 And thanks for coming to the talk at Drupal.com Prague. My name is Anthony. This is Ev. Together we run System Seed, which is an end-to-end digital agency focusing on Drupal. My name is Ev. I'm a head of engineering at System Seed, and I'm responsible for the delivery excellence. So we work almost exclusively with social impact clients. And we're very proud to work with some of these names you can see on the screen behind me. As you can probably imagine, if we're doing social impact work externally in our delivery for clients, we've also got an interest in doing social impact internally with the staff inside the company. It's towards the end of the day here, and I'm sure you're all a little tired. So relax, kick back, and you see this is all about people. It's not very technical. So we're here to talk to you today about the four-day work week. Let's start with a few quick questions. Who here works a four-day week? Very good, more than I thought. And who here would like to work a four-day work week? Everybody. Oh, wow. Yeah, very good. And who here, I'm going to put you on the spot, who here is an agency owner or operator with the authority to move to a four-day work? Brilliant. You put your hand down. OK. So I think there's something in this talk for everybody. They say it's good to give a promise at the beginning of a talk, so here's mine to you. We think that the four-day work week is good for employees, good for employers, and is applicable to 90% of the businesses you'll meet at DrupalCon today. And we're going to tell you how we did that as system seeds. Spoiler alert, this talk is all going to sound very intuitive and very obvious. That's because it is. And you should find the concepts both easy to understand as well as easy to implement. So let's start by talking about the future of work. Governments, employers, employees, they all have different thoughts on this. But all sorts of studies basically show the same thing. And it summarized as businesses need a human-centric approach to worker engagement. And if you don't provide it, someone else will. This applies to full-time workers, part-time workers, parents, carers, digital nomads of which I know there is some in the Drupal community, as well as people with side hustles. Again, this all sounds really obvious, especially since COVID hit, but work and people are so entwined that we can't talk about one without the other. This has been found across all industries since the start of the COVID pandemic. So when we talk about a four-day work week, we're really talking about putting people at the center of our business as our part of the approach to the future of work. This means considering employee well-being in order to help the business run smoother. Also, I think it's really important to state that you cannot fake this. This isn't an HR or a PR exercise. It's not part of your branding. So let's do it properly. Let's start putting people at the center of our business strategies. Let's talk agencies and people for a moment. Being an edgy socialist as a team, I had a teacher that said, you don't need the boss. The boss needs you. Now I'm the boss. I can tell you that is absolutely true. Again, this probably all sounds obvious, but if you look at any organization, any goal, or aspect of life, it all still comes down to people. Think of it like this. If you serve a staff person's self-interest, they will be happier and able to perform better. Look after your staff, and they will look after you as the phrase goes. You might see a bit of a pattern starting to form here as to how all of this folds together. And if you're the sort of person who likes KPIs or measurements and you want to quantify results, start with recruitment and retention. And remember to factor in the human side of things when analyzing HR data, better still lead with it. Start with your people. I'm going to go a step further and say agencies are only their people. If you're a services agency, you are quite literally the sum output of the people working in your company. Think about that for a moment. How do you want to care for the people carrying your business? The takeaway here is, all in all, happy people equals better outcomes. Let's talk products and services organizations. So for different people, this can mean different things. I'm going to dig into some core differences and make some high level definitions. This question time again. Who here works in a company building products? OK. And who here works in a services agency doing waterfall or agile? Just about everybody else. Very good. Over here. Let's look at the core differences between them. So in a product company, you can really leverage technology to bring down the marginal cost of doing technology at scale. Doing business at scale, sorry. This is how Google and other tech titans reach those 90% profit margins. You can leverage IP. You can reuse code, almost like copy and pasting. Or you can build a SaaS where you don't even copy and paste. You just load everyone into one platform. Your marginal costs associated with onboarding each new customer is incredibly low. And your product relating to a single domain gives you laser focus in terms of planning and execution. Other people have written a lot about how to move to a four day work week as part of a product company. And we don't currently build products in system seeds. So I won't go much deeper into it than that. I'm just going to summarize by saying that points all boil down to productivity isn't calculated by hours sat working. It's calculated by outputs in terms of delivery. And so you get more out of the people you treat better and the better rested they are. Something else you probably all know, deep down, this is all going to sound intuitive. People