One of the biggest misconceptions about the shorter working week is that it is a one-size fits all, rigid model based around Thursday being the new Friday. In fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth. 🤥

Although average working hours decreased by 6 hours on average in the recent #4DayWeek global trial results, less than half of the companies that took part adopted a model where all employees took Friday off. 🤔

This model, where feasible, has a lot of upside. Having a single universal day off maximizes the availability of your team for internal collaboration and team-working, and having a three-day weekend maximizes the benefit of extra time for rest and recuperation. However, it won’t work for everyone, particularly those in customer-facing, availability-dependent roles. ☎️

Not only does the appropriate schedule depend on your business and your industry, it might even depend on what department of the business you are in. 👨‍💼👩‍💼

Not everyone can afford to take Fridays off. But the vast majority of businesses have the productive capacity and technological tools at their disposal to start working smarter, and start working less. And many can achieve a four-day week by taking a creative approach to scheduling, prioritization and resource demand. 💡

For those that aren’t quite there yet, there are improvements to processes and changes to work practices that can help their business become more efficient, and give their people, who often might be regularly overworking their contracted #workinghours, some of their time back. 🕓👍

And lots of businesses in between are experimenting with everything from 9-day fortnights, to shorter work days, to treating Fridays as a half-day, a ‘flex’ or ‘freedom’ day with no meetings or fixed work commitments, or a day off in the summer. ☀️

Often this is a step in the right direction to a four-day week, and sometimes it might be the final destination. 🗺📍

It doesn’t matter where you are on your journey. We at the Work Time Reduction Center of Excellence can help you on the road to work time reduction. 🚸