A four-day workweek experiment changed how these employers approach flexibility

Remember when the four-day workweek was in the running to be the most highly sought-after perk?

After the pandemic, as remote work became increasingly more common, many workers hoped the four-day workweek would become more common too. And, for a while, many companies experimented with different flexible work arrangements. But as the economic environment changed, many companies ditched flex policies, and the four-day workweek conversation also seemingly vanished.

“I see 2020 as ‘day zero’ of the new experiment of work, because there was such a massive disruption,” said Jennifer Moss, workplace strategist and author of Why Are We Here? Creating A Work Culture Everyone Wants. “And then we’re still seeing incredible disruption.”

HR Brew has kept tabs on three companies that, in the wake of the pandemic, experimented with a shortened workweek as a way to retain and improve the well-being of their employees. The ways in which their programs have evolved are evidence of this continued disruption, and serve as a lesson for any employer experimenting with flexible work.

Three trials. Safeguard Global, a workforce management company, piloted its four-day workweek in 2023. Its founder and CEO, Bjorn Reynolds told HR Brew that he saw it as a strategy to help improve retention, and encouraged senior leaders and teams with workflows that would allow for a shortened workweek to take Friday off.

“Choose the hours that fit best for the work product you need, and if you can do that in four days, great, if you do it in five [days], but you’re taking two half days, whatever works for you,” Reynolds said.

Corporate wellness company Exos also piloted a four-day workweek in 2023. Its program, called “You Do You Fridays,” extended to its roughly 400 corporate and 2,600 non-corporate employees, including performance coaches, dieticians, and physical therapists in 300-plus US facilities. Exos’ chief people officer, Greg Hill, told HR Brew that the purpose of a flexible Friday was to give employees more autonomy and recovery time in their workweek.

Communications design agency Codeword had a similar goal when it launched its “Soft Fridays” initiative in 2024. Its chief of staff, Alli Ray, told HR Brew that the goal of the program was to encourage employees to spend their Fridays however they saw fit, stepping away entirely or using the day as focus time.

“We trust you to get your work done. We don’t need to know that you’re sitting at your metal box nine to five,” Ray said.

Not just Fridays. After piloting their four-day workweek programs, all of these companies encountered a similar problem: Not every employee can, or even wants, to take Friday off.

At Codeword, Ray said she found that some employees weren’t able to step away from their work on Fridays. So the agency made its program more flexible, allowing employees the opportunity to choose any workday to be their “Soft Day.”

It has also focused on cultivating a company culture that puts less stress on when employees work and more emphasis on what they get done, Ray said.

“You know yourself best,” she said. “It’s less to me about a concentration of work into four days and more of this freedom and transparency of just being able to get your work done whenever you need to.”

Hill received similar feedback at Exos, where he said some employees, due to the client-facing nature of their work, found themselves needing to work on Fridays.

Like Codeword, Exos leaned into a culture of flexibility, encouraging employees to choose their own “You Do You” day and leaders to model the behavior from the top. To that end, Hill said communicating about and accommodating preferred working hours was key.

“It sounds like a small thing, but going back to the idea of well-being being an outcome. Not waking up to it, or going to bed to it, or you’re sitting down with your family or friends at 10 o’clock at night and getting your pings,” Hill said. “All those little things matter to us.”

Well-being was top of mind for Reynolds too, especially after hearing that some employees were experiencing burnout because they were working longer hours Monday through Thursday in order to take off on Friday.

As a result, Safeguard Global also abandoned its standardized four-day workweek structure. Now, employees choose their own working hours, and managers measure their performance on the basis of outcomes.

“How does everybody’s daily productivity or daily outcomes ladder up to part of a broader initiative?” he said. “We really make sure you understand what you do is super critical, and where you’ve placed in the organization, and then what are the key metrics that show that outcome versus time.”

The bottom line? A one-size-fits-all approach to flexibility doesn’t work, Moss said. Employees need the autonomy to structure their days in a way that allows them to do their best work.

“You’re asking your employees what flexibility means to them and making accommodations, because you will be left in the dust if you don’t,” Moss said.