Four Day Workweek: We Did It! What Now?

[Music] thank you hey everyone um thank you so much for coming to our panel the four day work week we did it but now uh we're super excited to share all the details of our four day work weeks and how that went for each of us um we're four very different Studios we're all working on very different things and I've all had our different successes challenges and ways that we went about our four day work week so this panel is really just an introduction starting point a way to think about the four day formula what has worked not worked things you may be considering for your own Studios and exposing all the wins whys and hows of operating every week like it's a uh three day weekend so uh with that in mind I'll introduce uh myself and then I will let the panel introduce themselves as well my name is John Cooney I go by

he and him pronouns I'm the CEO of armor games which is a full remote 11 person Studio we started 15 something years ago as a flash games website and now we're predominantly a publisher for Indies and small teams we're working on games like Baron breakfast and snacko and spirit of the mouse we moved to a four day work week last October and we structured it as a 32-hour work week with Fridays becoming part of the weekend so I'm happy to moderate the panel I'm going to chime in on some things but I'm mostly going to try to let our other panelists speak the most um so let's just roll down uh the list in order starting with Celine hey everyone my name is Salim the Boos I'm the co-founder of Co-op which is a worker-owned game studio and it's also a Cooperative we're actually celebrating our 10th birthday in two months I'm really really excited and proud about that and um we started uh we started with our four day work week in 2020 and

then went back to five days just to kind of feel it out and then we're like oh yeah four days is where it's at and permanently made the switch last year uh that's me great and Tanya hi I'm Tanya short and I'm the captain CEO director of kickbox games where 11 people based in Montreal we released a boyfriend engine and moon hunters and we're working on some Secrets um and we've also done some publishing so we're probably best known as the Publishers of the upcoming graphical Dwarf Fortress um but feel free to look also look up Paparazzi six ages and other things um we went to four days 32 hours starting last June and the run-up to the launch of boyfriend dungeon we decided that that was the best way to have a sustainable pressure as launch was coming up and I was almost impossible to

go back to five days we briefly discussed it but nobody wanted to even try so it looks like we're four days at the very least until the pandemic is actually over but probably forever great and finally Chris yes my name is Christopher Chancey I am the founder and CEO of menavoid entertainment a studio based out of Montreal it's about 36 people now amongst other things we've recently released rainbow Billy the curse of the Leviathan we're on the four day week since 2019 so you know it was really part of our core values as a studio to have a no crunch culture and to try and give the best advantages to uh to our staff and so we implemented it pretty early and it's been going great we've never went back to the five days since then much like John we're under 32-hour week with Fridays off great thank you Chris and thank you everyone on the panel I'm going to uh go ahead and stop sharing my screen so

we'll go back to just looking at our faces so you don't have to look at um my presentation the whole time um and yeah thank you uh everyone who's come to uh our panel um I've this is very roughly structured uh but the the first part we're really going to focus on is thinking about how we planned and dreamed out our four day work week what that kind of how we arrived at those moments what did it look like what did initial planning look like uh for the um for our work weeks and then after that we'll move into more of some of our respective challenges some of the things we found from uh moving through this process things that changed along the way and we'll end by talking about uh the future where do we see it fitting in with our studios in the future Lasting Impressions thoughts about how the four day work week might fit into the larger Indie space but also the game industry as a whole and then at the end we'll have uh room for Q a so feel free to save any questions you might have for our panel we're very happy to answer any questions that there

might be uh towards the end so thank you everyone let's go ahead and start with um you know how we got here and how we started so the first question for the panel is really talking about you know what prompted this change like what what was the point at which uh you all decided that it was time to move and shift from a five-day work week to a four day work week and maybe I'll just pick someone to start off with and then we can start that conversation so let's start with uh Sully uh sure uh so we started in the summer of 2020 and uh I don't know if you remember but that was a pretty rough time uh it was after the murder of George Floyd we were going through pandemic uh there was you know a lot of um a lot of stress on our team uh and on a personal level just of like what uh was happening in the world and we just felt like just you know keeping our heads down and working throughout didn't

feel right for us we really wanted to be engaged in social movements we really wanted to have more time to sort of engage with our families and our communities and we felt like work was taking too much from us to be able to to do that and so that was where the conversation for four day work weeks began um it could became it was a necessity for our well-being our mental health and our need to engage with what was happening around us things that were just more important than frankly video games yeah I think I can chime in a little bit too that we had talked about it for some years before we did it um and I had always felt that the the humans making the games matter at least as much to me as you know the business that is profiting from the game so when it became very clear to me last summer that uh you know giving bonus vacation days wasn't quite cutting it

um giving various perks wasn't quite cutting it this seemed like a way that we could give more uh more buffer in a way to to The Human Side of of Kit Fox without losing we could afford to risk uh the potential losses from that and uh yeah after we've been enduring the pandemic for that long and then we were like I said we were running up to the launch of boyfriend dungeon and I really needed people to not burn out um and I needed them to to stay on after launch and and really come with with 100 uh you know of their health um it seemed like the best at least temporary solution and and then we thought well why not continue yeah um we implemented it in a in kind of a knee-jerk reaction to an article I had read when uh back in 2019 there was an article that came out of a study in Norway that it was all around focused

