By Tamilore Oladipo

Since we adopted a four-day workweek in 2020, everyone’s been jumping on the train across different industries and countries. Most notably, however – and the reason we are gathered here today – is the UK’s four-day workweek experiment that has yielded positive results. It’s also proven what we already know — that working four days a week works.

With the four-day workweek gaining traction worldwide, we thought it was about time to check in, yet again, with the folks working at Buffer about what it’s like to work four days a week.

Background

We implemented a four-day workweek experiment in May 2020 to test its effects on our collective well-being, mental health, and personal relationships.

The experiment wasn’t intended to track its effects on productivity, so we set low expectations around this measurement, but we were pleasantly surprised by the results.

At the time, our Chief of Staff, Carolyn Kopprasch, wrote, “…due to increased rest and reflection, many of you have shared that you felt your weekly productivity was in fact not all that different, and that your quality of work was higher while experiencing improved overall wellbeing.”

We ultimately shifted to a four-day workweek through the rest of 2020 and are now approaching the three-year mark.

We’ve checked in with our team several times since implementing the four-day workweek — enough to know it works. But the recent increase in interest had us thinking — what does the four-day workweek look like for us, three years in?

That led us to put out a survey filled out by 53 Buffer employees (out of 78), 60 percent of whom have been working at Buffer for over three years, which is as long as we’ve been running the four-day workweek. Here’s what they had to say.

Everyone loves the four-day workweek

Unsurprisingly, 100 percent of survey respondents stated that they’d like to continue working remotely for the rest of their careers.

This is in line with results from the UK experiment, with 90 percent of employees saying they definitely want to continue on a four-day week with no one saying they definitely don’t want to continue.

Most employees — 78.8 percent — work four days a week OR five shorter days, up from 73 percent the last time we did a survey. Meanwhile, 21 percent work more than four days a week, down from 27 percent the last time we did this survey.

We can infer from this that time spent working a four-day workweek has allowed each person to figure out what works best for their schedule. We can also connect this result to adjusted internal expectations for the four-day workweek.

As Carolyn explains, “We have somewhat adjusted the expectations of …read more

Source:: Buffer Blog

Author: Aaron