As the end of 2019 approached, Uncharted co-founder and CEO Banks Benitez became enthralled by the idea of a shortened workweek.
He read extensively on Microsoft's four-day workweek project in Japan, specifically related to the company's productivity boost of 40%.
He wondered if something similar was possible for the Denver-based social impact accelerator.
As the company began looking into what it needed to do to shift to a shorter workweek, Covid-19 hit and Benitez paused.
“Is now the best time or the worst time to do this? We had lost some funding, we went through a round of layoffs and we were trying to figure out, are we going to make it as a business? Is this the time to double down and work 80 hours, or is there no better time for us to consider this experiment,” Benitez said he wondered at the time.
The company pushed on with the trial and by early-May alerted its 13-person team that it would transition to four, eight hour workdays in June, for the remainder of the summer.
Before they rolled out the plan, Uncharted set out a series of goals to measure the success of the trial. The company was trying to fit 100 percent of its work into 80 percent of the time, in an effort to benefit the personal wellbeing of its employees.
“We thought, 'can we reduce team stress and increase team mental health, while still hitting all of our goals?'” Benitez said.
So, Uncharted began developing strategies to reach its performance goals. Benitez said he began prioritizing 16 hours a week for protected space to get his goals completed, while the company decided to cap meeting lengths to under an hour.
“The first thing that we did is look at how we determine what is actually important,” he said.
The company collectively read the book Essentialism by Greg McKeown and discussed how to prioritize what’s essential and cut out what’s nonessential. They rethought the frequency of meetings and how they report out findings in an effort to maximize their time.
Now, two and a half weeks into the trial, Benitez said Uncharted has learned a handful of things that will guide the rest of the experiment.
Employees have tracked their hours, ensuring that they’re staying at or around the 32-hour mandate. So far, Benitez worked 34 hours in the first week and 32.5 last week, a sharp decrease from the 50 to 55 hours a week he worked before this trial. He’s hopeful that the additional day off has given the team an opportunity to rest and recharge before returning.
“Getting the chance to totally decompress over three days brings people back with a level of rest and clarity,” he said.
There have also been some unintended consequences with the trial, as Benitez said Uncharted has seen a decrease in people reaching out to ask others for help.
“People know we have less time to do our work, so there is an increased hesitation to ask for help from people,” he said. “We don’t want that to become a norm.”
Uncharted is looking into the issue, and Benitez is hopeful to find a happy medium where people are respectful of other’s time, but ask for help when they truly need it.
“We have to ask for help, the key is to learn when to ask for help,” he said.
As Uncharted looks to fairly evaluate the experiment, it has hired Coeffect, a Denver-based company that helps organizations leverage data more effectively, to host a third-party review. For this experiment, the company has designed a process that evaluates team performance, hours worked, cultural impacts, self-reported mental health, personal life attributes and stress levels.
Coeffect captured baseline data at the beginning of June, will take a mid-summer survey to understand if the team has actually changed working practices and an end-of-summer survey to understand how these dimensions have changed.
Internally, Uncharted has created specific objectives and key results for the three months over the summer and will be evaluating its performance against those objectives and key results at the organizational, departmental and individual levels.
As the trial is still in the early phases, Benitez said Uncharted is uncertain if this will be a permanent move. Regardless of the outcomes, he wants to find a schedule that works best for the company.
“Success for me is that we design a workweek that is fundamentally human for our team,” he said.