hours of work and uh basically the article was saying that you know in a normal day on a five-day week uh a human being can only have about four to four and a half hours of focused work the rest of the time you're a little bit distracted you're on Facebook you're you know talking with colleagues whatever it is and uh that they made a test and with the four day work week that four hours of focused work became five hours to five hours and a half of forecast focused work and so in a sense in four days they felt like you could achieve as as much as in five days because the amount of focused work didn't change and so you know from that and also being in Montreal there there is there are a lot of studios here and so there it is a competitive landscape you know find staff finds senior talent and all of that stuff and and bring them into the studio and we were very much into already the the idea of kind of trying to balance out work and life together and and kind of redefine what it means to work and you know in the 21st century

and so we decided to implement it at that time um and as I said like uh the reception uh immediately was you know pretty crazy so we decided to keep it that's awesome and so as you were thinking about your your you know switch over to this new work week and as you were starting to plan things out what were your expectations around you know the fact that there was no longer going to be a Friday or whatever day you take off for the four day work week um were you expecting productivity I know Chris you talked about this a little bit were you expecting productivity to say the same were you expecting productivity to drop you know a full 20 because there's that less time what were your expectations going into uh rolling this out for your teams our expectations were that we were going to probably lose a bit of efficiency in the short term like I feel like I'm very aware of what I don't know in life and so I was approaching it with the humility of knowing that we were going to have some some bumps down that road um and so we decided to implement it for

six months before we even uh decided to kind of look at what what the results were we decided to kind of give ourselves a really solid period of time and not stress out about it too early um and so yeah we did expect some you know some rough Patches at the beginning there was a little bit of a Slowdown at the start I think everyone was kind of getting into the groove uh you know we can talk about this extensively but you know probably in the next section there's a lot of you know challenges that come with the four day work week that you need to be aware of and we kind of hit those face first every time um but uh you know pretty quickly I would say within three months uh I feel like we had reached a level of efficiency that was similar to what we had in the past uh just with much happier people uh so it was and that positive for us foreign I had very uh minimal expectations I wasn't really sure how things were going to play out I I had a feeling that

mental health was going to improve and then that was like a very drastic uh obvious shift for us uh so that was just really great I think something that I was unsure of is our team had scaled up during the pandemic as a remote studio for the first time and so there were a lot of members of our studio that were you know people I've never worked with uh in in person and it definitely took a while to convince them to that the four day work week was real you know it just um when you're not a tight-knit team and you have new members and they're just like oh you're saying I can take off on Friday like are you sure and we noticed a couple people who were just like not doing that and that um they're like well I can't finish my work if I don't continue working Fridays and so something we didn't anticipate was just how we were assigning work how we were um tracking it how much work was being assigned and just a cultural level of uh providing safety to those newer team members who uh just started with us and

were suddenly being told they're okay to take time off on Fridays um that was a that was a bit of a surprise for us that that like need to kind of convince and make that feel safe for people yeah I know for us as a studio um one of the biggest things and that we're already segwaying into the next uh section but for us one of the biggest things that I think we we thought about and then ended up doing was framing it as a trial and really running with it as a trial that way um when things were not work if things weren't going to work or if things were um or if things were going really well or whatever it was in between that it was recognized that uh this is just a trial that we're going to see if this fits us and if it doesn't fit us there's ways we can roll back or change or figure out giving ourselves the room to fail a little bit was really kind of critical in our planning and something that helps alleviate a lot of the planning and speed bumps that we were expecting but didn't know were going to happen as we uh were moving along yeah I

I just wanted to add that our expectations were that productivity would slightly dip um I don't really believe that I mean maybe some of us on the team do work that can be properly Quantified um and like have productivity that's comparable to widgets but I think most of us don't um I'm not even sure most of my tasks are focused work tasks if it comes down to it like I think I do a lot of loose brain chaos emails and and like that doesn't really need or create Focus um but we were willing to that's why I put it in terms of risk um rather than anything we felt was measurable um my expectation was was more uh what Celine was talking about the mental health would be a little bit more stable that people would feel um like more able to put in those four days if they knew that they would have the three days at the end um and so we we we expected to lose I I

would say I expected to lose uh five to ten percent just because I think most people most weeks check out Friday afternoons anyway um like even if they are doing work um probably it's not the suit the most focused um so uh so that was that was my Baseline expectation I can just riff off of what John you mentioned before I think it's super important to leave yourself the room to fail at the 4K work week as well we implemented it um with a concept that was this is a privilege that you know that everyone has now um but you know if ever hits the fan you know we could go back to the five-day week for a period of time if ever doesn't work out for some reason we could go back to the fight like you know allowing yourself and telling everyone that this is kind of a trial thing is is an important I think aspect of it and then the other thing for us that that we had mentioned to to everyone initially was just in the concept of work using the agile method you know we're working

on Sprints with tasks and all that stuff and I think it is important to try and get some data out of it you know velocity and trying to get the you know an amount of hours that it takes to do a certain task but you know at the end of the day I'm not asking people to log in hours I'm asking them to deliver their tasks for their Sprint and so we were already in a dynamic with with everyone on our team where we trust that you know they'll they're they're responsible for the work that they need to do and you know under them understanding that this was the reasoning behind it was that we trusted them to be able to achieve what they needed to achieve within the four days instead of the five um also gave them the opportunity to decide if they wanted to work a few hours on the Friday but maybe take the Thursday afternoon a little bit more you know chill it gave them the flexibility essentially to be able to to kind of pick and choose when they felt more creative and when they felt more focused or when they felt more in a in a work mode so I think that's also something that that really worked out for us

