Piloting a 9 day fortnight with no less pay

3/5 posts reflecting on experiments in doing work differently

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In 2022 Huddlecraft piloted a 9 day fortnight, with every other Friday off, for no less pay. This came with challenges and rewards. To support this pilot we also hosted The League of Less Work, a peer group for people and organisationgs reducing their working hours. Reflections below!

Snapshots from the League of Less Work

💡 Why did we decide to do it?

• We were motivated by the benefits we believed would come, including; enhanced wellbeing and focus for our team; more time for each of us to rest, learn and connect with friends and family; a smaller carbon footprint as individuals and as an organisation; a visible demonstration of our values that can act as a beacon, helping us connect to those with shared values that we might work with.
• We were also encouraged by our friends at LearnJam, who had trialled a 4 day week and spoke very highly to us of their experiences. They shared a bit about the changes they made to enable their pilot, which helped us form a plan for our own.
• I wrote this thread on twitter about my mixed feelings before we began our pilot. I felt proud of taking the leap, and a bit nervous about whether only affluent organisations could make it work.

🎥 How did it go?

• We designed a structure that we hoped would work for us. A 9 day fortnight meant that we took every other Friday off, at no less pay. We alternated between Fridays ‘On’ and Fridays ‘Off’. Fridays On are days dedicated to team time, learning and strategy. To make this work we intentionally re-structured our week so that most team meetings, sessions and collaborative activities happened on Fridays On. The idea was that grouping these meetings would leave the other weekdays free (to a greater extent), allowing for more flow, and hopefully creating some efficiencies that would ‘offset’ Fridays Off. Fridays Off created a fortnightly 3-day weekend which would regularly allow us to rest, recharge and switch off more deeply.
• Personally, I started the year brilliantly, sticking to all the Fridays OFF and reaping the benefits. Summer brought many challenges, and for several months I was working the 10th day again to stay afloat. I did feel grateful that having started a 9 day pilot, working extra meant working Monday-Friday rather than into the weekends. Toward the end of the year I got mostly back on track, and I think overall I took about 50% of Fridays OFF off.
• I think my legal responsibility for Huddlecraft made it very tough for me to prioritise time off at certain times in 2022. Different positions and responsibilities will make it harder for some people to reduced hours than others. I’m not sure how I feel about this, or that I have any solutions.
• 6 weeks into the pilot I wrote this blog for Hatch Enterprise about how it was going in the early stages. I was fairly bright eyed and bushy tailed at this point!
• We did have one partner express some frustration that we wouldn’t be able to meet on Fridays, but on the whole everyone we worked with was very supportive, accepting and flexible.
• Katie, formerly freelance, joined the team in 2022 to work on our re-brand and new website. She said very categorically that she wouldn’t have joined the team if we weren’t reducing our working hours. This felt like a signal that we were going in the right direction.
• In collaboration with LearnJam we hosted The League of Less Work, an 8 month peer group for individuals and organisations who wanted to reduce their working hours. The idea was that the peer group would support our momentum and exchange ideas and strategies that would help everyone make their intentions stick. I wrote this post reflecting on the first half of the process. The League really helped me stay connected to the reasons why I wanted to pilot reduced working hours. This was a useful anchor when things got tough.
• Ultimately, we piloted a 9 day fortnight for a full year and… survived! We will continue with our 9 day fortnight approach, which says it all.

🎓 What did we learn?

• Condensing team meetings and working sessions into the Fridays ON worked well for the most part. This allowed us to make the most of stretches of time during the rest of the week. I learnt being willing to play with your relationship to time, and the way you manage it, is a crucial ingredient to making reduced hours work.
• You can’t decouple time and money totally, but they don’t need to be monogomous! By which I mean time and money can also have relationships with other things. Money can hook up with team wellbeing. A rested, happy team may be linked to a healthy financial situation (but you can’t take time-spent-working out of the equation). Time can hook up with willing volunteers, but you’ll still need money to pay the person that manages them. I learnt to approach this coupling between between time and money as malleable, but ultimately strong and enduring.
• Don’t assume everyone relates to reduced hours in the same way. For some people NOT working will be challenging, as they fight the urge to use that 10th day productively. Others may not find this difficult at all! Apparently younger people and recent graduates actively dislike the 4 day week because their priority is gaining as much experience as they can. Particularly if you’re an employer, don’t fall into the trap of thinking reducing working hours can please everyone (it can’t be done).
• As a Director reduced hours is a bit of a gnarly challenge that constantly causes you to wrestle with questions about what’s more important: modelling behaviour which you know others want to see you model so they can feel fully validated in that behaviour themselves! Or work on the company which provides for them. Because of course you don’t have the option to simply leave if the company stands in the way of your ideal behaviour.
• Trying to work less is like trying to break an old habit, build a new one, unlearn stuff, learn new stuff — all at the same time! It’s a great testing ground for the process of changing yourself. And there’s a lot that can be learn in that about changing other things at the small scale, or doing things that might require others to change. It’s a process not an on/off switch.

👉 How will we take it forward in 2023?

• Most importantly: we will continue to work a 9 day fortnight with no less pay.
• In terms of changes, we need to stick to our Fridays ON structure throughout 2023. When times got tough last year we let some of our structure slip, for example our ‘stewie’ (peer coaching) sessions petered out in autumn 2022. It will help us to make really clear who holds responsibility for holding us to the structure we want.
• I’d love for us to bring a clearer prompt into our Monday morning check-in, to find out specifically how we each used Friday OFF. I think this will help build all round accountability, and gratitude for this time, which we shouldn’t take for granted. It’s a privilege.
• Personally, my goal will be to increase the number of Fridays OFF that I take off, to at least 75%.

🤔 Remaining questions?

• I think it’s likely that we may need to work out how the 9 day fortnight would work for part-time team members this year. I’m not sure yet how we’ll approach this. Will they need to work Fridays ON? Or perhaps we would change our ON day to another day of the week?
• Over 8 months we hosted the League of Less Work. Do we want to take this work forward in some way? Is there some support we could offer to other organisations and individuals who would like to pilot reduced working hours?
• I’m curious about how we maintain gratitude for this privilege. So many people have so much less control over when they work and how much, for so many reasons. It’s so easy to forget this if you work alongside others with the same freedoms.

🍭 Tips for others who’d like to do this?

• Really build the relational ‘soil’ you’ll need for a change like this. Talk about power, privilege, money and time. Really talk about what it will take to make this possible. It won’t come for free, at least initially. There may be things you need to let go of or deprioritise, to make this work. Everyone should understand this idea — that this isn’t an entitlement, but something that can be created, together.
• Invite peers who have done this to share their experiences with you. You can look at research, and this may be valuable too, but it will have been abstracted from organisations that may be utterly different from yours.
• For us it felt like there were far too many uncertainties to try to fully model the 9 day fortnight before we began. We prepared, but really the advise would be just go for it, put it into practice and learn through experience. Proper modelling would be such a huge investment. Test and learn feels like a much better approach here.
• Make it public that your organisation is trialing reduced working hours. This helps with accountability.
• Reflect regularly on how it’s going in practice. How is everyone using their time off? How is everyone feeling about their workload? How are your partners or collaborators feeling about your decision to do this? Is the trial creating strain on the people and/or organisation? Is there anything further you need to let go of to make the trial work?

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