You might have heard a lot of talk about the concept of a 4-day work week over the last few years. There have been trials happening in various countries around the world, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This year, the UK follows suit, with a 6-month trial from June through November, and we’re thrilled to announce that Amplitude is participating in the trial…

What does the 4-day working week trial involve?

As you might have guessed from the name of the trial, we’ll be transitioning from a 5-day work week to a 4-day work week. There won’t be any change in what we pay our staff throughout the trial (unless people get promoted, obviously!) but a few people will have half-hour extensions to their working days.

The trial lasts for 6-months, and we’ll conduct a review at the end to see whether a 4-day work week becomes permanent. It’s early days, obviously, but making it permanent is the goal, so we’re going to do all we can to ensure that happens.

Now, initially, some staff will have different days off, so we won’t be closing the office completely on any day. This ensures that there’s no interruption to client services while we adjust to working fewer hours.

Looking further ahead, we’re aiming to close the studio and offices on Fridays, giving everyone the same day off (and a three-day weekend!).

We’ll cover what this means for our clients in more detail in a moment, but the aim is to keep the same or better client service standards, while only working four days per week. We’ve put a lot of time into planning this, and evidence shows that a 4-day work week can improve efficiency by 20%, so we’re predicting things will work well.

Why a 4-day work week?

There are a host of reasons we’re invested in a 4-day work week, mostly connected to our core values:

Closing the office and studio for one day a week means we’ll be spending less on heating and electricity, and in turn using fewer resources. This gives us a lower carbon footprint and helps further reduce our environmental impact.

We’re firm believers in a healthy work-life balance too, and a 4-day working week will give our staff an extra day to use however they want. A new hobby? Binge watching box sets? A side hustle? Who knows?

Switching to a 4-day work week also ties in with our love of innovation. We firmly believe that a 4-day work week is the future, and we’re investing time and energy into making that happen.

Finally, it’s going to improve our communication skills. To make a 4-day week effective, we’ll need to communicate efficiently and transparently both with team mates and clients. We’ve already done internal project management training and tweaked some of our processes to improve communication, but we’ll be monitoring things throughout the trial to see how we can improve things further.

What does a 4-day work week mean for our clients?

In the short term, nothing. We’ll be starting with staff having different days off, so there will always be someone on-hand to answer emails and queries Monday to Friday.

Over time, we’ll aim to give everyone the same day off and close the studio and offices every Friday. This means we’ll be scheduling our meetings, project updates, and project deliveries to happen Monday to Thursday. We find that most clients avoid Friday meetings anyway and prefer early-week project delivery, so we’re not predicting any major upheaval here. We’ll still be handling the same volume of projects and delivering them in a timely manner.

Key to making this work is efficiency. We’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes on process mapping and project management, ensuring we can produce outputs of the same quality and quantity, and provide the same level of service, despite a shorter working week.

If any of our clients have concerns about how things are going to work, we’re more than happy to have an open and transparent conversation. We’ll be reaching out to people to let them know about the trial in due course.

How are we measuring success?

We’ll be measuring the success of our 4-day work week trial through a few different means. Firstly, we’ll be conducting regular staff surveys to see how staff think things are going. Through these we’ll seek to understand whether the trial is benefiting our staff and company in the ways we expected, and whether there’s anything we need to change or improve.

In addition, we’ll be seeking feedback directly from clients and staff about their experience of the 4-day work week, and monitoring stats like turnover, client spend, and client acquisition to judge our overall performance.

The results of our surveys are part of the official 4-day working week study, and those running the trial are providing advice, support tools, workshops, and training throughout to help us make a success of this.

What next?

We’re thrilled to be part of this trial and we can’t wait to see how it goes. We have every faith we’ll be able to give our clients the same top quality service while also looking after our staff and planet a little better.

Stay tuned to the Amplitude blog and social media pages for more information and updates on how the trial is going.