thanks and Chris you're um we can kind of move into like the next section and talking about how we're measuring the things that we're doing and uh to the to thank you Chris for answering the questions on how you were measuring that success there um for Saleem or Tanya uh how are you uh measuring success for your team how are you measuring whether or not the four day work week was working or not uh was it you know productivity was it uh you know General feel how's everyone doing like what were you using as like kind of the benchmarks for deciding if this was a fit for you well part of why I was dubious about uh measuring the productivity is I think it's God heart's law um as soon as you make something a measure of success it becomes a useless measure um uh because people sometimes unconsciously you know if I told them they have to do a certain number of points well I think they'll do that number of points um so it I I really I could go back and

look at now historically because it's not you know a measure that everyone's striving for there's no punishment attached to it I could see what the productivity is um but realistically we would take it off if people felt like they weren't making forward enough momentum because that that kills the morale of many game developers if they can just feel like the project is stagnating and they're not moving forward um now what are the chances that it's the Friday that's the problem in that case it seems pretty unlikely like they still have you know a good number of hours to move a project forward so maybe there's some other issue at that point um but yeah it was really it was more just uh it was not measurable it was really asking the team like what do we think is the benefit is it worth the fact that maybe we will take 10 more time to make our projects potentially um is everyone okay with that and then so far everyone is cool how about you Celine yeah I agree that there was a lot of a gut check feeling kind of thing going on we did

track um we like just for planning purposes we're like okay well this is how much uh velocity our programmers were hitting is how many points that were completing in a Sprint uh let's see what it's like in four days and then we found that there was kind of very little like difference for us um some weeks they were more productive some weeks were less productive it just kind of seemed to follow the same kind of Cadence as a five-day work week and we also checked our art asset output and kind of found the exact same result as well and so it was like okay well on a productivity side it's pretty much plus or minus within the standard expectations so not much of a change there which is great um and then we just conducted a bunch of interviews and uh Anonymous feedback and one-on-ones about the four day work week to see how people were reacting to that and it was pretty much you know maybe this sounds obvious but it was really positive across the board and that was

and I mean just like me personally like I was dying during the time like I was having a miserable time at work I was really stressed out I needed more time and so like just me on a personal level I could see the benefit to myself and that was um you know Co-op is a it's a Cooperative so we vote on our uh on all of our policies but I'm just here representing the studio as myself and I could say easily that it had a significant impact on my mental health and so that was enough honestly uh for tracking yeah let's talk about that let's talk about mental health impact on your team what you saw like especially as you were you know going through your initial rollout into like people feeling comfortable what were you seeing on your teams in terms of mental health and uh were people coming fresh to work on Monday were they um feeling like the more time is better was there anyone feeling anxiety from the fact that it's a shorter week what were you seeing on your teams especially through the early stages and going into

the parts where you're starting to become comfortable uh I can speak to that anxiety element because that was definitely present for us in our in our first attempt at the four day work week because we had uh I would say kind of poor production planning as well as a milestone around when that was happening so for some people they felt like because of those such that scenario they felt like they couldn't as freely take that four day work week um and had to do overtime uh which we always track at Co-op and also pay out at 1.5 x salary so it was like okay if we're gonna treat you know four days as the standard and the fifth day is overtime we need to also track that so there's anxiety around um milestones and finishing things but I think those were really rooted in poor production practices because when we Revisited four-day work week with a much stronger emphasis on smoothing out our production pipelines that anxiety kind of uh went away pretty pretty quickly

you know on our side it's it's similar you know I think a lot of our processes had to be reworked for the four day work week um but you know we did also do some uh some interviews uh anonymously uh you know sent out surveys and stuff like that and and across the board morale was up um you know and then I'm not sure what the stats are on this I'd have to go back and check but you know my gut feeling is there was a lot less absenteeism during the week I think you know there's a lot of uh you know appointments that you need to do during the week because things are closed on the weekends and then you know people are going to kind of pick and choose a moment in the week where they're going to do that thing now everyone knows that they have the Friday to do whatever that is and so when they need to plan something in the week they don't plan it on a Tuesday they know that the Friday is off so they'll just do whatever they need to do on the Friday so the four days like was really all hands on deck a lot more than than what we would see before and I also feel like this might extend to like you know just generally

recording stopped generally people to you know taking sick days um is also something that I think we saw less of I think you know organically people just felt that they could be refreshed with the three-day work the three-day weekend and then come out into the work week yeah ready to work basically Tanya is there anything you want to add I mean it was it was very popular I don't think a single person ever complained um I I know that there is a little bit of a rough bit which I don't know if we're getting into the all the concerns yet but as far as mental health goes um for me and my community manager we both have the kinds of things that might need us to respond over the weekend uh for me it's more like an urgent business partner email for for her it's like you know a Discord fight breaks out something like that um and uh and so that's always been on our radar like this doesn't really change that

um I know one thing we've adjusted um for her is she tells us to leave a bit early Thursday afternoon planning to do a bit on Friday um just because it helps break out that uh that weekend silence it was really hard to be away from social media for a whole three days like that's that's like an eternity in Twitter time so um I think initially her Mental Health maybe it was harder because she was anxious about leaving it for three days and now that we've worked out this system uh she can leave it for the two days and feel better about it yeah we we definitely had something similar to that uh where especially with social media and partners uh there was a lot of anxiety around that um I would say with Partners it's been a lot easier because I just people are like are you available for a meeting on Friday I'll be like oh sorry just no I don't I don't even say we don't work Friday I don't have availabilities sorry exactly I'm sorry I'm not available I'm busy yeah exactly so that that that has

