Common Future
By: Barbara Abadi
Introduction
We’re primed toward experimentation, challenging structures that don’t often work for BIPOC folks. Our 4-day workweek offers incredible benefits for our employees. They have more time for family, friends, hobbies, entrepreneurship, learning new skills, wellness activities, physical healthcare, and community involvement.
Common Future is a California-based nonprofit whose mission is building a future where all people – no matter their race and class – have power, choice, and ownership over the economy. For over 20 years, Common Future has been fighting for a world where BIPOC communities have the economic power to steward their own restoration and healing.
In 2024, Common Future and WorkFour see policy and public advocacy as necessary components to scaling this movement in order to ensure equity and that hourly, non-unionized, working-class, essential, and industrial workers have a four-day workweek.
Joann Lee Wagner, Vice President of People Operations, shares Common Future’s early adoption of the 4-day workweek (4DW) and their experience since launching it in 2021.
Common Future’s 4-Day Workweek Journey
During the pandemic, we went remote, and it was such a huge shift. Leadership began with two questions: How do we create a workplace that truly supports our employees and that creates an environment that really helps us make an impact in the world? How can we live our values inside our organization like we do on the outside where our work is all about economic and racial justice? Being a majority BIPOC organization, this is very important to us.
To find out what was most helpful to employees, we sent out surveys and found that what was most valued was flexibility and taking some of the pressure off. When things were getting very difficult during the pandemic, we would give people time off. We saw anecdotally how much it supported our employees to have some space and time.
What was the most important, in my view, was essentialism – getting the right things done by only focusing on the essentials. So, when we came across essentialism as part of our 4DW research, these converging factors helped us see why the 4DW would make sense for Common Future. All these observations created the seeds that grew into our experiment with the 4DW as a policy.
Strategic priorities and essentialism were the most important principles for establishing clear metrics of 4DW success. Common Future uses OKRs to measure productivity against strategy. We use surveys, time studies, and focus groups to measure the impact of the 4DW on work-life balance, community engagement, and physical/emotional health. For the pilot, we used pre- and post-experiment benchmarks, time studies, and mid-experiment focus groups targeting parents, supervisors, and entry-level employees to obtain data to really understand the 4DW impact on our diverse employee population.
Once the decision was made to take on this experiment, we communicated it to our employees and as you can imagine, it was met with a lot of excitement. Next, we provided training on essentialism, power dynamics, and the resources that employees could use to make the 4DW work for them.
We intentionally launched our 4DW experiment in May to take advantage of summer’s less intense work pace.
What Works Well
So many things!! Employee retention, job satisfaction, and engagement numbers are quite high. People say this is the organization of their dreams!
Continuous prioritization and adaptability in the face of competing priorities is also quite a benefit even if it doesn't always feel that way. In a 4DW, you're continuously forced to think and make tradeoffs. We want folks to feel the agency to prioritize for themselves.
Challenges
There is not much spaciousness to create camaraderie in the 4DW or remote work. To alleviate this, we implemented ‘culture buddies’ to help people just connect as human beings and develop relationships. This has been particularly helpful as we have grown from 20 people during the pilot to 40 people today.
In the beginning, it did feel like people were trying to force five days into four. Ongoing focus on balancing individual, team, and organizational rhythms is very important. Because our people have a drive to create impact, we continue needing to prioritize a pace of work that is sustainable.
Advice to Potential 4-Day Workweek Adopters
Do your research beforehand. If you decide to proceed, lean into experimentation with a data-driven approach. It’s quite important to match your experiment parameters to the culture of your organization, to the employees you have, and to the employee experience you want to provide.