Should You Move to a Four-Day Workweek?
Every year, without fail, as summertime rolls around and the good weather is here to stay, I get asked whether it's a good idea to operate a residential construction business on a four-day workweek instead of five.
As a business owner, building a company culture that is open and adaptive and offers a work-life balance is important because we all know that it fosters a better working environment and results in better output from your team members. And many employees might favor a three-day weekend to spend extra time with family or binge-watch Netflix.
But before you start declaring "Tuesday as the new Monday," there are some important things to consider about the overall impact of a shorter workweek on your general contracting business.
Why Companies Consider Four-Day Weeks
The modern working landscape is constantly changing as new technologies and new ways of working become mainstream. And, in recent years, many companies have started to focus on workers' mental health, which means they're looking not just at how people work but when they do their work and for how long.
Which means that concepts like "Summer Fridays" or "Four-Day Work Weeks" are permeating into every industry as employers and employees try to strike a flexible balance between their work and their personal lives.
And residential construction is no exception. But how do you execute a four-day week in an industry that doesn't keep 9-5 workdays?
Shorter Weeks, Longer Days
The idea of shortening work weeks isn't new, and many industries have been using variations on this theme for a long time. That might look like a "Summer Fridays" program where employees add an extra hour to their day from Monday to Thursday for the summer months, so they can only work a half-day on Friday.
And in more recent years, particularly coming out of a pandemic where people were suddenly finding themselves doing remote work or hybrid work in some capacity, many companies have looked at adopting a four-day week.
But there's still 40 hours' worth of work to be done each week, so how does that add up?
The Ten-Hour Workday
Typically, a 40-hour week consists of 5 working days with 8 hours per day. In a four-day workweek scenario, those extra 8 hours are divided between each other working days, meaning that your teams are on job sites a lot longer each day to make up for the day off.
For example, instead of this:
Five-Day Work Week:
5 x 8-hour days
40 hours per week
8:00 am - 4:30 pm
30-minute lunch break (unpaid)
2 x 15-minute morning and afternoon breaks (paid)
A typical workweek would look like this:
Four-Day Work Week:
4 x 10-hour days
40 hours per week
8:00 am - 6:30 pm
30-minute lunch break (unpaid)
2 x 15-minute morning and afternoon breaks (paid)
But does adding the extra time onto a 4-day workweek actually benefit or impede employee productivity on a jobsite?
How a Four-Day Work Week Impacts Productivity
Remodeling or custom home building a home is a very labor-intensive job that requires precision and attention to detail, which means you want your teams to be alert and on their A-game every time they're on the job site.
And while adding an extra hour or two to their days might not seem like a lot in theory, it's worth considering that it's long been documented that people who work in excess of 8 or so hours per day become less effective the longer the day goes on.
And that can have serious implications for your residential construction projects.
Reduction in Efficiency
In my experience as a general manager, I experimented with switching teams to four-day work weeks. But I often found that as the week went on, the cumulative effect of adding those extra hours to each day had a more significant effect than we appreciated. In many cases, by the time Thursday rolled around, our guys were pretty tired having worked long hours already leading them to make more mistakes and caused frequent errors in judgment that cost the business time and money.
Impacted Project Timelines
Most remodeling or home-building projects have a large gap between the time they were estimated and the time that construction begins, which makes it very likely that the project timeline was created on the assumption that teams are working five days a week.
And while your teams are technically working the same number of hours per week on a four-day cycle, they are working longer days, which can cause them to work more slowly as fatigue sets in. Or, they spend more time correcting jobsite mistakes, which slows down productivity and makes the project take longer.
And project timeline delays always result in additional costs and frustrated stakeholders.
Safety Concerns
When people get tired, people make mistakes. In the world of construction, those mistakes can carry a heavy price. My motto in running a general contracting business was, "Everyone goes home at night." And that meant we were serious about safety and didn't want to jeopardize anyone's well-being in favor of working one less day each week.
The Schedule Impacts All Stakeholders
There are more stakeholders in every project than just your internal team, and it's important that we consider the impacts on everyone.
To your carpenters or apprentices, a work week is a work week, no matter how many days in length it is. And for the most part, their work schedules aren't impacted much either way. But for your project managers and site superintendents, the number of days a week teams are onsite can make a huge difference in how efficient and profitable a project is - and how they can work alongside other stakeholders.
Clients
Project Timeline
When it comes to remodeling or building a house, your clients are your biggest stakeholders. After all, they are the ones investing huge sums of money into the project. And in return, they've been promised a team that is working collectively with them, according to a preset schedule, which is completing their project so they can move in.
But when your client shows up at the jobsite on the one day a week your team isn't working, it sets a bad impression in their minds and can jeopardize the relationship you've worked hard to build with them.
Coordinating Onsite Activities
Now imagine on this same day, a trade partner or delivery from one of your vendors shows up, and only the client is onsite. It's not their job to coordinate trade work or manage deliveries, and they will likely feel frustrated, considering they are paying you to do this job.
Availability for Meetings
Another thing to consider is that we tell clients in the sales process that they need to be available for meetings, but we send mixed messaging when we aren't able to meet with them on a Monday or a Friday because we've chosen that as the "company day off." And if you have project managers who are off, you, as the business owner, will likely have to step in to fill their shoes. Because, again, the clients are paying you, and if they are free on Friday at noon, then there isn't going to be a plausible reason for not meeting with them.
Architects, Designers and Trade Partners
Any residential construction jobsite is a hub with professional partners coming and going. Architects and designers are often onsite consulting with project managers or site superintendents, and trade partners are constantly onsite performing work.
