The Truth About The 4 Day Work Week | Develop:Brighton 2024

Hello everyone. I'm uh Joe Bremer. I'm the studio lead or CEO or whatever title I choose this week of a company called Bulkhead in Derby and we make firstperson shooters. We also run a 4-day work week and have done for over two years now. Um and I like kind of sharing some of our information about it. So um here go. So we have 15 minutes where I'm just going to kind of talk about what we've been doing. 15 minutes of talking about all the problems with it and then hopefully have time about 15 minutes questions at the end because people usually have questions about it. A few disclaimers, I'm not anti- remote. Um we use it at Bulk pretty sparingly. Um because people love living in Derby. They just want to stay there. Um so please don't take it as an a personal attack on your situation if you are a remote worker. That's not what I'm doing. I don't know you. Um I swear a lot. I just get really passionate about it. Sorry. I'll try and avoid that. PR lady is here to avoid that. Um, and

really this talk is about being honest about the 4-day work week, right? Um, and I will contradict some sources that you've read. Um, and I'll try and explain why. And, uh, please don't take it personally. Um, and then finally, this is pragmatic and honest. Um, it's from a business perspective. So, it's not from a how I can save the world by working less perspective. is from a why this worked for me and my business and how it could work for yours. So firstly it's why did we do it? So I was inspired by this book called the year living Danishly. Um Denmark always the really happy place. Um and I read this book and it was just great about sort of quality of life and how they do s small things to improve your quality of life. Um and that was where it kind of started. Um and me and my business partner um we wanted to work our goal was we want to work less than 5 days a week. And then we kind of realized, well, why shouldn't everyone else like why why should it just be us? And that, you know, not a great look, us working four days, everyone else working five. Um, again,

the PR lady helped us with that. Um, but really from a business standpoint, we wanted to retain our staff and stem the bleed of staff in the pandemic. In the pandemic, we had people in California offering offering triple quadruple the salaries. Um, and also California versus Derby wasn't helpful. So we were trying to offer you offer a better package. What could we do to stop people even retaining by offering something better? So we wanted to compete on a global market. How are we going to do that? Um we wanted to work in office as well. Um we just for us it's better. We're we're faster, more productive, better communication. And from day one of the pandemic we were very clear with our staff that we will not we will not be uh staying remote forever. And that meant that that early decision, it was a lot easier to turn back on it. There weren't like broken promises that didn't get thrown around a lot at our place. Um, but really, we only want to work with good people. So, how can we attract good

people? There's a couple of banned phrases that we've we've banned. Um, so the three-day weekend, we don't have a three-day weekend, we have a 4-day work week. That was because we didn't want to start selling it as that's yours cuz the weekend is kind of very traditionally and always has been always should be yours. I think some of the older devs in here um my lecturers right would tell me that the industry was just horrible and people working all Saturday for a year that's yours and it should never be encroached on. But the Friday it's a for us the way we approached it especially with at the time going through an acquisition with 10 cent we had to be very um cognitive of the Friday may need to be taken back at some point. It's not yours. It's sort of a shared day and we needed to have a two-way relationship with our staff that they understand that this is a business and it's not that you know the Saturday and Sunday are yours. Monday to Thursday are ours but we're going to do something weird and Friday is going to be bit of a

shared day. um burnout. So there's quotes like um we had a 72% reduction in burnout in some of the articles you'll read about the 4day work week. 72% reduction in the in burnout. How the [ __ ] did you measure that? I have no idea. Why did your staff have so much burnout in the [ __ ] first place? So I told you you're passionate about it. Um burnout's very real. We had people burning out. Um it was something we had to deal with. But those companies on the websites that are saying we reduced it by x%. Firstly, why are they tracking it in that way? Secondly, why they have so much burnout? Um, those are big questions to ask. I don't think it's a real statistic they're using that they did reduce burnout. 40 week didn't reduce burnout. Our staff would say they have to work very [ __ ] hard Monday to Thursday. Um, and you have to catch up is what we have to do. And then finally is a work life balance. Um, it's called pie trip. Can I get a volunteer? Anyone? No. Should I gain up? Yes. Thank you. You stand up. Can you just for the room,

can you just mime walking a tight rope? Tight rope. Perfect. Thank you so much. So, as you can see, when people say work life, you're doing perfect. Keep going. Thank you. Um, when people say work life balance, what they mean is work less, not balance. So, they think it's kind of this like it's this even I do this much and this much, right? and you try and balance it. But when you actually walk a tight rope, just as we've we've seen here from my excellent excellent presenter, um people kind of go like this and sometimes work may be more important than your life in that point. I recently have my first hopefully last child and um work work wasn't as important, right? But when it gets to a release, really big milestone where it's a big funding gate, yeah, work might be more important. And for the grand scheme of your family, that might be more important for your team, for your company. Now, I'm not talking about the shareholders pockets. I'm talking about I really like the games we work on. So, I want to make sure that we make make

good of them. Um, so when we talk about work life balance, I don't like using it because I don't think people use it correctly. So, we went into the pandemic, um, March 2020. Um, I had to research that. Um, and it was all reactive. We were just we we'd never done remote and then the next day 100% remote. Um, I think everyone kind of remembers like they maybe don't like to admit it because of the the circumstances of it, but that first bit I think people were quite productive at home. I think you were probably working a bit later. There wasn't loads to do. Working a bit later, working quite hard immediately with your family and with your friends after work if you weren't meant to be. Um, and I think that start bit was quite productive and then I think we all saw what we could get away with. Um, the worst staff saw what they could not do and do. And it ended up with problems that I think the industry is seeing now. So we went into 2021 just getting gutted left, right, and center

for our people. And um, I think I've got the written safe version here without naming names. the CEOs who drove the behavior of double salaries and let you work remote whenever you want. Um the people who made those offers with money that wouldn't last forever and the people who accepted them encouraged that behavior and they played a role in where we're at now, the amount of redundancies we've been looking at and the issues the industry's had. So for us, we chose um not to increase our salary bands, which really hurt. good people who liked working with us were like I can't turn down I worked for £40,000 at Bulkhead I can't turn down £100,000 to go and work for a madeup company for the next big fad like they couldn't turn it down and I understood it there was nothing we could do so we we committed to we're not going to throw the money this isn't going to last forever and at the time remember we thought the pandemic might be over in another maybe another three months maybe another six months went on

a lot longer than we probably expected um so we started thinking How how can we rethink the problem and change it? Let's trade in time. The one thing that we all saw at the start of the pandemic was you had more time to yourself to do whether it was jobs or to do work or to just spend time with yourself. Um so we said let's trade in time instead of cash. We created something called project flex and this is our approach to being flexible at work. So what we did was we said we're going to take 100 people so our full company. We're going to let you work wherever you want, four days a week. Uh you can do hybrid or remote or in office. Um we have flexi time at the start of the day. I think 8 to 10 is what we used to do. Um you do whatever you want and people thought it was amazing. And we were very this is a six-month trial. 6 months we're going to try this and it was really good. Was fine um for the first couple of weeks.

Uh, and then magically we removed 20% of the time we spent at work and we became 20% slower.