dr. Joe Eisenmann, our Head of Sport Science, likes to call it), not a peer-reviewed research study.

100% of our employees declared their job satisfaction higher with the four-day week and 70% said their job satisfaction was “much higher.” Not a huge surprise here, but still nice to see. As a CEO, it always feels good when we’re able to make moves that improve our employees’ lives and, consequently, their job satisfaction.

96% of our employees felt their own productivity was roughly the same or higher with the shorter week. The sole exception thought their productivity was perhaps slightly lower. Pretty good!

100% of our employees felt the company’s overall productivity was roughly the same or higher with the shorter week. Think about that. We removed 20% of the required time at work and not a single employee felt it decreased the overall level of company productivity. That’s wild. 🤯

So let’s total this all up. Less time working + more productivity = happier employees. It’s not rocket science, but it sure is music to my ears.

After our six-week experiment, we decided to keep Volt on a compressed four-day schedule and renamed the policy “Flex Fridays.” I recognize that Volt is not the first company to embrace a four-day schedule, and it certainly won’t be the last. But as a former four-day skeptic, I wanted to share the reasons it has been working for us and why we’re keeping it going. I’ll leave you with a quote from one of our employees:

“I find myself to be more focused and intentional during the work-week because I have to get my work done within four days. I still tend to log on during the weekends, but I really don’t mind. I like being able to create my own fluid schedule on the weekends. Life feels incredibly balanced right now, almost too good to be true.”

If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to drop questions into the comments or email me at dan@voltathletics.com.