worked pretty well for us in terms of social media something that we've just kind of realized is that um are our team and Community Management in general is vastly undervalued in terms of resources and so that actually brought up a really good conversation at our studio over the needs of uh Community Management and that uh we were placing too much responsibility on one person to handle so much I think this is a Common Thread in a lot of uh Community Management uh roles and so it actually forced us to hire up for that role so that we have two people in that and that they can alternate and we also have paid volunteers for our Discord and our Twitter so that we can have people kind of keep eyes on things when core staff is not available or you know it's a Friday and stuff and that's like really helped I think spread the load instead of feeling like um Twitter and Discord are all one person's responsibility and it's always turned on uh we actually had really good

conversations around boundaries around that we also close our Discord during high traffic uh times in our marketing push like you know we'll close our Discord from 2 A.M to 8am or something so that people can't talk so that even our mods can get some rest and I think it just brought up a lot of conversations around the boundaries and needs for rest versus the expectations of things like Community Management and how that those were unfairly uh eating into people's personal time yeah I think I have to mention that you know organically the leads ended up still doing a small meeting on Friday mornings to kind of plan for the weeks ahead and you know we we don't stop them from doing that like you know as long as everyone is comfortable and they take those hours off on another day in the week or whatever you know anyone that kind of wants to have the peace and quiet of not being bothered by the entire staff on a Friday you know the leads do meet up and admittedly I don't really do the four day work week myself

I'm still in the rigmar role of trying to you know make everything happen all the time with the company so in in that sense like I'm not I'm not getting a good example of what the four day work week should be I feel like everyone watching this should follow Saleem and Tanya's Tanya's example not mine um because you know and we had this discussion with our leads but it's in part it's important that people don't feel like they would need to work on a Friday to advance in the company or become a leader in the company or you know kind of get get a ahead so that was really really important to kind of kill that Vibe right away and again it just comes back to you know working on deliverables and making people understand that you know this is just what they do in their Sprint this is part of their tasks and that whenever they decided to do them the same for you you could decide to work on the Friday if you wanted to but we're not you know being on the Friday or Thursday it doesn't matter to us I had one more note on um which is I'm the first and so far only uh Kit Fox parent

um but I have found having a day where my kid is in daycare and I don't have to work like it's a massive mental health benefit that like all my my friends who have young children um who don't have Fridays off like it seems like how do you get anything done and they're like I don't know um so I mean it's I I almost feel like it's something we should offer to all parents but yeah I just to second that um not not working on Fridays for me I I have two young children who are uh two and four years old uh through the pandemic and everything and um one of the things that's been really important to me is um being a part of their lives as much as I can and what fries have done for me um is yes the the time away from them and having my own personal time to for my own mental health has been really good but I've also every single Friday morning I volunteer at my my older

daughter's preschool and that's just been like one of them the best things about the four day work week it's not even work related at that point it's just my time that I feel like I'm getting back and it's this Only Could Happen uh unless I was taking every Friday morning off uh from work normally so that that was really um important and great for me and speaking on like things that have been really good and um beneficial what are the benefits uh what have you seen have been the major benef benefits for your Studios moving to a four day work week and what are the big things that you've seen and what are the big picture things that you you share when you want to talk about how great the four day work week is I mean I feel like I've covered this but for me it's just like it's a place I want to work at you know it's a place I want to work at a lot more than I used to and I think that's a pretty big deal yeah me too sorry I interrupted to you Chris oh no problem I I think one thing that we noticed was

so we started it in 2019 before the pandemic um and I'm I'm really proud that our retention rate was very close to 100 despite a worldwide pandemic in the past three years I haven't lost anyone on the team uh be it to mental health or you know whatever reason like everyone seems happy so everyone is sticking around everyone seems healthy so they're sticking around we added a lot more during the pandemic to make sure that everyone was feeling good and everything but still I think the the four day work week definitely helped everyone kind of be able to regroup refocus uh you know like talk with their families do whatever they needed to do in those three days off that maybe on a five-day work week would have just added a lot to the stress level of the team so retention I think uh is something you know as a as a Studio owner uh is a huge Advantage uh that that we have versus other companies and another thing I think is that our employees are kind of getting used to the four day work week

as well so I think it's going to be hard for them to find you know that that same lifestyle in another studio and so that also plays into you know trying again for us to have that best you know work-life balance I think Studios that are going to offer that are going to have a unique retention level with their employees and you know just generally have happier healthier employees working for them and honestly in the end people make games you know we need computers and brains I keep saying this all the time but I think it's really important to realize that our primary resource to make video games are human beings and you know making sure those human beings feel as creative and as focused and you know as ready as possible to hit the ground running on a work day I think is all you know positive things that that you want to do awesome yeah and I know for our studio um just echoing a lot of what everyone's already said here

um but I think the biggest thing that we saw is everyone would come to work on Monday with like stories to share of what they did over their weekend and when what what they had going on and then just hit the ground running super hard we saw that everyone felt like they were coming to work happy and refreshed and and then and I think for us especially framing it within the pandemic everyone at Armor Games was struggling really hard like really hard and it we were at a moment at the company where we realized we weren't we weren't just trying to get everyone to the level of just being okay like okay was just the Baseline we wanted to hit like can we get people to work going okay and I think the four day work week really helped us get beyond the okay bar and start moving towards like like what is ideal what is the ideal workplace and what does that look like and uh it really was that push for us and I think everyone feels those benefits and feels a lot of the things that are positive and good about the four day work week

