Another Business that has wholeheartedly embraced new ways of working to effectively implement a successful four-day week is the American company Uncharted, led by their CEO Banks Benitez. Uncharted, a Denver-based social investment accelerator, moved permanently to a four-day week in September of 2020, after beginning their trial in April of the same year. Both the quantity and quality of employee performance did not change, as measured against Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) before the trial start date. Work life balance improved and employee stress decreased. This became apparent very soon into the trial period. The company’s recruitment and retention capabilities also increased. But how was the company able to move to a four-day week while maintaining productivity? There were three key factors that allowed Uncharted to move to a four-day week without experiencing any drop in productivity. The first of these was a move to output focused working. This started from the fundamental understanding that the number of hours worked - does not translate into the quality of the work performed. Instead, Uncharted began to focus more heavily on what was driving real results for the company and tailor their operations to centre on them. The mantra for this shift was, time invested matters less than results produced. “The four-day workweek is achieved not by placing the burden on individuals to become faster and more productive, but through getting better at prioritising and de-prioritising”, says Benitez. This insight was built on the infamous pareto principle, named after the nineteenth century Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto and refined by the academic and management consultant, Joseph M. Juran, which states that 80% of all results come from just 20% of the work. The pareto principle has applications in walks of life, but it holds particularly true in business and productivity practices. Microsoft, for example, found that “80 percent of the errors in Windows and Office are caused by just 20 percent of the entire pool of bugs”. The logic follows that if they focus their efforts on fixing just 20% of bugs, they will actually prevent 80% of the errors. This is much less time consuming and much more effective than fixing every single bug, one at a time. By shifting the focus to what is actually producing results and reorienting business practice around this, you begin to operate much more efficiently. Firstly, in the sense of what we spend our working time doing. If we focus on what generates the best results, we are making the most productive use of our time possible. This allows the business to develop at a more streamlined rate. When time is managed to be more efficient, growth is boosted as the work carried out is always productive. It also creates a reduction in stress and burnout that we identified at the beginning of this chapter as detrimental to both health and work-related performance. If we are able to streamline working patterns and focus them more clearly, employees don’t suffer from an increasing number of competing demands being placed upon them that ultimately leads to burnout. This in turn decreases turnover of staff, which saves heaps of time onboarding and training new staff. Equally as importantly, it gives employees greater space and clarity to think more creatively while at work, increasing the frequency of light bulb ideas that can grow the business and make it even more successful. Giving employees a clearer focus will also help improve decision making. When workers know what is actually important and have been given the mandate to prioritise it, they are much more likely to make accurate decisions that will lead to improvements. As CEO Greg McKeown has observed, using data from over one hundred teams, “when there is a high level of clarity… people thrive”. The shift to output focused working ensures that resources are deployed in the most effective manner possible, as resources will be more effectively spent on what is producing the best outcomes, both reducing waste and optimising performance. Overall, it promotes better dialogue between senior managers and workers on what work the company should be doing. In this manner, leaders are held more accountable by staff, creating greater democratisation in the workplace, where everyone feels they are contributing significantly to the business’s success. While this method helps us highlight what work is essential, this does not mean that the other 80% of tasks should be readily discarded, as they may still be important. It is only to say that paying greater attention to the minority of work that produces the majority of important results, will allow you to work more effectively. This is why Juran referred to the 20/ 80 pareto distribution as "the vital few and the useful many". A four-day working week requires us to discard the mindset of quantity over quality, and adopt an alternative pattern of working that turns this myth on its head. We should focus on quality over quantity and design the way we work around this principle. Indeed, it seems strange that the phrase, quality over quantity has been a widely regarded part of our collective general wisdom for many years. So why haven’t we applied this convention to work? Uncharted did, and this was one of the main reasons they were able to smoothly transition to a four-day week. The next thing Uncharted did was to rethink the decision-making process and place more weight on making future proof decisions. Decision making is important and Benitez recognises this, citing making effective decisions as another method for successfully implementing a four-day week. Poor decision making can negatively affect productivity, revenue, reputation and staff motivation. According to Benitez, making better decisions is the best substitute