Don’t look now, but the 4-day/32-hour work week is starting to get some traction, and it could be the beginning of something bigger: A return to an employee-first company culture.
I mean, it’s crazy, right? Wishful thinking. But ask yourself, isn’t it time? Wouldn’t savvy and clever company leaders at least want to roll the dice by putting their employees first, and maybe see if the whole morale-to-productivity curve isn’t just a myth?
Now, I don’t think a 4-day work week becomes a standard any time soon. If anything, as the AI market share race continues to heat up, most of the larger public and unicorn companies (Amazon, Google, OpenAI) are allegedly leaning hard back into the “grind culture” days, where the 60-hour-plus work week isn’t necessarily mandated, but nevertheless is the anecdotal standard.
However, there are indeed a few companies sprinting the other way. The 4-day/32-hour work week has been an established part of the quirky 37Signals/Basecamp method of operation for some time, but over the years has also become a standard at companies like Kickstarter and Digible, among several others.
Is it a gimmick? Or is there really an alternative to RTO, quantified work, Jira checklists, bossware, and repeated firings?
Yeah. There is. I’ve been to the promised land. Here’s what it looks like and how you get there.
The 32-hour work week as a company culture initiative
You, like me, have probably at one point or another dismissed the 4-day/32-hour work week as a European notion, maybe the invention of the French. I don’t even remember why we think this way, but I do know that generally, American companies have always operated on a work-hard-play-hard basis.
And honestly, I don’t see that as a bad thing. I’ve always been the type of person who easily puts in 50-and-60-hour-plus weeks. But as I’ve matured along my long tech career, I’ve come to realize two things:
- It’s me. I just can’t sit still. One of the reasons I write is because I have this stupid need to fill every moment from 6:00 am to 11:00 pm with something productive, and if I can’t do my job, I’ll write about my job.
- Not everyone is me.
That second one, that’s where company culture should be rooted, by the way.
Anyway, over the last several months, I’ve seen more and more companies put the 4-day/32-hour work week up front. Digible, for example, a Denver/remote marketing/tech firm, discusses it in both their job posts and their initial interviews. They don’t just brag about it, they talk about the link to an increase in employee satisfaction and a direct bump in productivity.
CX Pilots, a customer experience consultancy I’ve worked with and remain friends with, explained it this way back in 2022:
“‘We were terrified of hypocrisy,’ [CEO Steven] Keith said, explaining the impetus for the switch. Work-life balance is a core principle CX Pilots preaches to other companies.”
“Most employees began taking off Fridays. Some Mondays. Their pay remained unchanged. Based on metrics collected by their company’s internal productivity-tracking system, CX Pilots staff say their individual performance has increased since their hours fell.”
“‘When you have a three-day weekend, you feel much more fulfilled on the personal front, which translates into productivity,’ said Joe Bell, the company’s chief marketing officer. ‘It creates a mutual respect and a drive.’”
On a side note, Joe just had his first kid, and is probably using that extra day for a little sleep.
But as you might note, these aren’t reactive policies created in 2025 to counter the hellscape that work has become over the last couple years. Instead, it’s companies who already focus on culture because a better culture leads to better performance, and now they’re putting that focus out front.
And it’s working for them.
But culture isn’t born of just a couple of policies and a smile. It’s got to be lived, not mandated. And this is where most company leadership screws it up.
Creating a Culture Team. Or Not.
In 2026, I’ve never seen workplaces so divisive and borderline toxic. I won’t get into the reasons why. You know the reasons why. But I will say that a focus on company culture seems like an organic, inexpensive, and results-based way to mitigate most of that divisiveness.
That said, company culture is more than just mission statements and “fun hat” Fridays. It’s got to be organic and lived.
When I ran my own consulting firm over a decade ago, I would take my small team of local employees out to lunch once a month, and we’d all connect and talk. It wasn’t a “benefit” or a “program,” it was lived culture. For remote employees, we’d do a one-on-one and I’d send them a gift card for a different restaurant each month.
“Have lunch with someone better than me.”
At Automated Insights, we quickly outgrew that kind of organic vibe, so we formed a culture team. Leadership, all of us, met monthly to discuss and create policies and programs that not only highlighted employee appreciation, but also cultivated that employee value. One of those policies was “no meeting Mondays,” which is exactly what it sounds like, it didn’t work, and got rolled back. One of the programs was the “guide program,” which let employees pick a “mentor” every quarter to learn about what they did and who they were. That stuck.
Sounds easy, right?
In fact, it’s even easier. Scot Wingo, the CEO of Spiffy, my next stop, lived our company culture so well that it trickled down and permeated its way through 700 employees. It wasn’t programs and policies this time, it was clear leadership and communication. But be warned. Very few leaders have that. Many don’t.
All I’m saying is company culture isn’t rocket science but it’s not just handing out free subscriptions to the Calm app either.
Culture Is Hard to Hang On To
The results of these kinds of culture initiatives are always very clear and usually directly measurable, if you choose to measure them, and you should. For example, Automated Insights went through a two-year period where we grew from 10 to 50 employees and didn’t lose one. No firings. No quittings.
Now here’s a warning. It’s not always so easy. Culture can be incredibly hard to maintain.
As a company grows, especially beyond 50 employees, it becomes harder to both define the culture and to measure the impact. This is why a lot of companies lose the handle on it.
But more often, the executives let it go. There comes a moment in time when it gets put on autopilot – usually the result of challenges in the market or with the business model, or even the result of hypergrowth pulling leadership in a dozen different priority-one directions.
Faith and perseverance are mandatory. And on a side note, that can be hard to explain to a board.
But don’t take your eye off it or it’ll atrophy.
Why It’s a Huge Positive Sign
I’m not saying culture is back, yet, but there’s a definite return of focus on it at companies who have seen the clear distinction between themselves and the “World A” players hell bent for AI dominance.
For those differentiated companies, and I include myself in this misfit alliance, everything that happened over the last few years, from AI hype to corporate short-term hyperfocus to the ravages of inflation – it took a lot of our best tools away.
We’ve lost faith in Innovation, now that it’s just another output of an LLM. Humanity and human ingenuity got underprioritized. Dishonesty was classified as a “hallucination.” Meanwhile, the solution, we were told, was to just go be a barista or a bartender instead. Dreams, passions, talent, drive – that became sooo 2019.
When we start focusing on people as the driver of results, we escape the limitations set by processors and checklists and OKRs. AI is the cart, people are the horse, tech is what we use to drive. We forgot that.
When we start focusing on culture as a mission, not an afterthought, we all have a better chance for success. Maybe, just maybe, the road to recovery starts with a 4-day/32-hour work week.
I’ll talk more about work and culture in future posts, along with other tech industry problems and solutions. Now would be a good time to join my email list and get short emails when I’m published.
Source – https://www.inc.com/joe-procopio/the-return-of-employee-first-company-culture/91288999