but on the other note too there was a lot of things that challenged us as well at Armor Games especially around certain disciplines had more trouble adjusting to a four day work week than others what were some of your um what were some of the things that you saw from your teams as you were rolling out the four day work week were there certain disciplines or certain groups that were more challenged was there um was there was it the company as a whole that was working through certain things did it expose anything that you weren't seeing before from your studio I know we went into some of this uh more or less with some of you but I was just curious if there's anything else the group saw I I would I'll start um I mean kickbox has always been very I would say efficient about our communication we're we're very focused we didn't have a lot of excess meetings to cancel or get rid of or anything like that but um we I think we did have a situation where um like we we believe in like being professionally respectful is one of our

pillars and and for us with professionalism means is like we have very very synchronous work together as collaborators we have core hours every day where everyone works at the same time together and that's great but in a five day week I think that sort of normalized nine to five working system um people sort of build in their own buffer where they because there isn't the flexibility of the schedule itself they build the flexibility in you know if I'm not feeling that great on Tuesday and I'll do the hours but it'll be Friday that I and then maybe to get my tasks done I have Friday afternoon and that kind of flexibility had to shift in favor of the the employee's time and energy instead so for me for example if I have a bad Tuesday it's sort of bad to work on Friday right like it's it's not when everybody's available I can't collaborate with people properly on Friday I can't necessarily make it up because people won't be there and I still could but it's you know it's

overtime at that point I'm working on the weekend better et cetera et cetera um and so one thing that that I'm trying to encourage with my employees is to think of you can still do makeup Fridays but but it's tough because like I said like if your collaborators aren't there if your team members aren't there like it might not be a replacement for that Tuesday afternoon you missed you might have to power through on Tuesday anyway somehow and how do you do that if you haven't slept so it's a it's sometimes uh it's still a struggle I think to try and really feel like every day you're putting in um that good 25 of a week I think for for us we actually have a mix of asynchronous work uh that ends up working really well for when people use Fridays as a makeup day where it's actually like oh great there's no one here that's perfect you know when I if I take a Monday or Tuesday off so that and I work on a Friday or I do Friday overtime um those are days where I'm just like so

efficient because I can focus on all the tasks that I put off during the week um where I have to communicate with a lot of people just because of the complexity and inefficiencies that we may we may have on our project um but we've also gotten really our team is pretty distributed across different time zones and also have different uh needs mental health physical health emotional health Etc and so we still maintain a very flexible time off policy and and like let people just kind of you know take whatever time they need even within the four days I think it's really important to still provide that level of flexibility and so we've gotten into a bit more of a culture of scheduled messages on slack um asynchronous communication and I think that those are really really uh beneficial in general for remote work as well um and in a way that the four day work week has actually made that more normalized and easier for us yeah I know oh sorry

I had an employee who uh who said that he did not want to work the four-day work week and he absolutely wanted to work five days a week which was a strange one to have to to deal with because again I I don't want to give him anything more than the others for working the extra day because that defeats the purpose of the four day work week but at the same time I understand that a lot of people you know have work as kind of their social life and work is is very melded together um and so do you stop someone from working on the fifth bit so we ended up kind of you know discussing it uh openly and and kind of having the fifth day be more of like a paid you know if he wants training or if anyone wants training on a Friday and they want to kind of go through more schooling or they want to go and like have this Unity class that we uh we buy for them or stuff like that um we we're always open to doing that and the Friday is kind of a moment for that we had employees that wanted to do their own personal projects which we encouraged them to do on the Friday and

so that even if they have questions or whatever during the Friday you know like feel free to like go on Discord and say whatever you need to say but so that was a bit of a challenge to where uh you know a lot of programmers told me actually that they didn't need the three days off which was a strange one I'm like they're you're serious right now you don't well you don't want to take the three days you absolutely want to work the five days so that that was a weird one to deal with but I think it's important to still stay the line of you know not encouraging people to do the five days because it would defeat the purpose of the four day week the other thing that was kind of just a an obvious one but that you only kind of have to think about once you're in it is uh how you how do you deal with holidays is it suddenly a three-day work week when there are you know there are way eight weeks uh in Montreal where you know during the year where there's uh a national holiday and so we decided to that we were going to stick to the four day work week but when it's a holiday you can decide to have that day if it's a Monday you can

decide to have the Monday off and then work the Friday or you can keep the Friday off as usual but you know but there's there was discussions around that as well you know it not being an issue just being like uh okay well logistically what do we want to do with this situation in my mind again it all comes back down to sticking to the Sprint sticking to the deliverables no matter the number of days it takes you to do that's kind of our expectation of work for the next two or three weeks depending on the Sprint size and that's kind of how we we ended up treating it I don't know if Salim or Tanya you know you have a different way to deal with holidays or John holidays has been uh a big back and forth for us as well um I think where we landed was a similar thing of like yeah either take the Monday or Friday but also recognize because we are removing a day and those holidays are kind of designed around a five-day work week to like that we need to sort of accommodate the fact that that would maybe cut a lot of time off from our Sprints and getting things done um I think it's kind of an open conversation at our studio honestly it's

something that uh we might revisit yeah we're still trying to figure it out too so far we've just said sometimes it's a three-day week um and that doesn't feel great as a product manager uh because typically we forget when we play in the Sprint um I mean if you remember when you're playing Sprint then it's not as bad but you still have to look at well how much would we get done if we added two more days or three more days right um but I think one one reason why we keep defaulting back to well it's just another day off is uh we have some people who are part-time in addition so they're only working three days a week or two days a week and they should have a day off too and it right it's like well if a three-day a week person gets the day off why don't I right so they were just like well I guess now you get off what 60 days a year it's 52 plus the the eight red days yeah I know for us uh holidays have been

