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Skip to main content Atlassian * Work Life * Products & news * Team Playbook * Community More from Atlassian * Topics * Distributed Work Lessons learned: 1,000 days of distributed at Atlassian New research: How to make time for the work that matters Here’s what remote workers need to be productive 3 challenges executives face and how to solve them More in Distributed Work * Teamwork 9 retrospective techniques that won’t bore your team to tears How to get unstuck: tips for moving past analysis paralysis Decision fatigue: what to do when endless choices are sapping your energy 5 creative ways to practice gratitude as a team More in Teamwork * Leadership How to honor what makes you unique with your career How to embrace the human side of leadership Compassionate leadership: the best of both worlds 7 proven leadership principles and the psychology behind them More in Leadership * Communication 5 ways to foster inclusive communication in the workplace 10 lessons to unlearn for better communication at work Toxic positivity at work: how to spot it and squash it Media literacy: a survival skill for the information age More in Communication * Productivity How to build critical thinking skills for better decision-making How to get unstuck: tips for moving past analysis paralysis Set successful new year’s goals in trello How to write SMART goals More in Productivity * Strategy Translating principles to practice: Our No-BS Guide to Responsible Tech Reviews 3 ways to center equity in the workplace How understanding the concept of value exchange can strengthen your workplace relationships Organize the chaos: 5 steps to effective change management More in Strategy * Collections Communication in the Workplace Crossed wires and missed connections – good communication among teams is tablestakes for effective teamwork. Get best practices and sound advice on how to create understanding and work together better. Remote Control Keep on top of your work from home life with these tips and ideas from our team to yours. Earnings Reports “Open company, no bullshit” isn’t just one of our values. It’s a way of life at Atlassian. Here’s what we’re sharing with our investors and stakeholders each quarter. Wellbeing at Work Laying the groundwork for better employee health and happiness. Company Culture Embrace transparency, foster a sense of belonging, form connections – and have fun along the way. Ways of Working How you work is just as important as the work you’re doing. Your Personality at Work Navigating and celebrating the complexities of our individuality. The Flywheel Growth Model There are loads of ways to grow a company – learn about our approach here. * Resources View All Resources Podcasts Should your team set aside time for virtual hangs? Does your team need a regular No Meeting Day? Do emojis belong in the workplace? Is it time to ditch the remote daily stand up? More episodes Guides and Research Lessons Learned: 1,000 Days of Distributed at Atlassian The State of Teams 2022 Atlassian’s approach to remote onboarding The Unusual Suspects More in guides and research Quizzes QUIZ Have you mastered the fine art of speaking up at work? QUIZ Does your team have a toxic workplace culture? QUIZ What’s your virtual meeting IQ? QUIZ What kind of feedback do you give? More in quizzes * About About Work Life Work Life is Atlassian’s flagship publication dedicated to unleashing the potential of every team through real-life advice, inspiring stories, and thoughtful perspectives from leaders around the world. Learn more about Work Life Contributors Kelli María Korducki Contributing Writer Dominic Price Work Futurist Dr. Mahreen Khan Senior Quantitative Researcher, People Insights Kat Boogaard Contributing Writer Sarah Goff-Dupont Principal Writer * Searchform * Subscribe Search Primary Menu Search in https://www.atlassian.com/blog/ Search * Topics Distributed Work Teamwork Leadership Communication Productivity Strategy Subscribe Culture, tech, teams, and tips, delivered twice a month Subscribe * Collections Communication in the Workplace Remote Control Earnings Reports Wellbeing at Work Company Culture Ways of Working Your Personality at Work The Flywheel Growth Model Subscribe Culture, tech, teams, and tips, delivered twice a month Subscribe * Resources Podcasts Guides and Research Quizzes Subscribe Culture, tech, teams, and tips, delivered twice a month Subscribe * Search Search in https://www.atlassian.com/blog/ Search Subscribe Culture, tech, teams, and tips, delivered