Julian Plotnick of Roxborough juggles on Forbidden Drive in Philadelphia on a Friday afternoon. Plotnick is an employee of Metropolitan Acoustics who works on a 4-day work week, with no work on Fridays. His individual experiment with the new work arrangement inspired his CEO to implement it for the whole company.last year: Let me work one less day per week, 32 hours total, without a cut in pay.
That’s what Metropolitan Acoustics founder and CEO Felicia Doggett saw after observing Plotnick’s six-month experiment. She has run her company with a five-day week since 1990, but she’s confident they can accomplish just as much in four days by shortening meetings and dedicating time to heads-down work.
“When everybody went remote during COVID, we kind of lost our differentiator. It wasn’t anything special anymore,” said CEO Bechara Jaoudeh. Making Friday part of the weekend was seen as a way to stand out again. Jaoudeh conducted a client satisfaction survey just before switching to the four-day week in July 2021. The company then implemented a four-day week without telling any clients about it, and surveyed them again after six months. Satisfaction levels were unchanged and clients had no complaints, he said.were still operating that way after a year and that the majority of them had decided to make the change permanent.