Many companies that have adopted the four-day workweek see it as a buzzy benefit that employees are curious about and can set them apart from competitor employers.
For Vancouver-based Procurify, the shortened workweek was a solution for cost-cutting during the pandemic.
Like many businesses, the spend management software company had to quickly find ways to reduce overhead costs when the pandemic hit in 2020, says co-founder and CEO Aman Mann.
Leaders needed to cut spending by 25% to 30%, Mann says, and rather than conduct any layoffs, he proposed reducing everyone's salaries by 20%. The tradeoff? Employees would also go down to working 32 hours, or four days, a week.
Mann recalls bringing the solution to his staff. "It was a pretty unanimous 'yes' across the board," he says, "except for one individual who couldn't be a part of that who chose to exit."
The goal was to help staff through a tough economic time and reduce burnout, he says. It was an unpredictable experiment, he adds: "I didn't have an understanding exactly how long it would be."
"I was just honest that I don't know what the world looks like from today," Mann says, "but I know that my goal is to look out for everyone here, and if we can support each other during this period, I believe that we'll be better for it."
About three months later, Mann says the company's budgets returned to normal, and leaders were able to restore everyone's salary to 100%.
But rather than go back to a traditional five-day week, Procurify permanently adopted its shortened schedule.
"I started to see a big shift in what was happening to us during those four days," he says. "The concentration, the focus, the energy, the mindset of everyone just shifted. It was such an amazing experience to see that and I decided, well, we're not going back. We're going to stay four days and we're going to figure this out."
Bosses and workers agree that a four-day workweek has big benefits for productivity, morale, stress levels and work-life balance, according to recent global experiments.
A majority of workers and job seekers, 81%, support a four-day workweek, and 1 in 3 people would quit their current job for one with a shortened schedule.
Mann says it was a no-brainer to restore everyone's salaries to 100% even with fewer hours on the clock.
Four years later, the biggest challenge of working a four-day week is continuously reducing priorities to the "big needle movers," Mann says.
Additionally, he says his team takes a "hyper-focused perspective" to work faster and with less effort, burden and "cognitive overload that can be created in an organization."
"We're just figuring it out to make sure we continuously improve the prioritization, the focus, the tools, the processes we have to allow us to be agile yet focused in our given week," Mann says. "There's no playbook for this."
Overall, he's optimistic about the four-day workweek becoming the new standard in the business world. As more companies use artificial intelligence to work more efficiently, Mann believes the workweek will be less dictated by a set number of hours and more about "the right objectives we get done as a team."
Today, Procurify has roughly 180 employees and in the fall of 2023 completed a $50 million series C funding round.
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