like like we've said before like the moment you go from a four day work week to a three day work week that's really it gets really compressed it gets really um it almost in some ways it becomes like you get to Wednesday you're like oh that's it like it's it's really can be challenging we um we we decided to keep all of our holidays but try to shift them in ways that made the best use of all the time that was available but it is it does start to squeeze the calendar quite a bit it does start to um especially when we start thinking of things like um we're trying to plan you know an off-site a lot of us haven't actually met each other in person before we haven't actually um seen each other in in two or three years so as we're starting to plan that we're also having to consider that as well especially um as a publisher with lots of publishing Partners we want to make sure that they're being taken care of as well um and that's always been like

yes holidays and extra days off and those kind of things have been really kind of a challenging thing and I think something that we're all kind of speaking to on this panel is we're learning a lot of things in real time and we are uh there's no guidebook on how to do a four day work week with a with in the games industry or as an indie or um it's just it's something where we kind of have to solve these things on our own and see if they fit and all of our teams are different so we all have to kind of fit it differently to our different uh needs um it's worth noting that part of as this conversation also started because our so we had somebody at three-day work uh three day weeks and paid appropriately uh like years and years before um any of this and and they pointed out that legally they are still oh those eight days like the it's in the the laws of Quebec at least um and but it'd be weird yeah to then give them time off and not everybody else

yeah we had to do a surprising amount of research into U.S laws on how uh 40 like we just assumed 40 hours is a full week of work yeah and it's bizarre well technically technically we do pay those hours by the way I don't know if that's a different segment I forget um but technically we have 40 hour weeks according to the government it's just we have eight hours of uh self-improvement or something um is is what it counts as cool uh let's get into like the future of the four day work week we're starting to run out of time so I want to make sure we we cover this topic um we all gave our various experiences on our four day work weeks we're all very different Studios but I'm curious um from this group do you think that you know Indies Indie developers as a whole will be able to move in this direction and do this is this going to be a broader trend for uh the greater industry where do you see uh the difference between a four day and five-day work week starting to shake out as more Studios jump on board

huge question dude sorry I think I think you know it's kind of a strange one but I think it it's going to it's going to need a big cultural shift and just the way work is perceived uh in the general population for for it to become something that's kind of normalized um I think you know it's an arbitrary number to say that we should work five days a week it could be two it could be three who like who cares in the end you know as long as you can live and be happy um you know I think also a lot more people are are orienting their life I think the pandemic has put a lot of different uh perspective on what it means to work and what it means to you know be happy and at home and and feel safe and secure and healthy and I think people are are maybe less uh career oriented now that you know there's been a worldwide pandemic and everything's gone to in some some fashion I think a lot of people now or might be saying well maybe I want to like enjoy

you know an extra a day or two a week off so that I can take you know take care of my family do things that I enjoy the things that I love um maybe sacrifice even some salary to do that you know I think I I know people that have gone from the AAA Studios that have come into smaller Studios that are on the four day week or I've decided to like shop their hours to do a three-day week even if they were making the huge salary with the Triple A's and you know I think it we're going to see more and more people trying to go down that lifestyle route instead of like the career you know money route and uh and I think that's a good thing in general and if more and more people start doing that then I think it's going to get more normalized and you'll see more Studios doing it I think it is another another Beast for AAA Studio to tackle the four day week than it is an indie Studio just the sheer scale and coordination of like a 400 person team working on a game I don't know how that would work but I think for Indies I expected it's going to be like more and more regular to see

Studios on the four day work week yeah to speak back to something that Chris mentioned uh in terms of uh you know hiring people and attracting Talent uh that is one of the main things that small Studios can offer I can't imagine uh that this won't become the norm in the future and I think it should become the norm I don't see any reason for it not to be and part of that is retaining Talent attracting talent because you know as small companies we don't compete with the big studios in terms of salary or benefits or whatever um so we have to find other ways to engage people in meaningful ways and make our work environments attractive for them I think that honestly and maybe this is the pandemic like existentialism speaking a little bit but I think that if there was a will any industry out there could go to to 40 hours a week it's just it's more a matter of everyone wanting to do it um

like I think if if all of the employees of Ubisoft woke up tomorrow and said we only want to work four days or we quit like suddenly it would be they'd figure it out right well that's like the magic of unions and co-ops and and all these other like worker forces um it would be very very difficult I'm not saying it's easy I'm not saying if I I know that it would be even you know exponentially harder the heart the larger your organization is um hats off to Chris already for for 30 people versus 11 but um but I absolutely think it'll become more and more normal and I hope it does and I hope the most for our most vulnerable workers for like QA and Community Management and and all the people that are exploited more um that they get to have uh more and more the kind of lifestyle that they want for for their talents sorry Celine you were you were gonna say something in the middle of the night I kept talking no no no I I forgot what I

was gonna say sorry well so let's just wrap up uh and then we can go to q a but the last question I wanted to ask the group um if there was just one thing that you'd recommend to any team considering a four day work week whether it's a piece of advice a thing that you keep thinking about what's that what's that one thing that you would give to that group who was thinking about that four day work week shift every single time that I run a postmortem in life the one issue that keeps coming back in again and again is communication there's always issues with communication in some form and so I think that's one thing that you really really need to work on so you know optimizing meetings and making sure the the there's a flow of communications from when things get decided to whoever needs to know those things and not necessarily monopolizing everyone's time for meetings uh is something that's really important um also you know going into a meeting with a schedule instead of just with

