Kickstarter Is Shifting to a 4-Day Workweek
Kickstarter starts one of its most interesting projects to date: a four-day work week for its employees.
The Brooklyn-based crowdfunding platform announced last week that it would be the first company to participate in a series of pilot programs called 4 Day Week US starting in 2022. The programs, which were started in part by Kickstarter manager Jon Leland, are a spin-off from 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit advocating a shorter work schedule. On Monday, the 4-day working week in the US circulated an employee petition to identify companies to target and encouraged employers to join the program.
For business owners, this could be the perfect time to experiment. “Remote workers are coming back now and they are used to some flexibility,” said Chris Mullen, executive director of the Boston-based think tank Workforce Institute. Mullen advises most employers to give it a try, provided they measure employee interest and get involved first Dialog about how to do it effectively.
The four-day week has gained momentum in recent years. In March, the Spanish government announced that it would pay companies to try. London-based consumer goods company Unilever began a year-long test in its New Zealand offices in November 2020. And Buffer, a San Francisco-based social media software company, tried the schedule in 2020 and decided to keep it going through 2021 because it says “Too sustained levels of productivity and a better sense of work-life balance.” it in a company blog post.
Kickstarter CEO Aziz Hasan told Axios that the pandemic inspired him to try a four-day work week for his 90 employees. “What we’ve all experienced in the past 18 months, you feel this compression on your professional life, your private life,” he said. A Kickstarter spokesperson said the company has not yet finalized how it will execute on the schedule. The 4-day week usually advocates a 32-hour week with four eight-hour days.
The results of the first experiments are promising. When Microsoft Japan tested the four-day week in 2019, productivity increased by 40 percent and 92 percent of employees said they liked the schedule. A 2020 study of 350 people in the Philippines published in the Journal of Physics found that compressed work weeks helped workers feel less stressed and more effective in their private lives.