working in office nine to five are not working eight hours a day. Right? Your eight hours at work does not mean eight hours of work gets done. And it definitely doesn't result in eight hours of productivity. Most people's best guess is three to five hours depending on the job role in the organization. Question time again. Who works in a services agency? Right? And who works in an agency doing waterfall? Not many these days. OK. And who works in an agency doing agile? Very good. So for those of you in waterfall agencies, both of you, you're in a similar position to those in product companies because your company makes money, or at least revenue, based on its output, something like client features built. And not based on hours spent creating that output. So if you can show that you're able to deliver the same output over a shorter period of time, and your employer benefits an increased employee retention, better company culture, and more flexibility, then you have a case for working fewer hours given you can perform at the same level of output. I can't tell you how much I hate grind culture and hustle culture. It can all go in the sea. But you've probably seen social media posts telling you to wake up at 5 AM, do four hours of really deep work before 9 AM, then take the rest of the day off when everyone else is just getting started. Well, that could be sort of true if you work in a waterfall agency. Because you're basically all being based on output. Your line manager is going to basically perform based on output. And I can see anyone from the operations side of the audience squirming in their seats figuring out how to manage people from 5 AM to 9 AM. And yes, you can run agile agencies with fixed time, fixed cost, fixed scope. But it largely undoes the whole point of agile. So let's talk about agile agencies that charge based on time and materials like we do at System Seed. I would guess right now that you're thinking, but if you're a time-based business, you can't just cut 20% of your time at work. Well, yes and no. Let me tell you what we did in the past and what we do now. Who knows Google Time, the phrase Google Time? One, two, three. Most of them are people in System Seed. OK, so Google Time. About five years ago, we started practicing Google Time at System Seed, where we paid for the staff to work full time, 40-hour work weeks. But the staff could self-determine what 20% of that time was based on. That's the equivalent of one day a week, whether it's all on a Friday or maybe spread throughout the week. The idea was that this would result in innovation and show positive results for the staff, the company, and the clients. And just as a side note, anytime you think you can tick all three of those boxes, that should be a really easy decision to make. And it should be even easier if you run it as an experiment that you could roll back if it doesn't work. So originally, we tried Google Time and let all the staff determine their own working timetable with a quota of hitting 80% billable hours or 32 out of 40 hours a week. Let's talk about what happened. Well, a lot of our very best developers went above and beyond for our clients and they burned out. Others took the opportunity to take it easy. And to be honest, we weren't holding people accountable for how that Google Time was spent, but we didn't see much output in terms of open source contributions, articles written for our website, other things that would clearly benefit or boost the company. So it's kind of negative in both sides of that experiment. The first half tried to push super hard for the clients, and this is really important. That benefits your short-term profits, but you simply pay for it later in things like sick days as people start to burn out. Over to Eves and Data. Thank you. So let's talk about concerns versus reality when it comes to 4D Workweek from perspective of business owners, staff, and clients. Also, I would like to show you some interesting data. Let's start with business owners first. In our case, it's me and Anthony. How do you think when it comes down to business owners, what is the first obvious concern regarding switching to 4D Workweek? Money, we agree, you're absolutely right. We just like to call it impact on profit. OK? So I would be lying if I said that business owners don't consider impact on profit first. As Anthony mentioned, in adopting Google time at system seed, we target on only 80% of the time to be billable, which results into 32 hours a week of billable target. So we thought, in theory, if we cancel Fridays, cancel all internal events, and focus on the unclient billable work, that should result in the same 32 hours a week. So we should be happy, right? I know that some people like to add charts to their presentation to look smarter. So I went ahead and billed mine as well. 32 hours target, when we worked five workdays a week, roughly equals 32 hours of our new target when you're going to be working four days a week. Now that was in theory. Let me show you some of the data that we pulled from our time tracking software. We compared one year before the switch to 4D Workweek and after. Here are the numbers. Basically, you can see that we have seen 6% drop of revenue, which is not horrible, but we have expected less. We started digging more into the data to see why this difference is so bigger than we expected. It turned out that before the switch, average team member did 33.5 billable hours per week. After the switch, it's 31. If you look at this data from a little bit different perspective and compare the target of billable hours to the actual hours, it's only 3% drop, which is a very good sacrifice for all the benefits we gained from 4D Workweek. Also here are some bonus data. During our data