Baltimore CEO John Byrne thinks it's time for employers to "take a serious look at" some of the workplace directives that have persisted for decades. This as his tech company is doing away with the five-day, 40-hour workweek.
Byrne leads Tricerat, a 24-year-old tech company that specializes in printing and scanning software. The company has found success with previous efforts to buck traditional workforce models, he said, and is ready to make another change aimed at improving work/life balance, and in turn, improving employee retention during a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has sparked huge labor shortages and mass employee exoduses in some industries.
The tech company will be transitioning to a four-day workweek starting Oct. 1. This announcement comes just a few months after another Baltimore tech company, Incite Automation, disclosed it had adopted the four-day model to increase its recruiting and retention potential.
At Tricerat, the decision was spurred by conversations and surveys in which the company's roughly 50 employees indicated flexibility in work hours was their No.1 workplace concern, "even above salary," Byrne said. The incoming four-day model also builds on Tricerat's existing "work from anywhere" policy, which Byrne said was implemented more than 10 years ago, well before the pandemic forced many other companies to enact similar policies.
"We’ve always strived to promote strong work/life balance," he said. "We know work is very up in the air right now. People are leaving and moving around much more. We wanted to be cognizant of that and make some new improvements."
The company is currently developing guidelines for how the four-day workweek will be structured.
Byrne said he knows this will be a more "radical change" than the work-from-anywhere policy, but his hope and expectation is that it will yield a similar result — improvements in employee morale and productivity. When Tricerat first began allowing employees to work from anywhere they chose, Byrne said the company found employees were completing their tasks in less time, the firm's customer satisfaction scores remained high, and follow-up surveys showed workers felt they could be more productive without the typical daily distractions of an office-only environment. The vast majority of the company's employees, including those in Baltimore, work remotely at least a few days per week, Byrne said.
Soon, Tricerat employees will have an extra day each week to deal with personal business such as dental or medical appointments, which Byrne hopes will allow them to be more even focused during the days they do spend working.
Byrne said the change is also "very very" motivated by Tricerat's desire to remain an attractive employer in the post-Covid market. The trend of companies battling unprecedented levels of employee turnover has been widely reported, and the tech talent pool has become even more competitive than before the pandemic. Byrne said he understands employee satisfaction is key to retention.
"We've built a solid team and good culture," Byrne said. "The last thing we want is people being peeled off by tech companies doing better things than we are.”
