The Four Day Workweek Three Years Later

More than three years have passed since Loka began giving every employee at the company every other Friday off. In that time the discourse around alternative workplace culture shifted from pandemic-driven remote work to mandatory RTO to the current (and frankly insane) hype around the 996 schedule, yet has achieved zero semblance of satisfying resolution. 

Which is pretty much the opposite of where we are on the issue. At Loka we’re fully convinced, committed and even evangelistic about the policy we call 5/4 Fridays. Our people have described it as “literally life changing.” And with it the company is performing better than ever in all the most important metrics. 

Since committing to 5/4 Fridays in January 2022:

→ We’ve nearly tripled our project launches per year.

→ 9.8 out of 10 customers would recommend Loka (based on more than 100 reviews).

→ We’ve attracted 7,000-10,000 more job candidates per year, every year.

→ We’ve maintained a 95% employee retention rate. 

→ Most significantly, in November 2024, AWS named Loka Innovation Partner of the Year, an award that has everything to do with our launch quality for customers, and nothing to do with our innovative culture. 

Progressive business and advocacy groups across Europe have long advocated for the four-day workweek. America has been slower to catch on. Other companies have adopted a similar format known as 9/80 or nine-day fortnight, yet we’ve seen little discourse around it. It works for a few reasons. 

As an award-winning consultancy, Loka thrives by innovating—a growth-mentality mindset that extends beyond the code we write and the products we launch to innovating workplace culture itself. Much like the tech landscape that is our engineers’ sandbox, Loka’s executive and HXteams see the modern workplace as a laboratory for testing new ideas, especially in the areas of employee satisfaction and cultural differentiation. We experiment often, and when we see positive results, we go all in. Our people appreciate this about us. 

Paul Englert is a German software engineer, Loka’s CTO and a four-year veteran of the company. He says “5/4s are a buffer, a vacation, an adventure and most of all a time to reflect, so I can start my Monday at 100%.” 

Loka has operated remotely for 20 years, and when it comes to hiring, we look for not only technical mastery but also chemistry. Recruiting, hiring managers and team leaders seek out a specific combination of personality traits in a specific set of tech professionals—curious people who are adept collaborators and also value autonomy and respect the opportunities afforded by a remote workplace. This approach results in a miniscule .43% acceptance rate, which is more stringent than Google’s (.5%) or Harvard’s (3.64%). It also leads to the aforementioned 95% retention rate, which is remarkable in a notoriously high-churn industry populated by ambitious workers in sought-after fields like AI/ML, DevOps and Big Data. 

Also, the majority of our talent comes from emerging hotspots in Europe and South America. High achievers from these regions are hungry to perform on the international stage but also acculturated maintaining elite standards within a healthy live-work balance. They’re perhaps less inclined to take opportunity for granted. 

5/4 Fridays initially began as a way to simply go one day without meetings, but they’ve evolved something more. Alongside Loka’s remote “work wherever you’re most productive” policy and Explorer program (which sends volunteer Lokals to work in Lisbon, Skopje or Bogota for three months), they’re now one of the company’s signature benefits, extending to every employee, from interns to project managers to executives. As an equalizing policy, 5/4 bridges Loka’s leadership and our rank and file. Come Monday morning, even the CEO might post 5/4 photos on Slack (usually of early-morning tennis matches). 

Leadership opened the 5/4 Slack channel but our people have kicked it into a higher gear: Since 2022, Lokals have shared thousands of photos and stories detailing their days off. There’s extreme action like surfing and mountain climbing; personal improvement like public speaking classes, jujitsu lessons, coffee-tasting seminars, recipe testing and upskilling. There’s also time spent doing absolutely nothing but reading, taking walks and relishing the company of family and friends. All happening while most of their peers at other companies are obligated to be at their desks.

From our employees we hear that three-day weekends unlock more travel opportunities and their horizon-expanding effects, more educational opportunities at conferences and workshops, more growth outside of work that ultimately contributes to a positive work environment. Since opening the 5/4 channel instances of sharing have increased exponentially. This increase aligns with one of our main internal goals for the last year, which is to expand knowledge sharing of all kinds. 5/4s helped us get there.

Interestingly, taking every other Friday means employees look forward to every other Friday on. Five-day weeks are less pressurized, offering more room for more expansive work, which is another reason why the hybrid 5/4 model works so well. 

“This Friday off is really special,” says VP of Engineering Ricardo Grizonic, “because it's out of phase with the rest of the world—everybody else is working, kids are at school—so you actually get that time for yourself, which makes it feel like much more than just eight hours. You can't measure it.”

Grizonic says his family and friends now know his work cadence and adapt their schedules accordingly. For them and anyone else interested in the benefits of a condensed work week, he recommends the book Friday is the New Saturday: How a Four-Day Work Week Can Save Capitalism by Portuguese economist Dr. Pedro Gomes. 

Can a 5/4 program work at other companies? If their own internal chemistry can handle it, then the benefits speak for themselves. Across the board, Loka’s executives recommend rethinking the workplace in some shape or form. Their impulse to implement radical changes stems from our general attitude about working in tech: Our hard-fought innovations are intended to impact and ultimately improve our lives. 

As Dr. Gomes says, “There is nothing biological, teleological or astrological about working five days. The working week is a social, political and economic construct. Why should it remain the same, when everything else in society has changed so profoundly?” Loka’s answer is putting our answer into action. 

For leaders looking to implement a version of 5/4 Friday, get in touch—we’d be happy to share our intel. For builders, it truly has to be experienced. Good thing we’re hiring.