Moving towards a 4-day work week at TalentBee

We decided to pilot a 4-day work week at TalentBee.

Every now and then, we've had Fridays off for the past few months, but we wanted to make it a company-wide policy.

The pilot will start on January 1, 2023 and continue until 31 March, 2023.

We will have all the Fridays off.

After three months, we will evaluate the results & decide whether to continue.

What happens to our salaries? Are we going to cut them?

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No. That was one of the first things our CEO Samuli said when we discussed the topic. Why are we not cutting the salaries of our employees?

For the past four months, we have been talking about the value you bring in. Not the hours you are bringing in.

We tell the story to our customers: It's not the hours we use but the results we bring for you. Whether recruitment will take us 50 or 100 hours, the value for you is finding the person. If we are doing employer branding, it's about if we can build a brand that makes your hiring easier, faster & cheaper. It's not about how many hours we use for it. We are always trying to automate as many things as possible to make things more efficient. This means templates, processes, automation & much more.

So if we suddenly say it is actually about the hours, it would be quite inconsistent.

So yes, we will pay the same salary for the 4-day work week. Since our goal is to become even more profitable & productive, maybe we should pay more according to that?

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Why are we moving towards a 4-day work week?

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Mainly because data shows that it's better. There has been multiple research on the topic, and all of the research has the same results.

Here are the benefits we are expecting when switching to a 4-day-work week:

• Increased productivity
• Better job satisfaction
• Better work-life balance
• Company loyalty

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What are the risks for a 4-day work week?

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There are for sure some risks when moving towards a 4-day work week. Here are the ones we have identified so far:

• Customer satisfaction: Most of our customers still work a 5-day-work-week --> What will happen if we don't answer their messages/calls on Fridays? Will they be unsatisfied? We believe not. It's all about communication with the customers. And we hope that more & more companies will move towards a 4-day-work-week and this problem will go away completely.
• The 4-day work week will become a norm, and productivity will decrease.

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How are we measuring the success & deciding to switch full-time to a 4-day work week?

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As shared, the pilot will be three months, from January to March, and after that, we will decide. We will, of course, evaluate how things are moving forward during the months already.

Here are the things we look at when deciding to continue:

• Employee happiness: Our goal is to create the best workplace for talent acquisition professionals. Is this creating an effect on the people we are expecting or are people feeling, e.g., more stress for doing things in 4 days?
• Customer happiness: Currently, 100% of our customers are happy. If we see a drop in this number, we need to carefully identify whether it was because of this change.
• Our sales & marketing. Is our brand awareness continuing to grow & are we getting more and more inbound leads? Are we closing more customers than we used to?
• Is our monthly recurring revenue growing?  

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And that's it. If you want to follow our journey of moving towards a 4-day work week, follow TalentBee on Instagram!

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