Armor Games CEO John Cooney announced that the indie game publisher and portal has moved to a four-day-a-week system.
Last year, the company ran a one-month trial of four-day workweeks, after which the eight employees surveyed unanimously voted to extend the trial for another two months until the end of the year.
Cooney said on Twitter that after trying four-day workweeks for three months, each employee’s productivity was the same or better than in a five-day workweek. On top of that, 87.5% of employees (seven out of eight) voted for the shift to be permanent.
While Armor is happy with the result, Cooney said the system was not without problems.
“The flow of a 32-hour week is different, and acclamation took time across the entire team. Establishing that ‘this may/may not go okay,’ coupled with team-wide communication, check-ins, and sharing was critical to making it work.”
For example, some parts of the business don’t think the four-day week is as advantageous as others. Most of the rest of the world still works on Fridays and even weekends.
Several game developers of various sizes have used Four-day workweeks in recent years. Bugsnax studio Young Horses and Eidos’ Montreal and Sherbrooke studios switched to shortened work weeks last year. Microsoft Japan also tried it in 2019 and found that it increases productivity and reduces paper and electricity consumption.