Professional partners, like architects and designers, have hectic schedules, which can cause friction if they have to constantly work around the company's reduced work week when scheduling meetings with clients, general contractors, and other consultants. It also poses a challenge when a professional partner is needed in short order to review issues so that a project can continue moving forward, and it's not a day when the project manager or site super is onsite.
It's also not uncommon to have trade partners who have a six-day working week and are onsite most of those days.
That work needs to be supervised by a site superintendent to ensure it's being done correctly and in a timely manner, to ensure the project is on budget, and nothing is damaged in the process.
But if your team is on a 4-day schedule, that leaves at least one day a week when professional partners are left unsupervised on your jobsite. And that's one of the fastest ways to increase the need for re-work that will frustrate you and your client and dilute your profit.
Inspectors
Anyone who has been in the residential construction industry for any length of time knows that inspections are a big part of the job. And inspectors like to show up when you least expect them.
In fact, submitting inspection requests is a lot like a game of roulette. And not having your site super on the job every day is like ensuring the house has the winning hand - because it's almost a guarantee that an inspector will show up on the day your team didn't.
We often need the inspector at critical times to ensure we can proceed with the next step, such as passing insulation inspections so the drywall team arriving the next day can begin. Not being available to meet with an inspector because it's the "company's day off" means having to wait until the next time the inspector is available. And that results in lengthy delays and additional costs.
Other Things to Consider
Aside from the impact on productivity, schedules, and stakeholder relationships, there are other factors to consider when determining whether your team would work better on a four or five-day rotation.
Team Dynamics
Everyone who works for you has a different life situation and commitments they need to work around. Getting alignment from all of them on something as major as switching to a four-day schedule could be difficult for a variety of reasons - one of the biggest being for employees with young families.
Working full-time and raising children is a hard balancing act, particularly when school and daycare end times don't often align with workday hours. Asking a team member to suddenly add one or two extra hours to their day can put a lot of pressure on them to find alternative situations for pick-ups and drop-offs or cause them to constantly miss out on dinner or extracurricular sports and activities.
Weather Delays
You can control many things on a jobsite, but the weather is not one of them. Just ask any Canadian companies in the construction sector! Navigating project schedules alongside snow and extreme cold, excruciating heat, or wet climates that see above-average rain days impacts your team's ability to be onsite and productive. Having to shift work because of inclement weather situations becomes challenging if you're limiting the specific days onsite each week.
Side Work
One of the things I had never considered when experimenting with a four-day week for my teams was that giving them an extra day a week meant they suddenly had free time to pick up small side jobs to boost their income on the day they weren't on our job sites.
Not only can this be problematic if those side jobs start to spill over into regular working hours, but it can have many other negative impacts.
Team Members Calling In Sick To Finish Up Side Jobs
Unfinished side jobs start impacting your projects as team members might call in sick in order to finish up their side work, leaving you shorthanded and at risk of running behind schedule.
Team Members Arrive At Work Already Tired
Team members who are working more hours each week are likely to show up to work on the first day of your "work week" already tired, which means lower levels of productivity and an increased chance of errors or accidents happening onsite.
Team Members Using Company Tools For Side Work
If construction workers start picking up side jobs on their day off, they may not have the right tools to do that work, so they borrow company property, which might get damaged, lost, or stolen - or forgotten at their side job. Suddenly, they don't have the necessary tools to complete your work, which impacts production on your limited days onsite.
Team Members Wearing Company Gear At Non-Company Job Sites
Your teams represent your brand, and when they're on your job sites, you want people to notice this. But if they wear company attire on a side job and are visible to neighbors walking by that property, they will think it's your company performing the work. And if those team members aren't operating the way they do on your sites with respect to language, safety, noise volume, or detailed work, people observing them will think that's how you run your business. This can cause negative word-of-mouth or online feedback and be detrimental to your ability to get new work.
Still Thinking of Implementing a Four-Day Work Week?
It's no surprise that many companies across multiple industries are looking for ways to improve company culture and adapt their work landscape to better align with their employees' needs for a healthy work-life balance.
And in that quest, many turn to the four-day workweek.
But for the construction sector, this change can have some serious implications because it involves not just shorter working weeks but longer days. This can lead to potential challenges in maintaining productivity, adhering to project timelines, maintaining profitability, and navigating relationships with various stakeholders. All of which can negatively impact your bottom line.
But if you are adamant about adapting your business model away from the standard Monday-to-Friday drill, there are other options to consider. Just remember that each of these solutions comes with its own set of challenges.
Rolling four-day work weeks where your teams all work four days a week, just not the same four days. In this scenario, there's always someone out on a day off, but not everyone is out at the same time. Logistically, though, it's a headache for your site supers or project managers to track, and it's still susceptible to the other issues that we've talked about.
Implement a '4x9' workweek to increase each workday by one hour - so your teams are onsite 9 hours a day, but only four days a week. The challenge here, though, aside from the above-mentioned issues, is that your overall workweek decreases by four hours, which impacts your overall throughput for the year.
Start each day earlier instead of running later. For employees with young families, this scenario shifts the extra work to the morning, allowing them to participate while still making it home for dinner each night.
Shifting to a four-day week might sound like a good way to improve perceived work-life balance, but in reality, it can present more headaches than benefits. In an industry with tight schedules and many stakeholders to satisfy, increasing to ten hours on the job each day can lead to overworked employees, frustrated stakeholders, and too many opportunities for errors that can make it harder to manage overhead costs, potentially reducing your long-term profitability.