twice a month Subscribe Published September 23, 2022 in Teamwork THE DATA DOESN’T LIE: WHAT WE LEARNED WHEN WE TRIED A 4-DAY WORKWEEK Our team tracked hours worked, team performance, and our well-being. Here’s our story. Published September 23, 2022 in Teamwork Sarah Goff-Dupont Principal Writer 5-SECOND SUMMARY * The team that brings you this publication experimented with a four-day workweek for nine weeks in summer 2021. * The sky did not fall! In fact, we maintained or improved on our key performance metrics and felt an improved sense of wellbeing. * While the experience was positive overall, there were some logistical and emotional struggles. There’s nothing magical or preordained about the five-day, 40-hour workweek. It’s just where we landed after labor movements made their last push for more humane working conditions. And that was nearly a century ago. Surely, with all the technological advances since then, our workweeks are due for an upgrade. This may explain why the four-day workweek is having a “moment” right now. Our team has been intently following the glowing press coverage of Iceland’s national experiment, Kickstarter’s trial, and others. Story after story tells of improved employee wellbeing with no dip in performance. But we wondered if these stories were too good to be true. It’s rare to see anything beyond vague, high-level evidence to back up these claims. So I pitched our manager on running a team experiment so we could find out for ourselves. (It wasn’t a tough sell.) You would think that, given the chance to work fewer hours for the same pay, people would jump at it. So imagine my surprise when I presented my team with the idea and they did not erupt in universal celebration in response. Some were skeptical. Can we really get everything done in four days? Will we be a bottleneck for other teams? Is this going to get us fired? I felt confident the answers were yes, no, and probably not.* But their concerns were enough to give me pause. Ultimately, the promise of a summer filled with glorious three-day weekends won out. We gamed out some “what if?” scenarios, made a plan, took a deep breath, and gave it a try. And we collected a bunch of data along the way. *Just kidding. We cleared the idea first, so we knew we weren’t risking our jobs. WHAT WE HOPED TO LEARN Every good experiment starts with a hypothesis. But our team prides itself on being a little “extra,” so we came up with two: 1. We believe our team can be just as effective working four days each week as we can working a traditional five-day week. 2. We believe switching to a four-day workweek will have a positive impact on our work-life balance and well-being. Related Article WHAT IS PARKINSON’S LAW AND WHY IS IT SABOTAGING YOUR PRODUCTIVITY? By Kat Boogaard In Productivity Parkinson’s law says that work “expands” to fill the time you allot for it. So we suspected that the inverse must also be true: we could work more efficiently simply by allowing ourselves less time. This could translate to more intense workdays with fewer breaks, shorter meetings with less space for chit-chat, the need for working lunches, etc. But we also suspected that having consistent three-day weekends would give us the energy to power through. Plus, having more time to attend to the business of our personal lives should, in theory, make us calmer and more focused during work hours. And the extra day off might open up more time for family, friends, excursions, hobbies… all the things that boost a person’s mojo. As a bonus, we also hoped to answer a couple of related questions: * Are there more streamlined ways of working that we can carry back into our five-day weeks after the experiment? * Are there hidden trade-offs involved in compressing the workweek into just four days and, if so, what are they? HOW WE SET UP THE EXPERIMENT The participants were six individual contributors and one manager. We were located across the U.S., from Hawaii all the way to New York City. Our team works with nearly every part of the business, from product development to product marketing to investor relations. So we created a page (in Confluence, naturally) to keep our stakeholders and frequent collaborators in the loop. We didn’t want anyone to be caught flat-footed on our day off. Here’s the structure we used: * Run the experiment for nine weeks, from mid-June to mid-August. * Work Monday-Thursday, as close to eight-hour days as possible. * Mark our calendars as “out of the office” and set our Slack status to “away” on Fridays. Some of us included our cell