Chucklefish have been doing the 4-day-week for a whole year now!
With my Fridays off I was able to finish my Masters and now I'm taking piano lessons, doing home DIY and taking myself on cute dates ✨
But how does a game studio & publisher make 4 days work week to week?
Our top priority was achieving a better work/life balance. We work 28 hours a week, we did not add the time we were losing to the rest of our work-days and we haven't needed to.
Instead, we established new boundaries and ideas for what was achievable and what a successful week would look like for us.
We kicked this off with a risk assessment meeting (I know, boring production-y stuff), where we listed out all of our concerns. This was especially important for the publishing side of the studio who regularly have a lot of external engagements that made it difficult to be away for a whole day every week while our partners would still be at work.
Everyone brought with them a list of things they thought would be more difficult with less days.
We put everything into a risk log, establishing how likely each event was to occur and how we could mitigate it.
I think it's worth saying that everything we discussed and added to the list was already something we were juggling while on 5 days a week, and the mitigations we came up with would have helped with 5 days as well as 4 days a week.
The exercise helped us tighten up our process and give voice to those who were worried about the drawbacks and the risk of the trial potentially failing if we stayed blind to processes and issues that needed a look into.
Periodically these processes have been reviewed, are checked in on. We frequently discuss ways to improve how we work and implement changes we think will bring the best out of our teams.
Before we went on the trial, we got in touch with every partner we work with on a regular basis and everybody that we publish to let them know about the trial. We also asked them for their own feedback and issues they experienced directly related to our reduced work hours so we could continue updating our process.
Our partners were all incredibly supportive of our endeavour and still acknowledge and accommodate our ethos and reduced hours respectfully and enthusiastically a year on ❤️
Our process adjustments asked a lot from us in terms of how we defined our roles, what were the key priorities that couldn't slip with less hours, how we delegate and schedule work.
It took a lot of trust in each other's criticisms of how our team functioned to overall make us better, focused and more rested as individuals. We were able to make up a whole that can always rely on each other in the day to day and that made 4 day weeks a success.
I love chatting about how we implemented 4 day weeks and I know a lot of studios are thinking about it - I highly, highly encourage you to plan for a trial that is being set up for success - iron out the issues and acknowledge the big stuff your team will need to improve to create a success of it.
Teams bog themselves down in the panic of ensuring high levels of productivity and continuous progress. I think we achieved exactly that by taking a step back and relaxing a bit. ✨
@Keevahh Did you end up making it one central "studio closed" day or are employees free to choose? I can imagine the former is more challenging when dealing with external partners, and the former for internal communication, so I'm curious about this :)
Big fan of smaller work weeks though so this has been an inspiring thread, thanks! Also, yay more producers on our instance!
@thomasjager we chose Fridays as a studio-wide day off. There was some debate between Monday, Wednesday and Friday for a while.
Monday wouldn't work because people like myself needed to work with external teams to set up and plan the week - I wouldn't have been much use only starting a day late.
We thought about Wednesday for a bit but ultimately decided it would break our flow and be awkward for external partners.
@thomasjager ultimately Friday made most sense because external partners and our publishing teams wind down on a Friday and don't expect things like responses to emails that day etc!
I think if we had been a developer-only team we would have been more flexible with the day but because of the publishing team we had to consider how it would impact other companies a lot.
Choosing our own day week to week would have broken up communication too much and slowed down others in their work.
@Keevahh Thanks so much for answering :D Nice to know, and seemed like you backed up your choice well with the experiment.
I think having a central day off also helps avoiding that people feel socially obliged to check in!
jacob (renard) 🦊
Caoimhe
Jaycie
Thomas
Marcel 🌚
Simon McDonnell
Wren Brier