for working longer. We have already seen how moving to output focused working can be incredibly helpful in making better decisions. It tells us where to focus the majority of our efforts, where to deploy our limited resources and how to organise our work in order to get the best results. However, good decision making doesn’t stop once you have identified the drivers of results, it’s a constantly evolving process that can keep your organisation on track and ensure it continues to remain streamlined and agile. The key to success here is to design decision making processes that lead to better outcomes. One good decision now can prevent a hundred downstream decisions that arise from a poor alternative. Decisions need to be made in order to continually maintain conditions for optimal performance and eliminate needless problems that sap time and energy and create drags on productivity. Decisions that are made either too hastily, in an emotional state, or that focus on short term success and are made without adequate data, are just some examples that could potentially all lead to otherwise unnecessary work down the road. Priority should be given to ensuring the correct decisions are taken to ensure that the staff’s energy is continually focused on the drivers of results, not preventable distractions arising from poor decisions. Alongside the move to output focused working and redesigning the decision-making process, Benitez rethought his company’s approach to client relations. Just as the dominant assumptions about hustle culture produce a reluctance to the four-day week, the popular attitude to client relations has a similar effect. Many client facing businesses are aware of the prevalence of what might be called the ‘customer is always right’ mentality and will often fall into the trap of working harder and longer to deliver for clients. Their view is that if the client wants something done, they are obligated to deliver, even if that means working every waking hour available to them. For any business, it is completely understandable that they want to offer the best level of service possible to clients. But this can be done without relenting to hustle culture and easily within the confines of the four-day week. Uncharted were able to provide the same level of service, if not better, by working smarter, not harder. Just as they conducted a Pareto inventory to identify the drivers of results in the business on a broad scale, they also conducted a similar, client-based inventory, identifying the factors that commonly led to the best outcomes for clients and used these to drive their service going forward. They identified successful strategies and areas where they had wasted time, along with opportunities for other efficiencies and improvements. This client audit allowed them to deliver a comparable and, in some cases, better level of service in a smaller time frame. Again, by focusing on the drivers of results, they were once again able to provide the same level of service in four days, simply by working smarter. They were also honest and open with clients. In order to ensure the new working pattern could be implemented properly. Benitez was careful to set positive boundaries and communicate them effectively. Good communication from the outset of the relationship is essential but even more so with clients when your business operates a four-day week. One of the strengths of Uncharted’s approach was that they were proactive in communications with clients as opposed to reactive. They listed non-negotiables with clients up front and clearly delineated their working hours to build positive working relationships and make the best use of their available time to communicate with clients. Most importantly, they also communicated that their aim behind moving to a four-day week was to work smarter and more efficiently to allow them to deliver, at the very least, the same level of service. No doubt many clients will welcome the positives from working with a business that seeks to improve staff wellbeing and business performance by adopting a four-day week, but what about clients who breach the boundaries set by four-day week employers, expecting five days of work to feel as though they are truly getting their value for money. Granted, this is rare, but clients that repeatedly try to breach any of the non-negotiables agreed at the outset of the relationship may prove difficult to work with. If problems arise once a partnership or working dynamic has been formed, Benitez recommends releasing those clients who prove to be highly problematic. In summary, we’ve always found a pro-active communication strategy with clients is the best approach. Be confident and clear in your communication about what you are setting out to achieve by moving to a four-day week and how the quality of work will not be affected. Most clients will be fine with this, and many will welcome this dynamic new approach. Uncharted is a perfect example of how a company can move to a four-day week by working smarter not harder. The company was able to maintain employee performance, while improving work life balance, decreasing stress levels and seeing benefits to their recruitment and retention capabilities, simply by reorganising and rethinking how the company operated. A four-day week that maintains productivity and, in some cases, improves it, is absolutely possible if implemented correctly. Simple measures such as focusing on what produces results, making good decisions and clearly communicating with clients allowed Uncharted to move to a four-day week with no drop in performance. The key to implementation is tweaking business practice to become more efficient by focusing on the drivers of real results and making good decisions, reorienting business practice around them and communicating this effectively with clients.