numbers in our Slack status in case anyone urgently needed us. * Include checkpoints at the four- and six-week marks. If things went so poorly that it would be professionally or personally damaging to continue, we agreed to end the experiment early. WHAT WE MEASURED Aside from having a great story to publish, we wanted to contribute to the body of knowledge around four-day workweeks in a concrete way. So we tracked both quantitative and qualitative measures. On the quantitative side, we tracked: * Work Life readership, as measured by total page views * Newsletter subscriber growth * The number of days we worked longer than eight hours On the qualitative side, we use a scale of one to five to capture: * Our energy levels on Monday morning * Our start-of-week confidence levels in our ability to accomplish everything we needed to during the next four days * Our Thursday-afternoon satisfaction levels with what we actually got done that week * Our end-of-week energy levels before signing off for the weekend Atlassian keeps historical data on readership and subscriber growth, which was like having a quantitative control group baked right in. For the qualitative data, we started the tracking a few weeks before the experiment started so we had a baseline comparison. Alongside the qualitative ratings, we recorded why we felt that way. All the quotes you’re about to see come from those comments. HERE’S WHAT THE DATA REVEALED First, the simple fact of running this experiment reveals that our team is a lucky group of humans. It’s a privilege to work at such a forward-thinking company and to have the kind of flexibility our job roles afford. Now, about that data… WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR ENERGY AND FOCUS AT WORK? Overall, we were more motivated on Monday mornings during the experiment compared to before – both in terms of our energy levels and our confidence in our ability to get everything done by the end of the week. During the experiment our ratings for energy averaged 3.8 out of a possible five points, and 4.2 for confidence, whereas before the experiment, ratings had averaged 3.2 and 3.8, respectively. As one team member said, “It’s easier to start work on Monday knowing that your next weekend is only four days away.” Our ratings varied somewhat week-to-week. Although there were no zero or one ratings for energy and confidence, there were a handful of twos. According to the accompanying comments, the driving forces behind those lower ratings were evenly split between personal and work-related factors. “I’m just tired because I didn’t sleep well last night,” wrote one team member. “A couple of tasks are dependent on contributions from other people, and some of those people are running behind,” said another. As the experiment wound down, our Monday morning mood did, too. Was this a natural fluctuation? Or, were we sliding into our version of the “trough of disillusionment”? Since the downturn happened in the final weeks, I can’t say. (Clearly, further research is warranted. ) Gartner Reserach’s “hype cycle of technology,” which posits that the road to sustained improvement feels a lot like a roller coaster. WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR PERFORMANCE AS A TEAM? Simply put, we performed well. Our absence on Fridays didn’t cause friction with other teams (proactive communication for the win!) and we didn’t miss any deadlines. “This week I had to work with a ton of different people. Thankfully, all of them were very responsive,” wrote one team member early in the experiment. “I was able to get everything on my list done!” In fact, we pulled off a few high-profile projects like the debut of the Teamistry podcast’s third season and the launch of Atlassian’s second annual Return on Action Report. Buoyed by these wins, our satisfaction with what we accomplished each week trended upward throughout the experiment. By the end, we were recording a lot of fives in that area. > With Friday off and the upcoming July 4th holiday, I’m a bit concerned about > getting to everything. But in a strange way, that’s motivating. And the numbers back up this feeling! Readership was actually 5.2 percent higher during the experiment period, compared to the same period last year. And our newsletter subscriber base grew by 8 percent. That said, subscriber growth was slightly lower during the experiment compared to the months immediately prior. But since most of our audience is in the northern hemisphere, a summer slump in June, July, and August is typical for us. How did we