Six founders kept the four-day week: what they changed

Six UK business leaders who moved to a four-day week have stayed on it, several since 2022. All six told Startups.co.uk output has held up.

The thing they changed first was not the calendar. It was how work gets approved, scheduled and measured.

Start with the audit. Andrew McLernon, co-founder and chief executive of lead generation platform Interlink, says the test is "which work actually creates value and what can be removed, automated or done differently?"

Interlink did not flip the switch in a week. McLernon credits a phased 18-month transition.

Weglot, which makes a website translation tool, reviewed its meetings and internal communication before the trial began. One outcome was a change to code review: Augustin Prot says two people used to be needed to validate a feature before deploying, and now one is enough if the other is off.

That is the pattern worth copying. A four-day week exposes any process that needs two people present on the same day.

McLernon makes the same point about meetings: "If meetings become too long, processes become cumbersome or communication becomes fragmented, you notice it much more quickly when you only have four working days."

Cover is the hurdle, not productivity. Clients tend to expect a reply on Friday whether or not anyone is in.

Marketing Signals, a digital marketing agency that began its trial in May 2022 and later made it permanent, split its team in two. Weglot lets staff pick Wednesday or Friday off.

Bell & Company, a debt advisory firm, added staff who work Tuesday to Friday and take Monday off instead. Founder and chairman Terry Bell says that "strengthened our Friday coverage while still preserving the four-day-week benefit".

Bell also says the model he runs now is not the one he introduced in 2022, and that he has changed things when they have not worked. He describes continually reviewing where the pressure points are.

Measurement is the other precondition. Gareth Hoyle, managing director of Marketing Signals, says the firm already judged teams on output rather than attendance before the move, so staff were expected to produce results rather than account for hours.

Liz Howard, an executive coach and founder of talent consultancy Up2Eleven, gives the same advice to founders considering it: decide what success looks like, then track results rather than desk time.

The warning comes from Corinna Nicol, founder of Connect, a Yorkshire community for women business owners. She runs events, so her own week is not rigid, and she says a shorter week only works with genuine boundaries rather than a fifth day spent quietly answering email.

For a founder weighing this up, the sequence in these accounts is consistent: measure outcomes before you cut the day, strip the approvals that require two diaries to align, settle who covers Friday, then run it as a trial you expect to keep amending. The founders also report it comes up unprompted from job applicants, which is one way a smaller employer competes without raising salaries.