The Nonprofit Four-Day Workweek: You Can Take Care of Yourself and Still Change the World

One of the six practices we teach social change leaders here at Rockwood Leadership Institute is personal ecology: maintaining balance, pacing and efficiency to sustain your energy over a lifetime of activism. For the past seven years, we’ve found that a wonderful way to support our staff’s personal ecology is by instituting a four-day, 32-hour workweek.

Our four-day workweek experiment began during the 2008 recession when we, like many nonprofits, were finding solutions for some new financial challenges. During that time, we decided to try reducing the salaries of our department directors while also changing their schedules to a four-day, 32-hour workweek (Monday-Thursday). After a very productive year, we extended the four-day, 32-hour workweek to our entire staff (without the salary decrease) to test the idea that a shorter week would strengthen the organization overall. And it did!

Some of the positive effects staff say they have experienced from the four-day, 32-hour workweek are:

• Feeling fully rested and rejuvenated on Mondays.
• Being more efficient in four days than they were in five.
• Becoming better at prioritizing, scheduling and managing their time at work and personally.
• Better team dynamics.
• Having time to do everything they want and need to do (e.g. run errands, spend quality time with friends and family, explore outside interests, exercise, go back to school, volunteer).
• Feeling more present and “alive” at work.
• Not feeling burned out at the end of the week.
• Loving their job!

We won’t sugar coat it. Having a four-day week isn’t without its issues. Staff have also reported challenges with answering the email that builds up over the three-day weekend, and with creating efficient systems to get work done in a timely manner. Some staff also expressed guilt about “not doing enough.”

That said, instituting a four-day, 32-hour workweek hasn’t just benefited the staff’s work and personal lives, it has also helped Rockwood grow as an organization. Since implementing a four-day workweek, we have tripled our budget and increased the number of people we serve each year while maintaining the same number of staff (11-13).

Join us in this grand experiment! We hope our story will show that it’s possible. If you’d like to transform your organization’s five-day, 40+ hour workweek into a four-day, 32-hour one, here are a few tips for how to integrate it into your organization’s culture:

• Plan: Give your staff 6-12 months to reconfigure their workload and schedules in preparation for the change.
• Communicate: Tell your constituents and key partners about your new work schedule. Ask staff to add their office hours to their email signatures, and mention it in their outgoing voicemail messages.
• Model: Encourage team leaders to model working a four-day, 32-hour workweek by leaving on time each day, and not sending or answering emails after office hours.

It might take some time for your staff to get the hang of managing its workload with the new schedule, so we’ve also compiled 10 tools the Rockwood staff says they use to get the most out of their workweek:

1. Keep a clear task list for each day of the week. Two to three times a day, revisit your list and prioritize.
2. Include personal to-dos on your list (e.g. exercise and spending time with friends) to ensure you aren’t leaving out important personal tasks.
3. Spend 10 minutes at the end of each day planning for the next day, and 20 minutes at the end of your week planning for the following week.
4. Keep at least one day meeting-free.
5. Have a clear idea of the POP (purpose, outcome and process) of each project and meeting before committing to it.
6. Answer emails in batches, rather than react to them as they arrive in your in-box.
7. Turn off email and social media alerts.
8. Eat lunch away from your desk. You’ll come back to your work with greater focus.
9. Be clear with everyone you work with (inside and outside of the organization) about your time constraints.
10. Create efficient systems for team planning, accountability and communication.

Have questions about the nonprofit four-day workweek? Email us.

For more ideas and reflections about the four-day workweek, check out these related articles:

• 5 Reasons It’s Time for the 4-Day Work Week on AlterNet.org
• Inside the Life of a Company That Works a 4-Day Week on AlJazeeraAmerica.com.
• It’s High Time for the 4-Day Workweek on Forbes.com.
• Be More Productive. Take Time Off in The New York Times.
• How to Implement a Four-Day Workweek on Inc.com.