This company doubled down on the four-day workweek two years after piloting its program

For today’s edition of “Where are they now?” HR Brew checked in with Codeword, a company that piloted a four-day workweek in 2024.

As some other companies have rolled back flexibility in recent years, the communications design agency has doubled down on its program, dubbed “soft Fridays,” which has since blossomed into a year-round initiative embedded in the company’s culture, the agency’s chief of staff, Alli Ray, told HR Brew.

“Our team has really appreciated the autonomy where they’re able to work when they need to work, but they can use the time that they have for their lives,” Ray said. “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.”

What’s changed? When Codeword started “soft Fridays,” the agency wanted it to go beyond a new perk to reshape how employees think about work, Ray previously told HR Brew. The goal, she said, was to give employees more time to themselves so the hours they were working would be more productive and efficient.

When some of Codeword’s roughly 90 employees said that they weren’t able to step away from their work every Friday, Ray said the company started allowing workers to designate any day of the workweek as a “soft” day.

“How about a soft Tuesday or a soft Wednesday?” she said. “When your work ebbs and flows, we want your downtime to ebb and flow.”

As is the case for many project- and client-focused companies, Ray said Codeword has busier and slower seasons, making the added flexibility around scheduling “soft days” helpful.

“Sometimes there’s a ton going on, and you’re working more than eight hours a day,” she said. “But, sometimes you don’t need to work eight hours a day…If your work is getting done, we want you to be able to take advantage of that.”

Some lessons. After launching the program, Ray said the company sent employees hats that read, “Cancel Friday meetings” in an effort to promote limiting end-of-week meetings. It led to a mindset shift across the organization and became part of the company’s culture.

“One way that the soft Fridays has really manifested itself in something [is] when you book a Friday meeting, I feel like I get pings on the side that are like, ‘Hey, sorry, booking this,’” Ray said. “And, it’s totally chill. Work is work, and it needs to get done. But, that has been a good culture reset for us.”

What works for one company may not work for another, Ray said, but every employee can benefit from more autonomy.

“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.”