The Four-Day Workweek Is Here To Stay: Moving from Pilot to Permanence

2022 started off with a bang here at Bolt as we <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90710084/tech-company-bolt-is-permanently-embracing-a-4-day-workweek">announced</a> we’re embracing the four-day workweek more permanently!The <a href="https://www.bolt.com/blog/what-bolters-are-saying-about-the-four-day-work-week/">response to our three-month trial</a> was overwhelmingly positive—94% of employees surveyed said they wanted the program to continue and 86% said they were more efficient with their time—and <a href="https://www.bolt.com/blog/switching-four-day-workweek/">proved our hypothesis</a> that we could be as effective in four days as in five–87% of managers said their team maintained productivity/service levels. Needless to say our team is excited about four-day workweeks.As the Bolt team embraces this innovative, largely uncharted way of working, our People teams are working hard to help Bolters adjust to their new normal and provide support as we work through the details of how we work within a four-day week.As always, communication is key. Our first step was to share our approach to "offline days." Every Friday is to be considered an offline day which means there's no obligation to be online—meetings aren't held, Slack becomes quiet, and the team is not expected to respond to requests they may receive. Our corporate-wide shared calendar has been updated to reflect Friday as offline as well.We created and shared an FAQ for our employees to address common questions. Even though we’d experimented with four-day weeks with our three-month trial, our team still had questions around how to think about things like PTO, holidays, weekly working hours, and meetings scheduled on Fridays that we wanted to address.Managing schedules is just the beginning of what it will take to make a four-day workweek successful for everyone at Bolt. In the coming months, we’ll turn our attention to updating playbooks and policies; offering time management, prioritization, and effective meeting training support for our team; balancing workloads; and rethinking how we approach myriad work scenarios. And, while the experiment might be over, we’ll continue to gather feedback and assess the effectiveness of the four-day week across productivity, employee wellness and engagement, customer feedback, etc. throughout 2022.As with everything we do at Bolt, we’re learning, adapting, and optimizing as we go. <a href="https://conscious.org/">Working Consciously</a> means balancing the needs of our people and our business and we’ll continue to use that mindset as we approach our four-day weeks in the future.If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of a four-day week or how to make the switch, please visit <a href="https://fourdayweek.com/">fourdayweek.com</a> to get started.