Every pilot has two policies. One is written down: the model, the day, the trial terms. The other is what the most senior person in the room visibly does on the day off. Staff read the second policy more carefully than the first, and they are right to — it tells them whether the day is real.
What leaders signal when they work the day off
When a chief executive spends Friday answering email, three lessons land, whatever the launch deck said. The day off is conditional on being sufficiently senior or sufficiently committed. Responsiveness outranks the new model. And the pilot is probably a temporary perk rather than an operating change, so investing effort in redesigning work is risky.
None of this requires bad intent. Leaders work the day off for understandable reasons: a board deadline, a customer escalation, a diary that predates the pilot. The problem is visibility without explanation. A quiet Friday of writing becomes, in the retelling, “the CEO was online all day.” Once that story sets, middle managers protect themselves the same way, and within weeks the organisation has a 4-day week on the website and a 5-day week in the message logs.
The reverse is also powerful. Andrew Barnes, the founder of New Zealand’s Perpetual Guardian, made the 2018 trial a leadership act as much as a policy: staff were challenged to redesign how they worked, the trial held output, and the firm made it permanent. The detail leaders remember is not the speech — it is that the founder treated the day as genuinely off, and expected the same discipline from his senior team.
Modelling is operational, not theatrical
Visible modelling is not posting a photo from a golf course. It is a set of boring, repeatable behaviours:
- Your calendar shows the day off as unavailable, with a named deputy for genuine emergencies.
- Nothing you send is timestamped on the day off. Draft it if you must; schedule it for Monday.
- You attend the pilot reviews and ask about workload and coverage before you ask about output.
- In the first month, you publicly kill at least one piece of work — a report, a meeting, an approval step — so the stop-doing list is seen to bind leadership too.
Atom Bank’s move to a permanent 34-hour week in late 2022 is instructive here. Reporting on its first year described applications rising, departures falling and customer goodwill improving — outcomes that depend on hundreds of daily decisions, not one announcement. Those decisions hold when staff believe the model will still be there next year. Leadership behaviour is the fastest evidence they get.
The honest exceptions
There will be Fridays a leader must work: a crisis, a regulatory deadline, a customer failure. Pretending otherwise makes the policy brittle. The pilot terms should define the exception in advance — what counts as an emergency, who decides, and how the day is given back. A leader who works an emergency Friday and takes the following Wednesday off, saying so plainly, strengthens the model. A leader who is “just checking email” every Friday dissolves it.
The same applies downward. If leaders require themselves to be contactable, they must not let that become an expectation that everyone is. Write the escalation route — one named person per function, rotated — so an individual’s day off is never the single point of failure.
A leadership compact for the pilot
Before launch, agree a short written compact among the senior team: we take the day; we do not send on the day; emergencies follow the rota; we review our own message data monthly alongside the team’s. Put that last item in the scorecard. If leadership after-hours activity is not measured, it will not be believed when leaders say it fell.
Practical takeaways
- Staff copy what leaders do on the day off, not what the policy says — lead accordingly.
- Make the day visibly unavailable: calendar blocked, deputy named, nothing sent.
- Define real emergencies in the trial terms, and give worked days back openly.
- Kill some leadership-owned work early so the stop-doing list is seen to apply upward.
- Measure senior-team out-of-hours activity and review it with the pilot data.
Sources
- Perpetual Guardian trial outcomes, Auckland academic monitoring, reported 2018 — https://www.sciencealert.com/this-4-day-work-week-experiment-went-so-well-company-keeping-it-perpetual-guardian-engagement-balance
- Atom Bank permanent four-day week, first-year outcomes, Personnel Today, 21 December 2022 — https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/atom-bank-four-day-week/
- Autonomy, UK pilot one-year follow-up, reported February 2024 — https://www.hrdconnect.com/2024/02/26/one-year-on-uks-4-day-work-week-trial-has-been-a-success/
Day5Group is a consultancy that assists in the transition to a 4 day work week. More about Day5Group · All blog articles