with already talking points that are pre-planned instead of kind of just winging it uh that's a big one which is what we used to do I think is really really important because in the end you you realize that and on a five day week you were you were kind of already cheating on a lot of like you know cheating hours here and there with you know I'm going to attend this meeting even though I have nothing to do with it just because I wanted to see or understand what's going on knowing that it was kind of going to be like a more relaxed hour where you might not need to have a brain as focused as you usually do so that's the kind of stuff that I I think really needs to to get worked on uh the asynchronous communication also like as Tanya mentioned it can be an issue if someone's not there on a certain day or all that stuff are the things that we need to figure out uh but if you if you do put the time in that and and you can fix that part of it the rest comes a lot much more naturally and easier than you might think to implement Saleem Tanya

uh yeah I would say if you're a team considering the four day work week the most important thing I would suggest to you is to consider unionizing um if you're a group of team members you should build Collective power because you can't trust people like us who are giving this talk right now as business owners um you know we might be nice bosses we might be good people uh but there's nothing stopping us from reverting that or changing things or exploiting in other ways and so the four day work week is a great place to actually start organizing your workplace because it's a really easy place to unify a lot of um things where you can be like yeah I would love that and my team would love that and that's a place where you find common ground to building solidarity so I really recommend reaching out to organizations like game Workers Unite and other Union organizations on how to unionize because then you can take some of that power into the team's hand and in force and Ensure proper boundaries and good work life

balance in a way that you can't by just trusting the owners of a studio the the bosses who are listening and the workers is to set a goal for yourself um if it if you're about like know what your goals are like for us if our goals were mental health that's something we can look at and measure whether or not we should continue and it was successful for us so we continued but if and as a worker like what are your goals for those Fridays are you are are you going to use them to relax you can use them to have a side project like I think everybody feels better about it when they know what their goals are for a change like this and uh and see the results through that lens rather than after six weeks trying to look back and remember how it felt before awesome well thank you all on the panel um I think we have about nine minutes for Q a is there anyone who wants to ask

any questions for our panel grammar in the coming year or so if anyone wants to ask about that um I don't have any details yet but keep an eye on our Twitter and uh website it is hard to hire programmers I hear so I'm hope I'm hoping this will be uh benefits okay uh you hear me I I think I have actually a few questions uh first of all is about the leading people uh because there are usually people who are very focused and efficient and at the same time you work with people who are not very efficient and have some problems with time organization and how do you deal with that where are the chops uh how we do with both attitudes and how did they people switch to the four days week

I mean I can say for us for on a five-day week there are some people who flail with their time organization and other people who who are very good at it and it's always a question of working with each person like I I'm not going to have the same system that works for everybody some people I gotta remind them of other timesheets every two days and other people I leave them alone for two weeks and they come back with with you know more spreadsheets than I could have imagined um and this does make it more evident but I I think if you're worried about someone not working hard enough like that's a separate conversation from how many hours you expect them to work yeah something to add to that is uh you can always help enable people to be better with those things but but also production needs to also be flexible enough to not treat every person as one size fits all and sometimes production actually has to just measure that different people have different outputs and you plan around that so yes you give

them support you help them have the tools to improve where you think it's necessary but also production you can't just have like an artist and be like well I need you to make you know 15 assets a week and if the artist can only make seven assets a week that's their Pace you have to plan around that you know I think it's very important to to not treat people as a uh just to just really not treat uh folks with a one-size-fits-all approach yeah and always giving feedback is also something that I I think is super important and unders and having that open conversation when you feel like someone might be underperforming or stuff like that are just like General things but again that are those are issues that are as real on a five-day weekend as they are on a four day week another question is about scaling it because if you work in in these Studios uh do you think or do you feel that it can be scaled to bigger Studios what are the possible traps there and do you have

anything to recommend I I guess I would require I would recommend trialing it in the most isolated Department I worked at a large studio many years ago so it's been a while um but I imagine the more tightly integrated and the more um cross-collaborative they are the harder that department will be to to trial a four day week um and doing it across the studio would probably be a complete uh problem um so yeah maybe there's a there's a particularly segregated group that can do a milestone on four day weeks and and then compare notes what is the trial period for us we started with six weeks and then we moved it to three months uh so we doubled it after six weeks we're successful um but I I guess it would depend on the the kind of Milestones that that project has

I'd be happy to talk with somebody in more depth if you want to email me or or tweet at me we can we can organize a chat um I can give some advice I've never worked in AAA studio so I'm not really equipped to answer that question um I know that in Montreal Idols Square Enix is is looking at trying the four day week or they're implementing it in some form so you know I I would maybe reach out to them and see how they do it but uh I'm just I don't have enough knowledge of the AAA space to be able to to add anything okay and last question I would like to ask about agile do you work in agile system if so um please elaborate on did you squeeze all these meetings this is pretty expensive planning refinement then you have to summarize all this up and four day weeks seems to be pretty short to do all these things how long uh your Sprint lasts so before you answer where you have three more people with questions this is

the last this is last one so you can keep the answer brief uh hopefully you were here in the beginning to get their contact info and if not we'll put it up at the end can I take this one or real quick uh I don't think agile is designed for video games I think you have to take agile and make it work for video games there are elements of agile that you take and implement but you cannot get away from waterfall elements as well I think you design the systems for your particular games and teams you don't just adhere to Agile uh blindly or religiously and that's how you make it work with the times and the constraints that you have for what it's worth we do two week Sprints and and yeah it slim is correct it's customized but we um we do cross Department show off and then Sprint review and then Sprint planning on Wednesday mornings every two weeks and the total is about two hours it's very unusual that it lasts more than two hours total thank you

