Staff meetings of Kansas City clothing brand Charlie Hustle, best known for its KC heart T-shirts, start with a friendly question: What did you do this weekend?
In recent years, the answers have usually run in the same vein.
I did dishes.
I ran errands.
I had a doctor’s appointment.
I finally got my laundry done.
“It was always like, ‘What’s your good news?’ ‘I got our house clean,’” said Greg Moore, the company’s chief operating officer. “Like, no, you should be making memories with your actual kids.”
This realization, along with a bevy of pandemic adjustments, led the small company’s leadership to launch an experiment this May: a four-day work week for all salaried employees in its Crossroads headquarters. Employees of the company started getting every Friday off work without a reduction in their pay or an increase in hours this summer.
The results were clear: The brand saw a significant boost in employee morale, and no decline in sales or profits. Last month, leadership officially made the change permanent, giving 21 employees three-day weekends every week.
The employee impact
Four Charlie Hustle employees told The Star that the four-day model has helped create a culture of productive work days and fulfilling weekend time.
“Giving my all Monday through Thursday, and then being able to either sleep in or run errands or take care of what I need to on Friday through Sunday, it’s been really fantastic,” said social media manager Laken Horton. “I’m not a parent, but I know that a lot of my co-workers are, and they’re able to spend a lot more time with their family.”
Sales manager Ryan Fortney said the change has encouraged employees to be more efficient in order to get the same amount of work done in just 32 hours per week.
“Having the four-day model has allowed me to focus on getting results,” he said. “It’s really allowed me to prioritize certain tasks over others, because there is a more limited amount of time.”
Moore told The Star that the change has led to smaller, less frequent meetings and allowed the company to reassess some practices, including cutting meetings that weren’t proving beneficial to employees.
He said the focus is “very much results over work.”
The COVID effect
The four-day work week has been discussed in economics and labor rights circles since the 1930s, but the COVID-19 pandemic brought the idea into mainstream conversation about our relationship to work, said University of Kansas economics professor Misty Heggeness.
The pandemic shifted the employment landscape dramatically, with workers leaving jobs because of the demands of life. In 2021, more than 47 million American workers quit their jobs, often referred to as “The Great Resignation.” But in a new analysis, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce suggested that a more accurate name may be “The Great Reshuffle,” showing that many workers who left their jobs got rehired elsewhere.
“Employers are trying to figure out how to help employees balance work and life… and thinking about ways (they) can enhance the productivity of their workers,” Heggeness told The Star.
“One way to show appreciation towards (employees) without necessarily taking a hit on your profits is to introduce this four-day work week. There’s potential here for a win/win for everybody.”
That kind of change may be harder for larger companies with a longer history, who have trouble breaking out of their current practices, she said.
“Sometimes we get entrenched in our old ways of thinking about how we’ve always done business… getting creative about how we get our work done can feel uncomfortable,” she said. “It’s much easier to measure the number of hours somebody is sitting in their cubicle than it is to measure other aspects of their work.”
But by changing the ways they measure productivity, Heggeness said that employers can adapt to new norms around labor and attract a more diverse workforce.
The business effect
Charlie Hustle has put some collaborations and project ideas on hold for next year while it navigates the limits on how much work it can manage, but Moore said none of these changes have hurt profits so far.
In fact, he said the company is on track to have its “biggest revenue year ever.”
Charlie Hustle CEO Chase McAnulty said that offering nontraditional hours may give his company an advantage attracting new talent and retaining the workers they already employ.
The recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce analysis on job openings in the country showed that companies with accommodations like remote work options have overall experienced less tumult than sectors that don’t have that option. But still, there are more open jobs than there are workers, putting employers in competition with one another. For every 100 open jobs in the U.S., there are only 66 available workers.
In Missouri, it’s worse. For every 100 open jobs, there are only 47 workers. In 2020, there were 113 workers available for every 100 jobs in Missouri.
“How can a small business like us compete and attract others? Well, here’s a big way for us to do that,” McAnulty said. A growing number of school districts are doing this to attract and retain employees too.
Horton, Charlie Hustle’s social media manager, was hired this summer when the four-day week experiment was already underway. She said it helped her overall impression of the company and that she wouldn’t be eager to return to a five-day schedule if she got a job elsewhere.
“In the future, if I were to go to another place, I would hope that they would… have a similar idea of, ‘I want to take care of my employees,’” she said. “I think it would just change the whole aspect of self-care and mental health and actual work-life balance.”
As employers pay closer attention to mental health and stress levels, McAnulty said that the new schedules have already paid dividends in terms of morale.
“Having a day in the week to really focus on yourself allows people to come back refreshed (for) whatever they have to go do,” he said.
A growing trend?
Now, Moore has other employers asking him about the model.
“We have people coming to us saying, ‘How in the hell are you doing a four-day work week?’ It’s like, it’s really not as scary as you think it is,” he said.
He knows of one other Kansas City company — marketing firm Lillian James Creative — that offers its employees a four-day work week. The firm implemented the schedule in June of 2020 due to pandemic-related fatigue, and made the change permanent in 2021.
“It has been the best decision I’ve ever made,” said CEO Aaron Fulk in an email to The Star. “I get 110% Monday-Thursday from my team, and I know that we are way more productive than we ever were on a Monday-Friday schedule.”
Fulk added that the company has seen an uptick in talented applicants since making the change, which in turn has improved its client roster and led to an increase in salaries. Clients are also understanding about the firm being closed on Fridays.
“Clients have never pushed back on it,” he said. “In fact, a few of them are contemplating moving to this same schedule because they have seen it work so well for us. “
McAnulty said it’s a sign of their companies’ adjustment to changing times.
“The mindset about work is changing… and I think the most important thing about making a decision like this is understanding that you have to adapt,” he said. “If we don’t come back from COVID and actually make changes, then what are we doing?”