research, we have found that the amount of sick days taken per average staff member per year has reduced more than 2 and 1 half times, from 4.5 days a year to less than 2 days a year. For us, as business owners, less sick days means more stable and predictable delivery, so we don't have to urgently find replacement. Now, you have to take this data with a pinch of salt, because there was COVID times before vaccine, so it may be a bit randomized. But the data is still quite interesting. We all know about the impact of stress and burnouts on physical health. So if your staff members take a lot of sick days, stress and burnouts may be the reason. It doesn't switch. Sorry about that. The next concern was impact on timelines. I'm sorry, I will stand here. Somehow it doesn't switch anymore. We were concerned that without working on Fridays, we won't be able to hit our performance metrics and achieve deadlines agreed with our clients. Now it started working, I'm sorry. What happened in the reality is that well-rested team actually compensated the drop of billable hours by the better performance and delivery. So the overall delivery, speed of delivery, has stayed the same. It's very hard to pinpoint this data and prove it, but this is what our general trends show, from our time tracking software, from our project management software, and from our internal tool that we have built to measure performance, we call it clarity, quite an obvious name for performance measurements. So regardless of what team members do over their three-day weekend, they come to work much more fresh and energetic. Before the switch, our mental health therapist told us to look out for burnouts. After the switch, this problem has completely disappeared and here comes my favorite bonus. I don't see tired faces on Monday anymore. Sorry? We're gonna come to that, yeah, yeah. Wait a second. Our next concern was client support and impact on client support. What if something goes wrong when we are away from keyboard on Friday? Let's set the context right. You should be supporting your client any day of the week regardless of whether it's a workday or the weekend. So Friday in this sense is not unique. Introduce or remind your clients about service level agreement and how quickly you can jump into incidence resolution and make sure that your team is ready to handle issues. Now here's my next question. How do you think? How much time, how much times our team had to jump into the incidence resolution over the weekend, let's say, over the course of the past three years? Anybody, any numbers? Five, zero. When I was writing this presentation, I put zero as well, but then I checked with the team. It turned out that we actually had two incidents which we had to prevent over the weekend. It was two unsuccessful hacking attempts. But apart from this, we had zero. And let me tell you how we managed to achieve it. Firstly, we have built our own self-healing hosting solution with multiple fellowers in several availability zones. Then there was a very boring but important CIS admin routine. We established proactive monitoring on all levels, application level, server level, up times, error strikers for the front end, for the back end. The point here is proactive monitoring helps to discover symptoms of issues before they become a real thing and blew up. And we can then fix them during work hours. Secondly, we have mandatory test coverage, automated quality control, and automated releases. How many of you have heard this phrase? Don't release on Fridays. I'm not gonna ask you to raise the hand. Everybody have, right? I call it Curse of Friday releases. The thing is, if you can't deploy on Fridays, then after switching to 4D Workweek, you won't be able to deploy on Thursdays, leaving you very little window for actual releases. And the only way to escape from this curse is actually to introduce automated test coverage, automated quality control, and don't involve humans into the releases. Machines should do this for stable results. Then you can push to production any day of the week, even on the weekends, if you fancy to. Now let's talk about our staff concerns. Believe it or not, but when we told our team that they will work less for the same money, they were concerned as well. Some of our team members were worried, how can they do 40 hours of work within 32 hours? This is important to understand. The main premise of 4D Workweek is a commitment to work more efficiently for the same money with one extra day off a week in return. To tell you more, for 45 extra days off a year, just think about this number for a second. According to the feedback of our team, after one and a half years of running with 4D Workweek, the expectation to have more focused work is correct, but three days is completely sufficient to recover without a sign of burnout. This is all you should really know about this concern. Will we meet client expectations? In the past, some of our team members used Fridays to catch up. How should they do now? I have already mentioned that we didn't see any significant changes on the delivery of performance, which means that the necessity to catch up was likely the result of procrastination or just generally reduced performance due to stress, being more tired, and burnout. As soon as we have set a new rhythm of work and rest, we stop seeing a need to catch up on Fridays. It does sound like magic, but this is exactly what happened with our team. Will we go back to 5D Week? Now, this was a genuine worry. We told everybody that we will run for the Workweek as an experiment. One and a half years later, what has changed, now this experiment is in our team's contracts, and every Friday still feels like a little miracle to me that we've been able to make this