Flock Fridays - Our 4-Day Work Week Experiment at Goosechase
From the beginning at Goosechase, we've done things a little differently. We're entirely bootstrapped, have always been remote, prioritize rapid but sustainable growth & recently launched company-wide profit sharing to ensure that everyone on our team benefits from our success. After all, what's the point of being bootstrapped if you can't push boundaries on how we work, right?
And even with all of those amazing things, we started thinking lately about how we can push the boundaries of our culture even more. Specifically, what is the next major thing that we can add to make our work/life experience worth evangelizing?
So, with all that in mind…🥁…we've decided to try our most radical experiment yet - 4-day work weeks - aka Flock Fridays! For the next three months (June - August 2021), we'll be modifying our work schedule to see if we can keep our productivity high, while reducing our working hours.
What is the hypothesis behind this? Why are we doing this?
There's an old adage that "work expands to fill the time allotted" and we think that might be true for us as well. When you know you need to work a full five days, it's human nature to pace yourself a bit. And if we're being honest, Friday's aren't often the most productive days for people anyways. So why not lean into it and give everyone that day back, so we can be as fresh & productive as possible when we do work, ultimately making an even greater impact.
To be extra clear, this hypothesis only works if our weekly productivity stays consistent (or improves!), but we really think that may be the case for us. And not in a way that means we work more on Monday to Thursday either - it's about working purposefully when it's time to go, but truly enjoying life when it isn't.
What about our customers?
This was probably the most challenging question for us. In the end, we decided that some of our roles, including CX and Sales, will have unique setups to ensure our customers still have a 7 star experience with us. All team members will still have the opportunity to operate on a 4-day work week schedule, we'll just move the days off around for certain team members to ensure our customers are unaffected.
How will we measure success?
We'll be running qualitative surveys throughout this experiment to measure things like mental freshness, focus & productivity. One of our values is to trust each other, so while this type of survey will always be subjective, we trust our people to tell us where things are truly at for them.
We'll also be augmenting these qualitative data points with more quantitative numbers where possible, but this will be easier to do for certain roles than others and that's ok.
What happens in the long run?
We're trying not to think too far ahead here as we want to see what the experiment tells us before making a decision. With that said, if the data shows us that our productivity has stayed where it needs to be & everyone is happier for it, we would seriously consider keeping it around longer.
What about holidays, vacation & salaries?
For statutory/bank holidays, we will still be doing a 4-day week, so if Monday is a holiday, that would be the rare case when we would default to working Friday. Also this isn't a replacement for vacation - vacation will be taken as usual. Lastly, salaries will not be affected - we never want to link compensation to hours worked.
While there's definitely some risk here for us, we love that we have the ability to push boundaries like this and are genuinely excited to see what the results are. We care deeply about being a company where hours worked is decoupled from impact & productivity, and believe this experiment has the potential to be a major step towards that!
Huge thanks to Buffer for posting their 4-Day Work Week learnings, which helped inform part of our experiment structure. I'll be sure to follow up with our learnings towards the end of our experiment as well!
What is Goosechase?
Goosechase is an online platform that helps organizers create and run digital scavenger hunt experiences for team building, learning, public engagement, or a variety of other events. Sign up and try creating a free recreational game, or contact us to learn more about our enterprise solutions!