pull this off? “Setting aside interruption-free time to focus was key for me this week,” one person noted. We also aimed for fewer, shorter meetings, and we scrutinized the value of each task or request so we stayed focused on high-value work. For me, it was mostly a matter of trimming the fat to create denser, more nutrient-rich workdays. When working five days a week, for example, I would take a mid-morning break to scan the news and have a second cuppa. But during the experiment, I sipped my coffee while reading something work-related. > This was a good week. I’m definitely living Parkinson’s Law! With less time to > work, I’m forced to work with more focus. I’m fascinated by this. This new way of working did take some getting used to, though. In the first few weeks of the experiment, we worked over eight hours a day more often than we did pre-experiment. Our notes reveal that we didn’t yet believe we could really be just as effective in our jobs while working only 32 hours each week, so we (over)compensated by working later. We dropped comments like “I started Monday feeling confident, but felt overwhelmed by the end of the day,” and “I’m feeling the Thursday sign-off scramble!” By the end, however, we’d gotten the hang of it and were working eight-hour days almost exclusively. WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR SENSE OF WELLBEING? When we held a retrospective after the experiment, everyone on the team said the overall experience was positive – and for some, very positive. It wasn’t all sunshine all the time, though. For me, every interruption felt like a catastrophe. As if taking 30 seconds to pour my son a glass of milk guaranteed I’d need to work late that day. (Turns out, it didn’t.) But I’m high-strung to begin with. My teammates who are more laid-back and/or weren’t surrounded by school-aged kids on summer break didn’t experience this. That said, everyone reported feeling nervous sometimes about whether they were doing enough, working enough, or being effective enough. (Turns out, they were.) But whatever angst we felt was overshadowed by the promise of a three-day weekend just around the corner. > As we near the end of our experiment, I really can’t say I’ve experienced many > negatives. Almost entirely positive for me. Work is getting done, I’m feeling > motivated, and am really enjoying the extra personal time. Having Fridays off was awesome. Can’t say it enough! Most people used that time intentionally: a dedicated day for hobbies and projects, excursions with the kids, or knocking out chores so Saturday and Sunday were purely for recharging. Others reveled in the freedom to let the day unfold organically and just go with the flow. Either way, the positive impact on our well-being can’t be overstated. Considering the current climate of pandemic-induced anxiety and generally exacerbated social toxicity, the emotional boost was right on time. A person could get used to feeling that good. BEYOND THE DATA: 4 TAKEAWAYS FROM THE EXPERIMENT We learned a metric tonne about ourselves from this experience – not to mention a few lessons that anyone can apply in their quest for better work-life balance. Highlights include: 1. PARKINSON’S LAW IS REAL! And the inverse is real, too. You can deliver just as much value in less time if you’re disciplined about it. Idea: Try giving yourself a personal deadline to deliver a project one day earlier than you ordinarily would, and get some first-hand experience with Parkinson’s Law. 2. NOT ALL TASKS ARE CREATED EQUAL. Prioritizing tasks and scrutinizing which ones really add value is key. Idea: Choose a low-value recurring task, e.g., a status update on a non-critical metric, to stop doing. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. And down the road, you might have to put that task back on your plate. But the upside is worth the risk. 3. A RIGID SCHEDULE CAN STILL BE STRESSFUL – EVEN IF IT AFFORDS YOU MORE FREE TIME. You can’t always control when “life” happens to you. Flexibility matters. Idea: If you’re in a role where working from home or outside the traditional nine-to-five workday is possible, make the case to your manager as to why and how you’d like to build in more flexibility. 