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# How to make a 4 day week work for everyone

When transitioning to a 32-hour schedule, Awin realized modern tooling wasn't enough. By restructuring teams around Conway's Law, they slashed cognitive load and actively increased total engineering output.

- **Speakers:** Kit Barclay, Jake Levine
- **Event:** World Congress 2022
- **Published:** June 15, 2022
- **Duration:** 58:18
- **URL:** https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/508-how-to-make-a-4-day-week-work-for-everyone

## Summary

The transition to a four-day work week is often misunderstood as merely compressing a standard schedule, but it fundamentally reorients a company's focus from hours worked to value-driven output. When preparing to implement a 32-hour work week at full salary, engineering leadership at Awin discovered that simply possessing modern tooling and CI/CD pipelines was insufficient to drive the required efficiency gains. The reduced time constraint acted as a spotlight on hidden organizational misalignments, revealing that developer bottlenecks were not rooted in technology, but in excessive team cognitive load and overly complex cross-team dependencies.

To ensure engineers could deliver equal or greater value in fewer hours, leadership applied principles from Team Topologies and Conway's Law to restructure their department. They recognized that their product teams were juggling too many disparate responsibilities, from battling legacy code to configuring infrastructure. By establishing specialized groups—including a core platform team, a legacy-focused complicated subsystem team, and an enabling solution architecture team—they drastically simplified communication modes. Solution architects took over cross-team planning and technical mentoring, which successfully unblocked stream-aligned teams and allowed them to focus strictly on feature delivery.

This structural realignment yielded tangible engineering metrics, including a 5.6% increase in resolved tickets per full-time equivalent and a 20% reduction in incident acknowledgment times. Furthermore, the constrained weekly schedule fostered healthier engineering habits, driving an increase in pair programming to eliminate single points of failure while pushing the department toward leaner, smaller delivery cycles. Ultimately, maintaining uninterrupted coverage while offering flexible schedules requires autonomous teams to self-organize their availability, proving that a shorter work week not only eliminates burnout but actively forces a more resilient and intentional engineering culture.

**Keywords:** four-day work week, team cognitive load, team topologies, Conway's law, solution architecture, developer productivity metrics, legacy code management, cross-team communication modes, continuous delivery pipeline, agile process optimization, stream-aligned teams, core platform engineering, flexible remote work arrangements, pair programming practices, lean software development

## Chapters

1. **Introduction to Awin and its affiliate marketing business** (00:00) — Understanding Awin's organizational context helps contextualize their successful transition to a four-day work week.
1. **Challenging the necessity of a five-day work week** (04:00) — Modern workplace tools and remote methodologies make the arbitrary five-day work schedule unnecessary for maintaining output.
1. **Structuring flexible policies for a four-day work week** (08:44) — Implementing a flexible company-wide policy allows software engineering employees to choose their preferred day off without financial penalty.
1. **Automating development processes to accommodate shorter team schedules** (10:52) — Decreasing working hours forces engineering teams to heavily prioritize process automation and strict calendar management.
1. **Identifying cognitive load and organizational bottlenecks within teams** (17:21) — Shorter timelines expose how excessive responsibilities and unclear communication modes overload the cognitive capacity of engineering teams.
1. **Applying team topologies to reorganize engineering team boundaries** (26:56) — Reorganizing engineers into specific stream-aligned, enabling, platform, and complicated subsystem teams strictly limits unneeded cross-team communication friction.
1. **Accelerating service delivery with a solution architecture team** (35:21) — Empowering a dedicated solution architecture team removes technical blockers and reduces the cognitive burden on product delivery teams.
1. **Fostering a culture of flexible communication and collaboration** (41:50) — Embracing asynchronous workflows and pair programming ensures momentum continues even when individual contributors take their flexible days off.
1. **Measuring productivity and business impact of reduced hours** (49:52) — Analyzing ticket resolution velocity and incident response metrics quantitatively validates that a four-day week improves developer productivity.
1. **Resolving scheduling and client billing concerns in shorter weeks** (54:24) — Coordinating fixed times for agile ceremonies ensures teams maintain full alignment while preserving their flexible rest days.

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- [Transitioning to a reduced 36-hour work week](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1073-1000-things-we-tried-for-new-work-here-are-the-results) (from "1000 things we tried for new work. Here are the results.")
- [Flexible remote work strategies in software engineering](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1347-wearedevelopers-live-rendering-in-the-browser-the-state-of-css-and-accessibility-and-more) (from "WeAreDevelopers LIVE - Rendering in the Browser, The State of CSS and Accessibility and more")
- [Implementing a developer productivity framework and measuring output](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1118-developer-experience-in-the-age-of-ai) (from "Developer Experience in the Age of AI")
- [Preventing developer burnout by avoiding toxic productivity trends](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1308-data-science-ml-ai-in-the-oil-and-gas-industry-at-ndt-global-dr-katja-traumner) (from "Data Science, ML & AI in the Oil and Gas Industry at NDT Global - Dr. Katja Träumner")
- [Fostering flexibility, remote work, and personal wellbeing in tech](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1051-creating-healthy-high-performing-organizations-the-missing-link) (from "Creating healthy high performing organizations - the missing link")
- [Shifting developer workloads and realistic AI productivity gains](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/videos/1830-wearedevelopers-live-speculaitions) (from "WeAreDevelopers LIVE - SpeculAItions")

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