Part 2: Planning Resources from our launch of a 4-Day Work Week - Elephant Ventures

INTRO EMAIL:

SUBJECT: Requesting 15 mins, and an interesting announcement

BODY:

I’m reaching out today to our client partners to request a 15 minute time slot to talk over an interesting new endeavor at Elephant. As we have been restructuring our organization to deal with fully remote work and to look after the productivity and work-life balance needs of clients and our consultants in the post-covid world, we are undertaking a 4-8 week pilot of a 4-day work week (11 hours/day M-Th) beginning in August.
Why are we doing this?

We gave up our office in early June with the expectation that we may never go back to having an office in the traditional sense. We are exploring options of what that might mean for collaborative work spaces for us and our clients longer term.

We have run our Philippines team for the last 5 years on a 4 day work week and have seen significantly enhanced productivity from them with lots of reported work-life balance benefits.

We want to try this to optimize the work of our team in the US.

What does it mean for me as a client of Elephant Ventures?

The pilot has 2 KEY requirements of our team:

Project and operational requirements/deadlines must be met
Service to our customers must be maintained or improved

Our pilot working schedule will be US Eastern 7:00AM – 6:00PM Monday through Thursday, then offline Friday. (there will be some minor variance for west coast Product Owners and engineering staff)

If your team is running as a hybrid team of our combined staff, we’ll want to arrange specifically with your to make sure we can manage the team properly. Strong Agile practices and a healthy backlog should make this easy.

In order to optimize for start of day, unperturbed deep-work sessions we’ll be reaching out to do some meeting rescheduling and making enhanced efforts toward meeting efficiency.

The Pilot will run in 2 segments, August to validate our KPIs, and then a 2nd Pilot extension in September to see if we can sustain it when school is back in session.

We’ll be asking you to fill out a short survey a few times during the Pilot process to help us evaluate our KPIs.

I want everyone to have a chance to talk this over with me directly. Please feel free to simply email me some times that work for you or if easier for you, you can use this link to grab 15 minutes on my calendar hopefully sometime in the next few days.
Please do not hesitate to reach out at any time during the pilot if you have concerns.
Thanks for your support in this exciting new adventure!
Best Regards,
Art

4-DAY WORK WEEK PILOT SURVEY:

We authored a survey designed to see how our staff were feeling about the pilot and how their feelings changed over time. We had the unique ability to benchmark our Philippines team with the same survey as they have been doing the 4 Day Work Week for many years at this point. Our intention is to survey before the pilot, At the end of week 1, at the beginning of week 2, and then weekly or monthly throughout to see how our feelings shifted through the pilot and how/if the US trends toward our Philippine benchmark.

We used google forms to capture the sentiment of our staff during the pilot

Compressed Workweek Pilot Survey – Weekly

Thank you for participating in the compressed workweek pilot project for Elephant Ventures. Please take a few minutes to fill out the survey below.

My team and I are meeting our scrum deliverables and are continuing scrum best-practices and ceremonies (if you disagree, please comment about missing deliverables or best-practices that have stopped). (strongly disagree to strongly agree 1-5 scale)

My teams are adhering to the recommended compressed meeting schedule (approximately 9:30 ET to 12:30-1:00PM ET). (yes/no)

If the previous response was YES, are you finding it beneficial and/or effective? (strongly disagree to strongly agree 1-5 scale)

I believe a compressed workweek will help me to be more productive. If not, please comment in the section at the end of the survey. (strongly disagree to strongly agree 1-5 scale)

I believe a compressed workweek will offer me the flexibility I need to integrate a healthy work and life balance. (strongly disagree to strongly agree 1-5 scale)

My supervisor and I are aligned on the KPIs I need to deliver on a compressed workweek. (strongly disagree to strongly agree 1-5 scale)

I believe a compressed workweek will increase my engagement levels at work. (strongly disagree to strongly agree 1-5 scale)

I believe a compressed workweek will not affect my ability to retain a collaborative culture with my team. (strongly disagree to strongly agree 1-5 scale)

I believe a compressed workweek will not affect my ability to maintain a collaborative culture with my client stakeholders and collaborators. (strongly disagree to strongly agree 1-5 scale)

I believe the US team starting earlier will enhance the collaborative culture between the PH and US teams. (strongly disagree to strongly agree 1-5 scale)

I believe I will be able to maintain a 4 day workweek and 40 hour week (i.e. the compressed workweek hasn’t unfairly increased my overall hours where I am still working 5 days per week but they are longer) (strongly disagree to strongly agree 1-5 scale)

At this point, overall I want to move to a compressed workweek. (strongly disagree to strongly agree 1-5 scale)

General Comments and Questions (free text)