4. EXTRA TIME OFF FROM WORK IS WONDERFULLY RESTORATIVE. Related Article THE BURNOUT-BUSTING BENEFITS OF TAKING A VACATION By Sarah Goff-Dupont In Productivity We often forget that in our productivity-obsessed culture. Indeed, American workers only use about half their vacation time, and two-thirds report working even when they do take time off. Idea: Use your dang vacation days! And log out from all your work apps when you do. Bonus idea: If you’re in a leadership position, declare a department-wide day off. With everyone off at the same time, nobody will feel like they’re leaving anyone hanging or need to check in. This technique is trending across Atlassian and, so far, it’s proving to be effective. SO, WHAT’S NEXT? Atlassian isn’t considering a company-wide shift to four-day workweeks, but our team is already applying the lessons we learned. We are building in extra time to recharge with a monthly day off for the whole team, and by taking time to celebrate when we ship big projects. We’re looking at designated meeting-free days to increase our heads-down focus time. And we’re even considering instituting occasional “days of wonder” dedicated to exploring new ideas. We’re also taking time to share what we learned and encourage other teams to run experiments of their own. WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU Obviously, your ability to change to a four-day workweek is dependent on many things and the decision may not be yours to make. However, there may be other ways to achieve a little more work-life balance. Depending on the work you do, you might stick with five-day workweek, but get the green light to work fewer hours each day. Research shows even a slight reduction in work hours can have tangible benefits to your health and wellbeing. There’s no rulebook on this yet, so you might as well get creative with the format! Take my quiz! Now is the perfect time to explore the idea of a more flexible work life. Now, while we’re already neck-deep in reinventing the way we work. Now, at a time when workers are so totally over overwork that a majority are willing to turn down a promotion in the name of preserving their mental health, as Atlassian shared in our 2021 Return on Action Report. As we re-evaluate the role work plays in our lives, employers have a unique opportunity to help their people – and themselves – find a sustainable work-life balance. Because if we’re working so much it takes over our lives, then neither work nor life are very much fun. Subscribe to Work Life Get stories like this in your inbox Subscribe About this Article Published September 23, 2022 Artwork by Sari Jack About the Author Sarah Goff-Dupont Principal Writer * Facebook * Twitter * Linkedin * Pocket * Email Related Content MORE IN TEAMWORK Teamwork 9 RETROSPECTIVE TECHNIQUES THAT WON’T BORE YOUR TEAM TO TEARS Productivity HOW TO GET UNSTUCK: TIPS FOR MOVING PAST ANALYSIS PARALYSIS Productivity DECISION FATIGUE: WHAT TO DO WHEN ENDLESS CHOICES ARE SAPPING YOUR ENERGY Teamwork 5 CREATIVE WAYS TO PRACTICE GRATITUDE AS A TEAM MORE COLLECTIONS Collection WAYS OF WORKING How you work is just as important as the work you're doing. View Collection Collection THE FLYWHEEL GROWTH MODEL There are loads of ways to grow a company – learn about our approach here. View Collection Collection YOUR PERSONALITY AT WORK Navigating and celebrating the complexities of our individuality. View Collection Collection WAYS OF WORKING How you work is just as important as the work you're doing. View Collection Collection THE FLYWHEEL GROWTH MODEL There are loads of ways to grow a company – learn about our approach here. View Collection Collection YOUR PERSONALITY AT WORK Navigating and celebrating the complexities of our individuality. View Collection Collection WAYS OF WORKING How you work is just as important as the work you're doing. View Collection Collection THE FLYWHEEL GROWTH MODEL There are loads of ways to grow a company – learn about our approach here. View Collection Collection YOUR PERSONALITY AT WORK Navigating and celebrating the complexities of our individuality. View Collection Previous SlideNext Slide THE DATA DOESN’T LIE: WHAT WE LEARNED WHEN WE TRIED A 4-DAY WORKWEEK * Subscribe * Facebook * Twitter * Linkedin * Pocket * Email Join over 80,000 working professionals By Atlassian Culture, tech, teams, and tips, delivered twice a month Sign me up! * Atlassian.com * Terms of Use * Privacy Policy * Your Privacy Choices * Copyright © 2023 Atlassian Subscribe to Work Life ADVICE, STORIES, AND EXPERTISE ABOUT WORK LIFE TODAY. Email* This site uses cookies to improve your browsing experience, perform analytics and research, and conduct advertising. To change your preferences, click Manage preferences. Otherwise, clicking Accept all cookies indicates you agree to our use of cookies on your device. 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