experiment successful. We have asked our team, what do they think about 4D Workweek? And just for the record, this poll was anonymous, so they could have written anything they wanted. Let me read some of their quotes. It feels like now I have time for everything I plan for, more time to focus on family and life admin, more energy and initiative at work, much better work-life balance compared to many other experiments I made. Who's yours? That's Kate. Gives more personal time in the best sense. I think I do approximately the same work for four days as I did for five. This is my favorite one. One day per week when my son is at school and I don't have to work. Peace. I feel that after three days off, my mind is fresh again and I'm really ready to work. No more done-outs. Let's talk about clients. I will walk you through the concerns which our clients had, and you will realize that you actually already do know all the answers for their concerns. So feel free to help me. Will it impact our project timelines? Was it the answer? No, the performance delivery stays the same, so deadlines will be met. Will it impact our budget? Was the right answer? Yes, it will be cheaper. Remember the data I showed you? It was three to six percent reduction of billable hours from our end, meaning that it's cheaper for the client, or they will be able to achieve more for the same budget. Actually, clients are the biggest beneficiaries of this change. Who will support us on Fridays? Remind your clients about service-level agreements and the effort you put into the development operations to keep their projects stable. If you've got a great history of incidents management over the weekend or no incidents over the weekend, this is the right time to mention this as well. Now, ladies and gentlemen, meet pitfalls. The first one. We had to move from two-week sprints to three- or four-week sprints, because actually a day of work within a sprint was not sufficient to run all the necessary ceremonies and still be productive. When we introduced the change, we had to cancel all internal events initially. A few months later, there was a demand in the team to share the news, to celebrate things together. So we went ahead and reintroduced our weekly town hall with the team. A few months later, we have introduced engineering culture growth calls and innovation calls. Consider this an excellent opportunity for you to re-evaluate all internal events you have in the team. I can tell you more about the data that we have found. We've been able to cut 470 hours of internal time per staff member per year, which we have no idea where it was spent. So we definitely don't regret losing it. Almost all team-building events had to be moved outside of work hours, apart from events like DrupalCon, obviously, some hackathons and some company retreats. How do we roll now? Basically, I'll give an example. We have a demand in the team to do open-source contributions together. So now we have organized one Friday a month, which is completely optional to attend, where we gather together and do open-source contributions. You might have heard last month there was Drupal 10 upgrade initiative. Our team organized it with a great help from the Drupal community. If there is only one thing you want to take out of this session, now's the time to listen. Obviously, this is advice for the decision-makers. Run a short trial for over four weeks and treat this as an experiment. Don't commit to this change yet. It's actually much more simple than you think. First, warn your clients in advance that it is happening and come their fears. I have already told you how to do this. And second, tell your team that if they will be caught working Fridays, they will be fired. Trust me, it's the most ridiculous reason in the world to be fired, and so far we haven't caught anyone. As a responsible person, I have to warn you, it's a trap. As soon as you realize that the world didn't collapse, things still get done in time and your team is much happier, you won't go back. And if you have a family, they will find you more calm, peaceful and happy. So they will not let you go back. Do it for them and for the families of your team. And now I hand back to Anthony for the conclusion. Thanks, Ev. So, final question. Who's convinced about a four-day work week? Everyone raised their hand for the video. You can't see them, okay. Honestly, the main thing I want to put across is that agencies and product companies can make the same revenue, the same profit, and have a much healthier company culture just by introducing that four-day work week. In our case, we actually saw the revenue from System Seed grow 100%. The year after we switched to a four-day work week. So for those of you that are in companies like really battling for rapid growth, you don't have to sacrifice growth for culture. Staffer agencies, you're looking at 45 extra-free holidays a year with no reduction in pay. Does it improve recruitment? Yes. Does it improve retention? Well, yes and no, honestly. What we found is some people still want to chase cash over culture and mainly they were younger people, potentially people without kids or things that people might want in their 30s and 40s. And I would say that risks burnout. So for any people who are younger in the audience, I would really suggest that you consider both cash and culture as part of your career path. Please let us know what you think about our presentation via the session survey and we look forward to speaking to you soon. We've actually got a session right after this one. Also a reminder that we've got a contribution day on Friday, as well as others scattered throughout the week. We've got a stand here at DrupalCon. Please come and speak to us there. We can't wait to meet