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To the people at WPP who started their mandatory four days in-office at the start of April, the idea of working only four days a week in total, in-office or not, may seem like a pipe dream. But, in the same month that the group’s chief executive Mark Read announced his in-office mandate, 200 companies across the UK pledged to switch to a four-day week, with no attendant reduction in pay and effectively adding an extra day to their employees’ weekends.

Of these 200 businesses, 56 were part of the initial sample that took part in the UK’s first four-day week trial in June 2022. Run by 4 Day Week Global, the 4 Day Week Foundation and researchers at the University of Cambridge and Boston College, the pilot programme ran for six months; most of the companies that took part opted to carry out a full year of the pilot before making a decision.

When results were reported in 2023, 92% (56 companies) of the 61 businesses that participated in the pilot scheme pledged to keep a four-day week. Ten of these businesses were in fields related to adland. Campaign has spoken to two of the shops – pay-per-click agency Loud Mouth Media and digital marketing and web design agency Ascendancy. 

Loud Mouth Media is a small business that has about 30 employees, while Ascendancy is a micro business with just 11 members of staff. In these businesses, employees work four days, have a three-day weekend, but are paid as if they work five days per week.

Each agency has a weekly rota to ensure operations are covered for five days. In both businesses, half of the staff work Monday to Thursday and the other half work Tuesday to Friday.

At Loud Mouth Media, each client has two account managers, who alternate their four-day stints so that there is no break in contact.

Similarly, at Ascendancy, the extra day that staff are given off each week is fixed to either Monday or Friday, but the division of who takes which of those days off is spread across the team so that they can maintain a five-day operation for clients.

Benefits: better retention and productivity

Improved wellbeing and work/life balance are two of the obvious benefits of giving staff a three-day weekend. However, of more interest to agency leaders may be the boost to staff retention in a competitive job market and the boon it can bring to productivity.

Following the UK’s four-day week pilot, 4 Day Week Global found that among the businesses taking part, there was a 71% decrease in employee burnout, 57% decrease in attrition rate and 35% average increase in revenue. It also found that the vast majority of companies were satisfied that business performance and productivity were maintained during the trial.

At Loud Mouth Media, managing director Mark Haslam says there has been a shift in the type of people he employs, prompted by tracking staff output. He adds: “The one important thing to do is to measure output before, during the trial, and then after.”

By measuring output, it became easier for Loud Mouth to identify areas of underperformance, enabling the business to downsize from 40 to 30 people. Now, Haslam says his team comprises people who “value and appreciate” a three-day weekend.

Both Loud Mouth and Ascendancy offer the extra rest day as a benefit rather than an entitlement, which helps incentivise the team. Neither shop has seen employees working on the fifth day when they are supposed to be off.

Haslam adds: “I always position it to them as: the motivation’s with you. Do a good job, which you’re all capable of, which we have all the tools in place to do, and there’ll be no problem maintaining the four-day week.”

Ascendancy, which is based in the market town of Newport, Shropshire, may not be affected by the same inter-network rivalries as Publicis, WPP, Omnicom and Dentsu, or be on the sharp end of talent wars between agencies in big cities such as London. Loud Mouth, however, has an office in London, as well as Belfast, Glasgow and Dublin.

Ascendancy does, however, have a much smaller talent pool on which to draw, making competition for recruits comparatively intense. 

Chris Morledge, managing director of Ascendancy, says: “As a small business, the four-day week was seen as a way to differentiate ourselves from all the local recruiters without competing with bigger agencies on salaries.

“There’s a cultural element, too, because the type of people that we employ are the kind of people who appreciate their lifestyle just as much as they appreciate their work.”

Challenges

One of the biggest hurdles both businesses have faced in moving to a four-day week was the level of administration needed to implement it. Holidays and sick leave had to be recalculated and teams had to consider how bank holidays would be factored in.

Even finding an HR system that could handle a four-day week work pattern was a challenge for Ascendacy.

Haslam says: “You have to prep and prep and prep. And even when you do that, you won’t have done enough, you know, it’s the things that come up like – what about a bank holiday?”

For Haslam, the biggest challenge has proved to be that his agency is one of the first businesses in the UK to try the four-day week model. He adds: “This thing’s brand new. You can’t expect support for something that people haven’t actually experienced themselves.” 

Ultimately, though, he says the results speak for themselves: “We worked out the other day that our team only work 49% of the days of the year – yet we make more money now than we ever did.”

Ascendancy’s clients include digital marketing for furniture retailer Holloways of Ludlow and web design for geospatial data and analytics company GeoSmart Information, while Loud Mouth’s clients include the Irish FA and Queen’s University Belfast.

Is it scalable?

Despite the fact that Loud Mouth Media and Ascendancy combined could fit into a networked shop several times over, both say that scale would be an asset, rather than a hindrance, to shifting to a four-day week.

Haslam argues that it would actually be easier for bigger businesses to carry out a four-day week. His team is lean by necessity, he says, but in larger businesses there is “a bit of fat” – or more staff to help balance out the work.

He adds: “Bigger agencies will generally have a bit of fat that they can absorb – maybe if somebody’s not working as hard, there’ll be somebody else that can pull it up.

“If you look at the likes of WPP or Brainlabs or somebody like that, they’re incredibly well set-up businesses that are formulaic in how they do things. So if anything, they should actually be better set to do this.”

Morledge acquired Ascendancy in 2024 with the intention of merging it with his existing agency Copper Bay Digital, applying the four-day week across double the number of staff and with plans to increase the business’ headcount to between 30 and 40 people.

He says it is the agency business model that makes the four-day week a good fit, meaning that it can work irrespective of size.

“In the typical agency business, you work on fixed retainer hours per month for clients, allowing you flexibility in how you resource those hours, which means the four-day week can work,” he adds. “I personally think it could scale to a much larger business.”

Find all the hybrid working policies for adland’s “big six” agency groups here.

This article originally appeared on Campaign.