To most businesses, a 4 day work week may seem unreal, but there are organizations and experimental companies that have conducted test trials. Although the testing results have not yet been release, but base on the online discussion and the news cover, it seems that the 4 day work week is something that most employees would want in the future. Therefore, businesses should start consider how to adapt their business model in order to successfully transform the company into 4 day work week. First, actually implementing a good plan requires a good understanding of all the people in the organization. Because only in this way can we clearly know our current situation, real needs and goals we want to achieve. That's why don't forget to make career development plans for employees at any time.
1. Prioritize Your Employees' Workload
To implement a 4-day workweek successfully, be aware that you are not doing the same amount of work in fewer days but instead eliminating lower-priority tasks from your to-do list permanently. Your team might need help reprioritizing their to-do list and getting rid of low-priority tasks that take too much time if you lead them. Time tracking software makes that easy since it shows you where the time is spent. It would help if you looked into automating, outsourcing, or abandoning these tasks once you have identified them.
Free up your time by evaluating your own to-do list. Then you'll be forced to work on your days off, and sooner or later, the rest of your team will be forced into working.
2. Schedule Productive Meetings
Reducing the working hours makes time more precious. To use the time effectively, ensuring every internal meeting is productive and takes as little time as possible is vital. Moreover, to implement effective meetings, the team leader needs to ensure that all team staff know the meeting details in advance to prepare before the meeting. This will save massive meeting time of the staff acknowledging the detail during the meeting instead.
3. Notify Your Clients and Stakeholders About The Changes
Even though your company is switching to 4 day work week, but there are still others that are working 5 days work week. Therefore, keeping everyone you regularly communicate with informed of the change is a good idea. It can avoid confusion and frustration by doing this.
If the shortened workweek is not a company-wide policy, inform your clients/colleagues about your new office hours a few weeks before moving to a 4-day workweek.
4. Make Plans for the Additional Day-off
As important as everything else is, make plans on your day off, especially at the beginning. Doing this will force you to avoid work emails on your day off. We all used our day off as a "backup" workday, which caused our first attempts to move to a 4-day workweek to fail. Whenever I cannot finish something now, I'll still be able to do it on Friday.
5. Keep Track of Your KPIs
In order for the shifting to be successful, your business must avoid the difference, and your team must continue to meet its key performance indicators (KPI). Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential for tracking progress. The KPIs for each team are usually different. For example, the sales team could be new customers, while the PR team's KPI could be press mentions. Once your team has been working a 4-day work week for a few weeks, evaluate how they perform in terms of their KPIs.
Conclusion
To sum up, adapting to 4 day work week from a 5-day work week is complex, and it will take a lot of time for the businesses to change. Also, during the changes, companies may have a lot of upcoming issues and problems during the change. However, once businesses have adapted to the changes, it will create a more pleasant working environment for the employees and take the company further in the future.
