Courtesy of Jo Burns-Russell
- Jo Burns-Russell's agency joined one of the largest four-day-workweek trials for six months.
- During the pilot, it went from 40 hours a week over five days to 32 over four days.
- Burns-Russell shared how it worked — and why the agency opted for a 35-hour flexible week.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jo Burns-Russell, the 41-year-old founder of the creative agency Amplitude, from Northampton, England. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I founded Amplitude in 2008 after I was made redundant from my job in events planning. It's a creative agency that delivers animation and film photography, graphic design, copywriting, and branding for clients. We've got a mix of clients — including Unilever, The Body Shop, and Avon.
Now we've got 12 staff members, including project managers, creative directors, and graphic designers.
Before the trial, we had a 40-hour 5-day workweek
We had a little flexibility around starting times. People could work from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. or 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Apart from that, it was fairly rigid.
We transitioned to hybrid working earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic. While most of the staff went back to working in the office after lockdowns ended, that experience got me thinking about other ways we could give our employees greater autonomy over their workweeks.
When I heard from my operations director in April about the four-day-workweek trial, it felt like a natural next step. We signed up for the trial and started it in June.
I was nervous about clients' responses to the trial, but they were supportive
The organization running the trial in the UK, 4 Day Week Global, ran sessions to help us adapt our project-management structure and workflows to the new system.
With that, we pulled apart our entire workflow in the months before the trial started. The biggest change was communicating better with the client earlier on in the creative process to ensure we were wasting less time.
We set aside more hours for client communication at the project and planning stages to make sure that by the time our creative team had produced the work, there were fewer changes from our clients.
That's where I felt we should make our work more efficient, because you can't squeeze out creativity — that would make our outputs no good.
We organized calls with our clients to tell them what we were doing. Transparency was important.
We implemented a mandatory 32-hour week, giving staff the option to take Wednesday or Friday off.
The staff would work eight hours a day but only four days a week. We asked each person what worked best for them. Some people wanted to use their day off for their own projects — opting for Wednesday off, while others took Friday off to extend their weekends.
I used my day off to work on my DJ side business — but sometimes had to work extra hours
I'm a DJ and music producer in my spare time. Wednesday was my day to be in my studio. I tried to be strict with it. I'd put my phone on silent, with my notifications turned off.
But I did occasionally have to work to respond to business-development opportunities — for instance, if we had a prospective client and only a couple of days to write a proposal.
Handovers between absent staff members did create some stress
When we started the trial, we changed our project-management workflow. We had to make sure there was a lead for each project whom clients could access at any time, such as a creative director or project manager.
If both the director and the project manager were off on the same day, we assigned someone else to be a lead who answered client requests on that day. Everyone had to have the days they worked in their email signature — and a note about whom to contact if they were off. It was important that someone was in place to react to client needs.
We didn't lose any work and met our outputs for clients. Business revenue didn't go down, but it didn't increase, either.
But keeping everything running meant that more people were working across multiple projects. For some people, that was a bit stressful. On the senior-leadership team, we were used to handing over work, but for the creative team, it was harder to work across several briefs.
I loved the work-life balance of the 4-day week, but I wanted to make it more flexible
I have a chronic illness that causes neurological problems. I find mornings incredibly difficult and prefer to start later in the morning.
I felt the four-day week was too prescriptive. I wanted to give staff autonomy because everyone works best in different ways.
When the trial finished in December, we organized one-on-one meetings with each member of the staff to hear how they felt about the trial and discussed how they wanted to work. Everyone was different.
I need time in the morning to do physiotherapy, but I'm often the last one in the office in the evening. One of my colleagues has three kids. It's important for her to pick them up from school in the afternoon. Other people just like having a day off and working four days a week.
It's about giving people the choice
After speaking with the team, we opted for a 35-hour flexible week, over four or five days.
The trial finished in December, just after the UK's economy had fallen apart. We decided not to return to 40 hours a week, but I felt we had to increase staff's weekly hours from 32 during the trial to 35 because we knew our clients' budgets were stretched, and we had to compete on price with other agencies. We didn't want to lose any work.
Working a four-day week is still an option but not mandatory. Staffers have to be available for client meetings and should start their day by 10 a.m. because we have our team meetings in the morning — that is, unless they are taking that day off. Apart from that, working hours are fully flexible — and our office is still hybrid.
A member of staff could work four days one week and try out shorter hours across five days the next — as long as managers know the week before.
The 9-to-5 mentality is old-fashioned. People work effectively in different ways.
Having flexibility is a game changer. Creating that flexible working environment has made us better as a creative agency. It works well for us. But we're a small organization. Our working pattern might not work for larger organizations, and we might have to be more prescriptive about people's working hours if we grow.
The most important thing for me is respecting my team's autonomy. It's not up to me to tell them how to run their days. There are deadlines and meetings. Aside from those, people should be able to choose how they want to balance their work with their home life.