I Moved My 80-Person Company to a 4-Day Workweek Even Though It's Against the Industry Norm. Here's Why We'll Never Go Back. In 2021, TUX co-founders Dominic Tremblay and Ludwig Ciupka decided to find out if they could reinvent the workweek.
By Amanda Breen Edited by Jessica Thomas
Key Takeaways
- Tremblay and Ciupka wanted to "think beyond the industrial era five-day workweek, two-day weekend."
- After reading case studies and analyzing their own team's productivity, they decided to eliminate Fridays.
- The model requires an "experimental, progress-oriented mindset," but they'll never go back to a five-day workweek.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dominic Tremblay. He and his partner Ludwig Ciupka are co-founders of TUX, a creative agency that gives back through its Karma Foundation and boasts clients including Eucerin, Prada, Lancôme Paris, Make Up For Ever, Milk & Bone and Doctors of the World, among others.
Image Credit: Courtesy of TUX. Dominic Tremblay.
In 2021, we started to think about how we could push TUX further. We're an LGBTQ+-owned company that's been B-Corp-certified since 2017, inspired by many companies that were really innovating in terms of sustainability practices. For us, the next quest became, Could we reinvent the workweek? Could we think beyond the industrial era's five-day workweek and two-day weekend? It was a big decision, so we began the research process.
We read books like Shorter: Work Better, Harder, and Less—Here's How and turned to the Harvard Business Review for case studies, but we didn't find many examples in professional or creative services. The four-day workweek can be a challenge for service industries that charge an hourly rate because people see it as a decrease in revenue. So a lot of the cases that we saw were in industrial technology or software, things like that.
But we wanted to try. We really felt it was possible to focus on the work for four days full-time and then get three days to recharge. Since our work is creative, it's a bit easier; we're not counting potatoes in the sense that the value and hours put into an idea can be very flexible. Something doesn't necessarily get better the more you work on it. Productivity can actually decrease.
Related: 77 Percent of Workers Want a 4-Day Workweek. So Why Aren't More Companies Offering It?
In some of the case studies I read, people chose which days to work. But because our work is creative and collaborative, we do rely on synchronous availability. If we allowed people to take different days off, we worried the week would become even shorter. So, in 2022, we opted to choose one day for everybody, and after analyzing our five-day week, we realized that Fridays are not usually the most productive days. We have young employees who might be out late on Thursday night, so Friday morning might not be their most creative time. And we were already doing summer Fridays, or half days, anyway.
There are very few advertising agencies in the U.S. that operate on the four-day model, and those that do are typically small. So we went into this with an experimental, progress-oriented mindset.
One of the initial adjustments we made was around meetings, which can consume a lot of time in our industry; we allow anybody to eject themselves from meetings in the first five minutes if they don't feel like they're adding any value and can just read the notes or get the transcript later. We also put a stop to timesheets to keep track of hours, as it wasn't a very productive task. And we're always finding new ways of doing things or tools that help us do them better. So we moved onto value-based pricing; instead of counting every minute or hour, we focused more on deliverables.
Of course, there were some big lessons along the way. We soon realized that a lot of mandatory holidays fall on Mondays, and in those weeks, it was impossible to finish all of our work in just three days. So we decided that during those weeks, we'd work on Fridays and not Mondays. But it's always a work in progress. Even now, I'm going through training on how to make our working hours more productive.
Nobody wants to go back to the five-day workweek — not our employees, and not us.
Not only have we increased our productivity by 27%, but we've also improved our retention. Turnover in the advertising industry is about 25% but was up between 30%-35% in the Covid era, and ours is just 8%-10%. So it's really strong. Obviously, keeping people longer also means less loss of knowledge and energy. Additionally, many of our employees are parents to young children they have to take care of during the weekends, which typically means less time for themselves. With Fridays off, they have a full day for themselves. They can take tennis, yoga or cooking classes. I have young kids, so I can relate as well.
Related: A 4-Day Work Week Could Benefit Employees. But Are Employers Willing to Adapt?
It's quite amazing. People come back on Monday fully energized. What's more, when you think about it, you reduce 20% of your hourly workweek and gain 50% of your weekend time — that's huge. We really believe this is the future of knowledge-based work.
