List of 200 UK companies that moved to 4-day working week

International competition is the interesting thing for me, if we can prove a 4 day week in any form would be similarly efficient, that could give a great incentive to hiring the top talent and convincing them to migrate to the nation's that standardized it. If it turns out that it's less efficient in the long run, then it would cause the whole nation to fall behind, reducing total comp possible, and leading to the most capable leaving.

I am co-founder of a 5 year old tech startup with 50 staff that introduced a 4dww / 32hr work week a little over 2 years ago.

Since are a lot of questions surrounding 4dww - Thought I might be able to offer some insights.

1. “four days but actually working longer” or “four days with reduced hours”.

-- We offer 32hrs work week, rather than the standard 40hrs in our home country. This is generally taken as 4 days, but some work 5 days with less ours (especially those with school aged children).

2. "What employers want to know is not what happens in poorly managed offices, but what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised."

-- I am going to be biased but we spent 3 year with standard work week, and I think we were highly productive as an organisation, our internal metrics, output and surveys agreed with this assessment. After 2 years, we haven't seen any noticeable / measurable decrease in output or performance compared to 5dww, or since we started.

3. "Do these companies close on a week day, like they just don’t open on a Monday." -- We generally allow people to choose any day off they want, put have them put it in ~4 weeks before hand. Most people take either Monday or Friday, which means we always have some staff covering the days others have off. In smaller teams that speak with customers (sales/cs) they agree among the team who takes what days, and can trade, as long as we always have coverage.

4. "4 days week sounds great, if you hate your job and you already earn less than you deserve." -- We pay top percentile as other startup/tech companies in our country's HQ. Anyone joining us shouldn't feel they are being paid any less than someone on 5dww -- and that is because we expect their output to match those of others working 5dww.

Overall we've found the move to be extremely successful at attracting and retaining talent with I believe helps us be significantly more productive than other startups I know doing 5dww.

We have a few things that I think help with our 4dww, include remote async with very flexible hours, hiring worldwide, transparent salaries and virtually no meetings in engineering.

One thing this flexibility allows us to do is ask our staff to be 'switched on' when they are working -- if for any reason they aren't being productive, we encourage them stop working, do something else, and come back later. We expect our staff aren't reading reddit, posting on hacker news, etc during work-time -- in return for the 32hrs we want to see it (almost) all productive.

I believe this, along with staff dropped the least important work gives us a similar/same output as 40hrs. With the benefit that we've been able to attract talent that otherwise may have gone elsewhere, with a turnover of virtually 0%.

Happy to answer any specifics about how we've implemented thing, or what I've seen as a co-founder leading a small (16 people) engineering team.

Just give me five days of remote work—that’s all I ask. My job doesn’t require me to add to the traffic, yet there are middle managers rallying for RTO to maintain their relevance.

Unless your strictly monitored, 5 day work from home can become work when you feel like but respond quickly during office hours as long as you get things done, which is fine by me and my employer as long as the get things done and respond during office hours actually happens

In which country?