Moving to a 4-Day Workweek

In October 2021, Giant Army, the creators of Universe Sandbox, a physics-based space simulator, officially adopted a 4-day, 8 hours a day workweek at full salary. This change has positively impacted our team, so we wanted to share how we made this decision to encourage other game studios and companies to experiment with a 4-day workweek.

Making the Decision

We started discussing a 4-day workweek after Microsoft Japan trialed it and found that it increased their productivity. Those discussions continued as we saw other companies and organizations experiment with it. In May 2021, as part of the team’s effort to reduce burnout, we decided to take Fridays off for a month.

Most of our team found that the 4-day workweek left them refreshed and just as productive, so we extended it for another month, and then another. In July 2021, we extended it through September but added one condition: you can take Friday off if you share a short daily update and screenshot summarizing what you did,  Monday through Thursday. 

For a fully remote team spread across multiple time zones, a quick, daily team meeting is not practical. This makes the importance of communication about progress or problems even more valuable.

Even after an extensive trial period, there was concern that a 4-day workweek would lead to reduced productivity. So why did we do it?

Support from the Team

The team supported it. Direct quotes from our team include:

“Working a 4-day workweek for me has been a positive experience overall. I feel more organized and less stressed with both personal and work time.”

“[The 4-day workweek has led to] Fewer typos, far fewer odd little mistakes… etc. The sort of mistakes that go away when you’re even 10% sharper than before, or you have less brain fade.”

Steady Progress

While it’s difficult to quantify productivity, one would imagine that dropping a day a week would result in a drop in productivity. However, we continued to innovate and iterate on Universe Sandbox, adding new features and providing regular updates. Given the steady progress and increased happiness, switching to a 4-day workweek seemed like the right decision.

Reflections on the Change

We think adopting a 4-day workweek has been a net positive for Giant Army. The shorter week has:

• Pushed us to optimize our time, leading to shorter and more efficient meetings
• Improved our work environment
• Helped us to attract candidates for our current and future open positions

There are some drawbacks to the shorter week:

• We have a rule not to release an update right before the weekend to avoid needing to be on-call during the weekend. Previously we did not release on Fridays. Now we don’t release on Thursdays (mostly).
• More emails and messages come in over a 3 day weekend
• Fewer days to schedule meetings (or is this a benefit?)

The number of code commits or changes (which are not generally a good measure of productivity) made to Universe Sandbox and the number of updates we released in 2021 is similar to the previous 2 years. While our official transition wasn’t until late 2021, and these measures don’t quantify how much work went into each commit or update, they support the idea that everybody has been just as productive.

Overall, we’re happier, and progress on Universe Sandbox is steady. If you have any questions about our 4-day workweek, please contact us.

Universe Sandbox is an interactive physics-based space simulator that merges gravity, collisions, and climate to reveal the awesomeness of our universe in a whole new way. Learn more on our website.

Addendum

Here are a few more details based on the questions we’ve received about our 4-day workweek:

Q: Did we take a pay cut because we are now working 4 8-hour days instead of 5?

A: No. Everybody on our team is salaried, and nobody took a pay cut as part of this transition.

Q: Did we consider having some team members work Monday-Thursday, and some work Tuesday-Friday so there would always be somebody reachable 5 days a week?

A: We actually did the opposite and tried to make sure everybody had as much overlap as possible to maximize collaboration. That means that our team member in Australia has Mondays off instead of Fridays because they’re a day ahead of our primary work time zone (PST).

Last Updated: July 21, 2022