uh hello uh thank you so much for the talk um I wanted to come back to a point I think Salim you mentioned uh um you had to hire another person for your community manager because they were you know the there was so much focus on that one person how do you have that conversation with that person without making them to feel like they're not doing enough or like that you're trying to replace them because I can see how that can easily feel like you're being replaced like oh we're hiring another person just to you know help you with your work don't worry about it so how do you have that conversation that is Meaningful yeah um well so at Co-op uh the Corporal time team members are co-owners of the studio so there's a level of job security that that I think already kind of brings in uh in our particular case actually our community manager was the person who was like this is insane this is not fair and this is too much uh and so that was a reaction to them bringing up their need for help uh but in other situations where we've noticed people need

additional support it's kind of just like uh hey this is something we're noticing we think you need support and if that's a threat or a problem or a fear for them then it's just a matter of having a conversation being like let's lay it all down on the table and talk this out um and just be mature about it and I I do think being a co-op helps in a lot of ways uh towards that feeling of uh of that fear of being replaced yeah yeah I know for us um one one of the things that we do as a publisher is we do internal QA for our games and we found that QA didn't kind of get the same kind of product productivity boost that some of the other uh pieces of our publishing program did and so it became a conversation that got surfaced by the QA team that like hey like we're falling short we're not you know we're not falling short 20 but we are definitely falling short on QA cycles and yeah it's something you need you need your team needs to be trusted to bring those things up and be able to yeah respond to it in fact if you're if your team member

is not highlighting those problems I would want to ask why I would dig into why that's not being surfaced to you what is actually scaring them and solving for that yeah thank you so much hi um I'm curious some of you mentioned pushback from your studio members about not wanting to go to four weeks especially programmers can you dive into some of the reasons they specified and how you mitigated um I I feel like I'm part of this crowd so I'm gonna like Venture a guess as to why like we didn't you know go go delve into too much of it but my understanding is a lot of people come into the industry with a chip on their shoulder wanting to become the best at their craft the best at what they do and put and they understand that they need to put the practice hours in to be able to do that when you have that competitive mindset or you have that that drive uh it's it's

hard to stop someone from wanting to learn everything about the world you know so I think it was mostly that kind of issue I think programmers might be a more competitive field in particular um it's a it's a I don't know why uh I don't know if it's ingrained at school I don't know where it comes from uh but I think that's part of where it comes from uh it's it's just that drive of wanting to be the best uh that made them want to work the the extra extra time in and then it's just having a conversation with them of you making sure that it's a healthy uh it's a healthy thing that they're doing you know I was always that driven I was always I'm a very competitive person so I I have that instinct in me and I understand that I I do work more hours than a general person might enjoy General that's why I started my company and I decided to do what I did but um I I'm I'm very fulfilled in life I'm very happy I have a wife I have a very balanced you know social life and I think that's the important thing so you might want to you don't want to

discourage necessarily people from wanting to learn but you do just need to track and make sure it's for the right reasons that would just be my my day yeah in our situation the pushback actually came from people who were using work as a coping mechanism for the pandemic and so when that kind of feedback came back to us it was like well let's discuss that is that really the best path forward for you are there other solutions to find other ways to code because I I personally don't believe using work as a coping mechanism for the pandemic is healthy because in the long run once uh things change if they change you're left with nothing no support network uh you put all your resources into work and you're kind of and alone at the end and have very little to show for it so it was a matter of just really um pushing back against that very strongly foreign got it so people just need therapy thanks that's generally a very common piece of advice that we give our team

uh very quickly um so a lot of the criticism of the four day work week comes from the angle of sort of like oh like the benefits are temporary because once people become acclimated to it um you know they're less excited about it like that sort of thing um I know stretching on two or three years maybe some of your fears around that have been alleviated but could you talk a little bit about that and maybe some alternative schedules such as like summer hours like three days a week during like the summer or taking August off or things like that um I can say that we also give five days a week or five weeks a year of vacation um if you've been a kid fox for at least a year and four four weeks for the first year so you can already take Augusta um but uh I mean honestly I do I went into this with the full expectation that people would normalize to it um and I think that they have at this point like we're almost to one year and I think that's okay like if if this is their Norm their idea of normal like

we've actually won like we've improved their expectations of what work and life should feel like and how happy they should be as a baseline even in a difficult World situation and so like yes I I actually think that the biggest problem with these bigger companies is that because I think the benefits are immeasurable and because they're human oriented and because maybe yeah it does mean that some departments especially are going to be five to ten percent less productive um it really has to come from the workers to to fight for this kind of thing because in the long run it is probably a profit loss and somebody has to say that's okay yeah I think it's a win-win because anything that challenges the dominance of work in our lives is for the best so if they're if that's being normalized and and so on then I think that that's just a good thing but also be unique to Montreal but there's a lot of video game studios as well so you know people talk um so even though they might get acclimated to the four day work week I

think you know speaking with other Studios and understanding that there they have something that other Studios might not have that makes their life easier uh still makes it feel like it's something that's that's worthy or something that has value it's not like they suddenly stop carrying the fact that they're starting I'm starting to hear about like board game meetings and DND meetings and like moviegoers that are like all four day work week people and so like maybe that will help every every single time I get to Thursday night or Friday I'm just like thank God like thank God it never gets it never gets old it just never gets old it always feels good to get to Thursday or sorry to get to Friday so yeah for sure I think that's all the time we have for the panel thank you everyone in San Francisco uh who came to see us or thank you if you're watching this on the Vault or YouTube or wherever this video might be in the future appreciate everyone's questions appreciate the panel being here and sharing their topics and thank you everyone hope you have a good rest

of your day thank you thank you very much thanks everybody [Music]