comundo was founded people-first. Sure, we knew we were on to something with the product, but to build the team – the group of people who would ultimately be responsible for the success of the company – that was something else. And with so many successful pilots worldwide, we knew we had to give four-day working week a go.

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The Happy Employee™

It's common knowledge that happy employees are better employees, but just how do you make “a happy employee”?

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We knew it involved job satisfaction – making sure that everyone could feel the impact they were making through their work, and that they were part of an open and trusting community where there was zero judgement. That, we could definitely do.But does that really make people happy? We weren’t so sure. What we did know was that what had a huge impact in work was what was happening out of work, but how could we possibly influence that?

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Enter …

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The four-day working week

What if everyone in the company gets an extra day on the weekend? Would that make them happy? The more we looked into it, the more we felt it would. Studies show that a four-day working week:

• Improves mental and physical health
• Increases work/life balance
• Increases productivity
• Improves employees’ skillsets
• Increases community engagement and volunteerism
• Reduces employee turnover
• Reduces sick days
• Reduces a company’s carbon footprint
• And has a positive impact on a business's bottom line

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In 2022, 61 companies in the UK took part in a study to test the four-day work week benefits. The test resulted in wild success, with 29% of companies adopting it permanently. The four-day working week increased revenue by 1.4% and reduced the number of sick days by 65%. The companies also showed a 57% decline in the likelihood of an employee leaving. Not bad, right? It would give people time to do whatever it is they needed to do in order to rest, recharge and recuperate.

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That could be spending more time with friends and family – or by themselves. It could be listening to all those podcasts the working week and family-filled weekends just don’t allow for. It could be working out at the gym, doing yoga or taking a long walk. It could be cuddling a cat, volunteering, or just catching up on some much-needed sleep. Whatever it is, we knew it sounded good.

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We knew it would help people not only feel appreciated and heard at work but also feel that their working week was one they could both manage and feel proud of. But before we jumped headfirst into a whole new world of work, we wanted to be absolutely sure that we did it right – especially as a startup! The last thing we wanted was to burn people out by not managing our time correctly. After all, we still had five days of work to get through …

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So we reached out to the Nordic’s leading authority on the four-day working week, Pernille Garde Abildgaard.

Learning from the best

In May 2023, we had our first workshop about the four-day working week with Pernille. It was, to say the least, eye-opening.

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In that first workshop, she had a brilliant analogy using the Fosbury Flop.Before 1968, nobody had heard of the Fosbury Flop. It didn’t exist. In fact, when Dick Fosbury first jumped over the bar like that, people thought he was crazy. But a gold medal in the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City made people think again, and when you think of the high jump now, what do you see in your mind’s eye?

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This is a long-winded way of saying; just because the five-day working week is what we’re all used to, doesn’t mean it’s the best way of working.But getting to know a new way of working isn’t easy. We’ve had to unlearn everything we knew about our typical working day and learn an entirely new routine. One that would become the norm, and help us work more efficiently and effectively than we ever had done before.

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We had to learn how to truly focus; how to really unwind; how to prioritise and how to delegate. We had to learn new norms around meetings, emails (who needs CC anyway) and our day-to-day working environment. We know what you’re thinking; what, you don’t do all that already? But trust us, if you need to get five days of work done in four, it’s a whole different ballgame.

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Luckily, Pernille knows all of this (and then some), and she comes chock-full of tried and tested methods on how to manage our time in order to maximise productivity. We use these methods each and every day, and as everyone in the company is in the same shoes, there is a remarkable amount of respect when it comes to each other’s time. If we want this to work, we have to work together.

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But were there any challenges?

Excellent question! Of course, there are challenges to implementing a four-day working week. We knew that going into this big change we would have to tackle hurdles and adapt to make it work. A four-day work week has pros and cons (for some companies, there may be more cons than pros), however, we tackled those cons head-on.

Here are the two main challenges we faced:

Scheduling

The biggest challenge with a four-day work week is scheduling that one off day. What if everybody wants Monday off? For many, taking Friday off and having that long weekend makes sense.

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We had to improvise and come together to schedule off days so that those essential to that day’s operations would work. This way, we ensured that work or the quality of it wouldn’t be compromised.

Fitting in a lot of work

It may not seem much, but fitting one whole day of work somewhere into four days can be challenging. We had to make some changes in how we work and allocate tasks to ensure no time is wasted and five days of work is done in four seamlessly.

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We set fixed slots for checking, writing, and sending emails during the day. Our team is committed to sticking to and completing work hours on the working day. That means making up the time if someone comes in late, takes a long break, or runs an errand.

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But that’s not all – thanks to Pernille's expertise, we also adopted techniques that increase our productivity, like the good old Pomodoro technique. And yes, we also reduced unnecessary meetings!

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So what now?

Well, in June 2023, the first group of people moved to a four-day week – with full pay (everyone starts out with three months of full-time work to make sure they’re fully onboarded). We’re armed with the best tools, the best teacher (that’s you, Pernille), and of course, the best team.

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It’s safe to say that a four-day working week did wonders for us. Our employees are able to get the same amount of work done in four days that they would usually do in five days. We also learned that to ensure this kind of setup works well, you must implement it correctly. Luckily for us, we were in the right hands.

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Here’s to a new way of working!

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Wondering how things are going?

Not bad at all, if we may say so ourselves.

If you'd like to read more, check out this post about how we've implemented the four-day workweek.