And on the fifth day, they rested

4-day work weeks gain popularity. Are they right for your business?

Friday, April 7, 2023, Vol. 47, No. 15
By Kristin Whittlesey

“Tuesdays, amirite?” “TGI … Thursday?” Behold the hottest trend in the post-COVID work world, the four-day workweek. Scroll through job-search websites such as Indeed or ZipRecruiter, and the listings are legion. “Join our four-day workweek revolution!” they exclaim. Some companies go so far as to include the benefit in the titles of their job postings.

A large-scale pilot program in the United Kingdom, which involved almost 3,000 people across 61 companies, has just released its initial findings, which are dramatic. Fifty-six of the 61 participating companies said they planned to continue the four-day workweek model after the six-month trial period ended, and 18 of those firms planned to make the switch permanent.

Across the board, participants reported increased revenue, happier and more productive employees, and reduced turnover and absenteeism.

In Tennessee, companies across multiple industries have done more than experiment with 4DWW – they’ve made it an ongoing part of their culture.

“It’s given us a little bit of an edge in recruiting new employees, particularly the younger folks,” says Jerry Miller, vice president at Miller Diversified, a Nashville firm which specializes in commercial real estate, property management and construction. It switched to a four-day model in May.

But the idea of the four-day workweek isn’t new, and it’s not at all limited to desk workers. In Tennessee, companies ranging from Dalen Products in Knoxville to Holly Street Daycare in Nashville have offered four-day work models for a decade or more – long before most of us had even heard of “hybrid work models.”

“It’s not really a new phenomenon,” says Jennifer Rittenhouse, assistant professor of practice at the University of Tennessee’s Haslam College of Business and former longtime human resources executive at global companies including AMETEK and PepsiCo.

“A lot of manufacturing environments have been doing four-day work weeks for a very long period of time. For (those companies), the four-day workweek allows for different scheduling options to maximize the use of equipment.”

As far as knowledge-based workers, Rittenhouse says, “It is a recruiting mechanism now, especially for organizations that are like, ‘We can’t do remote work. Our environment’s not conducive to remote work, but we can offer you a little more flexibility on the four days versus five days in the office.’”

Knoxville’s Dalen Products switched to a four-day workweek about 10 years ago, company president Luke Adsit says. The company manufactures a range of lawn and garden products, most famously those plastic owls designed to scare off birds and snakes.

“Our owner, David Caldwell, did a lot of research on what some progressive companies were doing, and he’s a big advocate of work-life balance,” Adsit says. “What he found is, through the process of just hiring good people and finding team players, mature workers can handle having a schedule like that. And we ended up getting more out of people, because they appreciate the work-life balance.”

Dalen operates on a Monday-to-Thursday schedule for all employees, both office and production workers, with Friday available as a “backstop day” if it’s needed during especially busy times.

“The four-day workweek works great for us on a production side,” Adsit says, “because there’s less startup and shutdown time (for the machinery) in the week, obviously because there’s less days that we’re here. And so, we see some great efficiency gains there, as well as the benefit of not having the lights on that one extra day a week.”

Nashville’s Holly Street Daycare has offered a four-day, 10-hours-per-day workweek for 15 years, executive director Karen Stump says. The center operates Mondays through Fridays, with some teachers regularly taking three-day weekends and others preferring a random day off in the middle of the week. Stump says she tries to accommodate everybody’s scheduling preferences while still covering all the hours.

Before Holly Street switched models, Stump says, “teachers were working a nine-hour day with an unpaid hour lunch break, and that’s really hard. There’s no time for themselves. And so we just started looking at ways that we could make it more pleasing to the staff, that they could have some time. This way they’re only working 10 hours, and it’s all paid, and they get a day off. So it was really a great move for them.”

Pilots that paid off

Local businesses newer to the concept of reduced work schedules are reporting the same kinds of positive results noted in the British study.

When Miller Diversified switched to the four-day model last year, Miller says it was supposed to be a pilot program that would run just for the summer. They never switched back.

“We found, during the balance of the year, it gave people more flexibility with their families: kids’ events, sporting events, getting kids to and from school. It just became less rigid for them, to get their work done and take control of their own hours. We found zero reduction in productivity.”

Miller Diversified runs on a Monday-Thursday workweek, although Miller says that has evolved a bit as the program has matured.

“People during the week said, ‘OK, we might want to come in on Friday, or we want to do some catch-up on Friday,’ or use it for other purposes such as community service. So it became more of what I call ‘Flex Friday’ rather than just straight-up the four-day workweek.”

Edley’s Restaurant Group implemented a four-day workweek for its salaried managers during the pandemic, president Chris Beckler says.

“What led us to institute it was thinking about who we want to be as an organization,” he says. “The pandemic made us realize there is more to a whole person, and balance and the time they get with family was important to us.”

And even though Edley’s managers work a higher-than-usual number of base hours (44 hours in a four-day week), Beckler says the program is hugely popular.

“In an industry that typically runs in the 40% manager turnover rate, we have not had a manager voluntarily leave us in almost three years.

“We have also seen an improved interest in our internal talent,” Beckler continues. “Many team members want to become managers, because they know they can have a good quality of life in this industry.”

Next-gen ‘office hours’

While the four-day model has proved popular across a range of types and sizes of companies, it seems to be particularly popular among younger workers. Miller notes that his firm’s four-day policy has already been a big draw in recruiting younger workers in the year since they implemented it.

And as the generation who were in high school or college during the pandemic enter the workforce over the next 10 years, flexible work models are only going to increase in value for employers. Having spent formative years studying partly or entirely asynchronously, younger workers seem to have different expectations than their older colleagues about where and how work gets done.

Lisa Burke-Smalley, professor of management at UT-Chattanooga’s Gary W. Rollins College of Busines is already seeing this desire for flexibility among her students.

“Just this week in my undergrad class, we were doing role plays for salary negotiation, and for the first time ever I had a student negotiate during the role-play for a four-day workweek. I’ve been using role-play to teach students how to negotiate salary and perks and benefits for years, and this was the first time someone used this phrase.”

Rittenhouse, who directs the Business Fellows honors program at Haslam, has noticed an increased desire to travel, especially among students who might have missed out on study-abroad opportunities while international travel was curtailed. Having a three-day weekend every week, she notes, is especially appealing to those employees.

“I think, because they missed out on some travel opportunities and some experiences as part of high school, they really, really want to travel a lot,” she says. “In my conversations, they’re like, ‘Look, we just want to go.’ And so I think that for businesses, this is a benefit of a four-day workweek. (Young workers) can do some of that travel and have some of those experiences that they might have missed.”

Both anecdotally and academically, the four-day workweek seems to be a new fixture of the modern workplace. And there are almost as many ways to structure the model as there are companies pursuing it. Employers just need to make sure their plan is functional, strategic and attractive, both for them and for their employees.

And if you decide the model doesn’t work for you or your business? Don’t do it.

“Your business has to be your business and have your own unique culture,” Rittenhouse says. “This trend might be really cool and might be really exciting, but you have to assess: Will it work with what you want to have? Don’t try to be something that you’re not.”