The fastest way to damage a four-day week is to announce a start date before you know whether the work can support it.
Staff hear a promise. Clients hear a risk. Managers hear an instruction with no method. Then everyone spends the pilot defending the announcement instead of testing the idea.
At Day5Group, we help organisations transition to a four-day week, and we start every engagement with a readiness audit. Complete these ten checks before you name a date in public. None requires a consultant’s permission, but all require honesty.
1. Demand pattern
When do customers or internal clients actually need you? Pull four weeks of calls, tickets, bookings, orders or footfall by day and hour. If demand peaks on Friday, a universal Friday off is a design error, not a bold statement.
2. What “100% output” means
Each team names three to five outputs that define success: work completed to standard, on time, for the people you serve. If a team can only describe activity (“we attend, we process, we respond”), pause. You cannot trade time for output you have not defined.
3. Waste inventory, with hours
List recurring meetings, reports, approvals and duplicate data entry. Attach a rough weekly hour cost. Most organisations find the first hours for a shorter week here, not in heroic effort. Perpetual Guardian’s 2018 trial worked in part because teams were explicitly invited to challenge these routines.
4. Coverage and dependency map
Mark single points of failure: the one person who can approve, fix or sign off. Map handoffs between teams. Iceland’s public-sector trials (2015-2019) protected service first and reorganised rosters and routines around that duty; copy the instinct.
5. Baseline data
Take at least four to eight weeks of pre-pilot data on outputs, quality, customer response, absence and overtime, plus a short wellbeing pulse. Without a baseline, the end-of-pilot argument becomes memory versus memory, and memory usually loses to anxiety.
6. Manager capability
Managers do not need to be enthusiasts. They do need to set priorities, say no to low-value work, run short meetings with decisions, and spot hidden overtime. If those skills are thin, train before you pilot, not during the post-mortem.
7. Legal and HR readiness
Check contracts, overtime status, part-time patterns, and how leave accrues. Decide whether leave will be recorded in hours or days, and what happens when a public holiday falls on a day off. Get local legal advice; this article is general information, not legal advice.
8. Part-time equity
If full-time staff move from 40 hours to 32 on the same pay, their effective hourly rate rises. Part-time colleagues doing the same work will notice if theirs does not. Decide your pro-rata approach before launch, or you will build a two-tier workforce by accident.
9. Executive commitment to stop work
A shorter week is funded by work that stops. That requires a stop-doing list signed at the top, not a suggestion box managers are afraid to use. If senior leaders will not kill their own pet reports and meetings, staff will not believe the bargain is real.
10. Decision rules, agreed in advance
Write down what success, extension and stopping look like: a customer floor you will not breach, a quality floor, and a people ceiling for overtime and after-hours activity. Agree the decision date now. A pilot without a decision rule becomes a permanent argument.
How to run the audit
Give it two to four weeks, not two to four months. Appoint one owner, use data you already have, and keep the output short: a demand map, an output definition per team, a waste list with hours, a coverage risk list, your baselines, and the draft decision rules.
Then hold one meeting with a single question: are we ready to design a pilot, or is there a gap we must close first? Both answers are useful. A short delay to fix a coverage map is cheap. A failed launch is not.
If your audit shows readiness in one function and gaps in another, pilot where you are ready. A contained, honest start beats a company-wide announcement built on hope.
Day5Group’s rule is simple: earn the announcement. Do the audit, close the gaps you can, name the risks you cannot, and only then put a date in the diary.
Sources
- Perpetual Guardian trial, New Zealand (2018), academic monitoring by Auckland universities — reported in ScienceAlert, 2018.
- Iceland public-sector shorter-hours trials 2015-2019 — Autonomy and Alda, reported July 2021.
Day5Group is a consultancy that assists in the transition to a 4 day work week. More about Day5Group · All blog articles