you properly. It's S14 opposite the photo booth. And please get in touch if this sounds interesting to you. If you're an employer or you're looking for a new dream job, we'd love to stay in touch. I don't know if there's a microphone, but if you have any questions, you can meet us at the booth or right now. There are some questions. Yep, you're welcome. Has the team size grown? Has the company grown? Yeah, in the same year. So effectively we have one good reason to grow the company in size because we're a services agency and that's driven by revenue. So the more clients we get, the more revenue we make, we need to be able to service those clients. So I think we saw the team grow from about 15 people to 23 in that 100% year on year revenue growth. I don't think there's a microphone. You just have to shout. Thank you. Your voice is very loud. We can hear it perfectly. Don't talk to us at the stand. Yeah, sure. Thank you. I tell him it every day. That is a great question. And we do have mid-level people in the team. I think the larger the organization you are, the more opportunity that you have to support juniors. I think juniors can work in an organization that does a four-day work week for sure. But we do have mentoring systems and career development paths that are quite strictly monitored and measured. So we do have mid-level people, but not juniors at the moment. Any other questions? You're welcome. What's about replacement of Fridays to Wednesdays? Why? I mean, the whole point is that just work focused for days and then you completely disconnect. If that's the only way to go, probably you can experiment. Again, like I said, try to experiment. What will work? And you don't have to commit to this experiment over the long run. Just try. If it works, it works. I can see one drawback in that. And that is, I don't know how much deep work you get involved in. And the way that we do agile estimation is as little as half a day, four points equals four hours. I know this isn't strictly agile estimations. But generally, if there is a story that goes 20 points or above, so 20 hours, we would definitely look to chop that down into bite-sized pieces. And I think if you wanted to get really into deep work and not lose your flow, you might prefer four consecutive days rather than them be broken up. Yeah, my concern would be the focus. The whole point of their work week is that you are able to focus for days. If you focus this kind of, focus this kind of, I would be concerned about the productivity of this time. Yep. So our goal in terms of Google time was 32 hours billable to our clients each week, 80% of that 40-hour work week. And as Ev showed in his graph, people going above and beyond, we were actually billing average 33 and a half per person in the company for full-time staff. After the change to a four-day work week, the average was 31, yeah. So the productivity was just slightly less than our exact target. And that one-hour difference really made time for those town hall meetings, engineering culture growth, that sort of thing. And the way we measure productivity is not by hours, but by delivery. So you can't say like it's five productive hours now, or six or seven. So we were that productive before, after switch, we were the same about productivity, the same about estimates, deadlines, and the same and the rest. I hope it did answer the question. Thank you. They're jealous, yeah. No, honestly, as Ev said, if you're too afraid to deploy on a Friday, because you're worried of working the weekends, you want to tackle that same problem in terms of your SLA, your service level agreement, in which we define what is an urgent story. So there's no emails with, you know, super urgent, you've got to get back to me right now and block caps. They know better, and you need people on your team who have got consultancy skills to sort of manage your clients with you. But yeah, no, they all accept it. All clients that came through the change with us, as well as new clients, we explain it, and they go, oh, but what if, and it's a half hour conversation, then they're like, okay. You're welcome. Yes, yes, actually the data, sorry for interrupting you, the data which I used in comparison one year before and after, I forgot to say this, but we took the exact same employees who were with us before and after for data sanity. So we do have a couple of ad hoc freelancers that we don't have full-time capacity available for them to work full-time. They have other clients to juggle as well as us, and they know how to manage their time. So they dip in and out of the projects when we've got set pieces of work to do, but they also know that we're not available on the Fridays, and again, I think they're jealous they're trying to figure out how to do that for themselves as well. So basically if the question was, if we asked contractors to work with us on Fridays, no, we don't. They don't work Fridays as well. Any other questions? Great, I think that's it. Before I forgot. Go on. We promised to mention that we have some brands jam, it's a blueberry jam that we have available to our booth. It's handmade from our team members. Brand stand up. Oh, he's over here. He's over here, yeah. So there's a few giveaways at the stands. We have only jam available there. Some are farther. Things which are more liquid, we were not allowed to bring to DrupalCon, but the jam is very nice and it's very natural. Great. Anything else? I think that's it. The next session in this room is about a WHO project that we've been working on for the past four years, and it's myself and Elise West down the front here. We're talking about human-centered design, driven projects, and how we built a mental health support platform for the WHO. Stick around. Thank you.