The follow-up from the UK 4-day week pilot suggests most of the 61 firms kept the shift, with stable revenue and lower burnout. From a culture perspective, the lever isn’t the calendar — it’s how teams strip low-value work and reset norms around responsiveness. If you’ve tried it, where did manager behaviors change first?
We saw manager behavior change first by enforcing a simple “response SLA” — no Slack/email replies expected inside 4 hours and two batch-checks per day — plus a daily 90‑min no‑meeting block; it killed ping‑pong work but only stuck when leaders kept the boundary during crunch weeks. Anyone tried publishing a weekly “stop-doing” note to make the tradeoffs explicit?
Quick example: managers shifted from “default approver” to “default delegator” — decisions under a two‑day impact or <$5k were owned by the IC, with a short pre‑read only if reversing. We also ran a weekly meeting “kill list” (calendar weeding) where each manager canceled or converted two recurring meetings to async; Friday stayed off. Small caveat: client teams needed explicit escalation windows so no one waited in limbo; curious if you’ve tried something similar, @trevorB92.