How to make 4-day weeks a practical reality in a small agency. Lessons from a year-long experiment.
SystemSeed successfully operates Mondays - Thursdays only, and has been doing so for over a year.
At the start of 2021 SystemSeed (a small, specialist, fully-distributed agency) saw that some of our most talented engineers were in danger of burning out - a common industry problem.
We were already using the concept of ‘Google Time’ by only requiring SystemSeeders to work on client projects from Monday to Thursday, and leaving Fridays for other things like individual education, article writing, or open-source contributions. However, our people were either spending this time on administration or finishing off client stories (rather than tasks that would benefit them personally) or were not visible at all, with no oversight on how they were spending this time.
We’d seen that the COVID pandemic and consequent restrictions were putting additional stress on everyone. So, in consultation with our on-call mental-health specialist, our CEO and CTO decided to move to 4-day working weeks for our team as an experiment and have maintained this for over a year. At the same time, we have doubled our revenue and increased our team size.
In this session we’ll share:
- How we knew it was time to try something different and what made 4-day weeks the best option for us
- By the numbers: what have 4 day weeks done to our income, outgoings, shareholder returns, and other costs
- Managing client expectations when shifting to shorter hours - and how they responded!
- The impact of shorter weeks on our team in terms of mental health, stress levels, retention and recruitment
- How we maintained and even increased our agency income whilst working for 20% less time each week
- How to make 4-day weeks a practical reality in a small agency
- What changes need to take place as a result of a 4-day week
- Lessons learned: What worked, what didn’t, and how we could have done better
Presenters Anthony Fox-Davies (CEO) and Evgeniy Maslovskiy (CTO) will share first-hand how they took this decision, what it has meant for the company, and how you can do it too.
