This Moncton Firm is Testing A Four-Day Workweek
MONCTON–A Moncton consulting firm is about to wrap up a three-month trial of a four-day workweek–and its employees love it.
O Strategies co-founder Jason Doiron said that while he can’t know for sure until he and co-founder Myriane Ouellette consult their staff of nine at the end of the month, he said: “I have a hunch it’s going to continue.”
Doiron said the trial period, launched in early January, has been a net-positive experience for the company.
With more time to spend with family, friends, and loved ones, staff members have been more focused when they are at work, Doiron noted.
“We’ve noticed people coming in on Monday a lot more present, not just in person or on Zoom, but fully present. It kind of forces us to be more efficient with our work and make sure we optimize the tools we’re using for managing projects and working with clients,” he said.
While longer weekends are nice, Doiron said it was a learning process to adjust to four, more efficient workdays as opposed to five.
“A four-day workweek forces us to rethink how we organize our work. When we’re used to stretching out our work from Monday to Friday, we have to crunch a lot of work into four days; it’s challenging when we only have four days to do it all,” Doiron said.
It hasn’t all been rosy – the hyper-productivity of truncating the workweek by a day has led to some fatigue among staff.
“When crunching that much work, some people are just really tired after four big days of work,” noted Doiron.
That comes naturally for O Strategies, which works with non-profits, government agencies, and companies in the field of social impact and innovation, dealing with complex and heavy issues relating to immigration and gender equality.
“These topics can be pretty intense, so spending four days in this work can be pretty hard and makes it more meaningful, for sure,” Doiron said.
It was a fine balance to strike between getting what needed to be done, done and not overwhelming the team with too much work.
“We want to make sure we don’t lose anybody because of burnout or overwork; that’s not why we created a company and it’s not part of our values,” Doiron said.
While there are some exceptions, like weekend work, certain events, and assignments on timetables outside of the bounds of a four-day workweek, Doiron said they’ve agreed to be flexible on those schedules when necessary.
“I’ve enjoyed multiple long weekends so far, which is day and night from where I used to work six-to-seven days a week.”
While a handful of companies and municipalities across Canada have experimented with longer workdays and shorter workweeks, O Strategies has not asked its employees to work more hours and has kept its Monday-to-Friday, 8:30-4:30 hours in place.
“As entrepreneurs, we’ve accepted staff will work fewer hours per week. The type of work we do is mentally intensive, so working more than eight hours in a day is pretty hard, so we kept it 30 to 32 hours per week, instead of 37 or 40. We’re basically diminishing the number of hours by 20 to augment the weekend by 50 percent,” said Doiron.
With the re-evaluation of the trial coming at the end of this month, Doiron and Ouellette plan to consult staff – and Doiron has an intuition it’s going to stick.
“Everyone agrees that a three-day weekend is awesome. Not just here and there, with a holiday weekend – we can really regularly get rest and come back on Monday refreshed.”
Sam Macdonald is a Huddle reporter in Moncton. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].