Scoro proves the reality of unproductive Fridays as it launches own 4-day work week

Data from the work management platform shows how reducing hours might not be as hard as people think – if the working processes follow

Scoro, the award-winning end-to-end work management software platform, has announced it is moving all 140 staff to a 4-day work week, with no compressed hours and no change in salary.

In an attempt to create a blueprint for companies considering a similar move but worried about its impact on productivity, Scoro will publicly document its progress as it introduces organizational changes that it believes are crucial to the shift.

Scoro’s move to a 4-day work week is supported by its own employee data and usage data from the 20,000 users worldwide who work inside the Scoro platform which suggests varying levels of productivity throughout the week.

For example, this is how user activity differs on Fridays compared with average weekly levels:

• All system usage of Scoro’s platform goes down by 23%
• Internal Scoro email usage goes down by 15%
• Internal Scoro Slack usage goes down by 24%

As an organization built on the concept of optimizing time, Scoro wants to show how specifically designed efficiency improvements can help the business achieve more in less time, so people can be more productive and happy.

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Fewer hours alone won’t do the job

In pilots of 4-day work weeks up to now, increases in productivity have commonly been attributed to the boost in employee wellbeing. Scoro challenges this idea of ‘quick wins’ and argues that productivity-related organizational changes are needed if we are to reap the full benefits as well as minimize the risks of a shorter work week not working out.

Scoro Founder and CEO, Fred Krieger explains: “Organizations that trial a 4-day work week rarely commit to overhauling their operations to match new expectations. Consequently, they are likely to be disappointed, or worse, abandon the idea. We’re hoping that our openness makes us an effective case study for other companies to follow, taking our structure and performance metrics as a point of reference and inspiration for rolling out their own shorter work week.”

In order to align the organization and create a framework for employees to support the shift, Scoro has created measurable goals throughout its 12-month mission to boost productivity as working hours decrease.

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Examples include:

• Reducing the time spent in meetings by 25%
• Transitioning 20% of meetings to being held asynchronously
• Changes in communication channels and practices expected to reduce the number of interruptions by 18%
• Increasing the duration of time spent “in flow” and amount of uninterrupted time blocks by 23%
• Improving the quality of time tracking and increasing time tracked in detail to 90% of working hours
• Improved planning and time management expected to save 1 hour of time per person per week
• Increased use of automation expected to save 30 minutes of time per person per week

An easy-to-follow blueprint to encourage adoption

Part of Scoro’s 4-day work week mission is to create a free resource for other companies so that they might optimize their own efficiencies and potentially adopt a short work week too.

To demonstrate how the move from an outdated 5 day working schedule to an optimized 4-day work week could be feasible for other businesses, Scoro will be mapping and measuring its own process from the company to the individual level.

Data and insights generated from the successes, challenges, and downsides will be used to create a transparent and public framework. This framework will be built around the actual outcomes across multiple business operations and backed up by analyzing statistical progress against the goals outlined above.

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