The REALITY of the 4-Day Work Week

It’s not a myth, you can do it!!

Obviously, if it’s hard, it’s usually worth doing, so let’s get after it!

Who’s our audience on this topic?

Hey PRO-New England Business Owner!! If you have a payroll of field Labor, this could resonate with you… A Remodeling Contractor with 2-6 W-2 Carpenters on staff.

A conceptual benefit that stems from the 4 Day work week: Managing around or with minimized unproductive time.

You as the Business owner are constantly making decisions that are good for your business. Reducing the reality of lost production time is Good 4Biz and Good for Workforce Development. Here are Tips and
Tricks to make adoption easier

If you make it a strategic decision to shift to a 4-Day work week, you will see a connection between working more efficiently and an increased Gross Profit margin.

You will also note your ability to attract top Carpentry talent and the younger generation.

Let’s explore some numbers around this topic for Part 3 below…..

We need data to make informed decisions. You gotta do a little math with me now. Here goes….

**How many hours does your crew spend every year on unproductive daily tasks?

Certainly, there are many different unproductive tasks. Some examples of this are the following:

Setting up the job site in the AM
Breaks for lunch
Fixing mistakes
Driving to get materials from the store in the middle of the day.
Cleaning up in the PM or End of the week.

Driving to the job site from your shop (This applies to the business owner that does not allow their guys to take company trucks home for the night).

It might be too much of a stretch for you to let your guys drive their company trucks home. That’s a trust- thing but you might look at that a second time when you have a free moment….

It might be unrealistic to expect that the guys will never forget a bit of material to finish the day but that is a whole topic in and of itself….And, honestly, we all forget stuff. Being proactive about your planning will help keep that number of wasted hours to a minimum.

So for our purposes here and now, let’s focus on the normal and typical activities that are in our control…. Those are Setup/Cleanup and Breaks on a week in and week out basis.

Do you know what proportion of productive vs Unproductive time is spent by one of your crews every week? Measure it. “You can’t fix what you don’t track”, someone wise said.

**Here’s a tip to get some initial data to think about:

Like with anything, breaking up a week into days makes it easier to assess and think about.

Start by looking at your 2-man Team’s actions on a Monday….. If he/she knows what to do, you’ll see the hustle and it could take 30mins to set up the job site cut station by his/herself. Fine.

Around lunchtime, you have your start and stop time slippage which could be 15mins of unproductive time. Hard to track but I bet you see clearly, that the Team is quick to start lunch break and slow to end it. (That’s a tough one to argue about if you are managing “Non-Robots”.)

At the end of the workday – We have your Team member breaking down the cut station and cleaning up while the Team Leader does some thinking, talking, and/or planning. This could be 45mins of unproductive time.

You can see that unproductive time can easily sap 1.5 hours from a workday. (Let’s do some Math now….) It’s almost 20% of the total day’s production capacity. Woah, if you run a 4Day work week w/
10hour days, does it get better? Yes, it gets down as low as 15% of the total day’s production capacity.

**Let’s extrapolate from here:

Now on Monday, we spent 1.5 hours unproductively. That’s one guy each day on a 2 man-crew. For the week: 1.5 hours times a regular week is 7.5 hours used on the typical 5-Day week. On a 4-Day work week, the hours used are naturally 6 total. You save 1.5 hours on the week because you organically culled out one whole workday each week.

What could you gain with 1.5 hours more production time each week?!?!

If you bill @ $100/hr, that’s $150 more in Revenue each week and $7500 in additional Revenue each year (x50 weeks) which can mean $2400 more in Gross Profit (@ 32% GP).

Ok, cool. If you have three 2-man Teams now you have $7200 additional GP on the year.

These $$ can easily be the start of a Bonus Program or a Health Benefit or a retirement contribution….??

That helps to strengthen the positioning of a future team member in the Carpentry field.

You have to keep it “CLEAN” though!! This means the Team Leader does not waste his time setting up and cleaning up each day.

Because the unproductive activities are essential but not actually productive, you have 2 choices.
Hammer the Team to set up/cleanup ever faster or use a natural remedy!?!? Try out the 10 hour Work
Day and the 4-Day Work Week.

Thank you & More to follow……