Why four-day workweeks at U.S. ad agencies aren’t being adopted—and how that can change

Four-day workweeks in the U.S. could be a far-off dream for most ad agency employees. While some advertising and marketing companies are increasingly adopting and finding success with four-day workweeks, mostly in the U.K., the industry has yet to see such a program implemented formally, or on a large scale, by any major holding company agencies or independent networks. That’s primarily because of the nature of agency work; they have to be always on for their clients, who are generally working at least five days a week. Several industry executives including agency CEOs and consultants said it would be pretty much impossible to offer a four-day week to everyone at an agency because on any given day, even weekends, at least one person is working, whether they’re shooting a commercial or responding to an email. Initial tests of flexible schedules have revealed some very obvious issues. When The Martin Agency’s Cultural Impacts Lab team tested a four-day work week at the end of 2020, it seemed to create more work for senior members of the team, who were working harder on Fridays when they were on the clock to make up for the people who were off, according to one person who worked on the team at the time. Jaclyn Ruelle, The Martin Agency’s former senior VP and managing director of cultural impact and communications, who is now VP and head of brand for Papa Johns, divided employees into two teams that each had every other Friday off, the person said. But the program eventually fizzled out when Ruelle left the agency. Ruelle declined to comment. Upfronts and NewFronts blog Tracking the latest TV and digital ad pitches Read more here Interpublic Group of Cos.’ The Martin Agency schedules one three-day weekend (i.e. four-day workweek) each month for employees. The agency also lets individual teams set their schedules, so they can decide to do four-day workweeks if they can make it work. “We are constantly in a test-and-learn mode when it comes to tweaking our policies to serve our people,” said agency Chief Strategy Officer Elizabeth Paul. “On one hand, you want to have the best, most generous policies so that you can recruit and retain the best people. At the same time, if one person was gone for six months, somebody else would have to pick up that work. So, I feel like we're constantly checking in, evolving, trying things and seeing if they work.” Paul said the reason the agency frames its current policy around three-day weekends instead of four-day work weeks is simply that “it focuses on the staff time off, versus the work time.” Paul said The Martin Agency experimented earlier in the pandemic with giving all employees bigger chunks of time off around holidays, such as a full week for the Fourth of July, but found those more sporadic, longer breaks weren’t helping people feel less tired. Within about a year, the agency discontinued most of them in favor of three-day weekends. WPP’s Grey New York also offered a shorter workweek option in 2018—allowing employees to work four-day weeks for a slight pay cut—but it was discontinued due to lack of interest. Grey New York declined to comment. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Why four-day work weeks likely won’t take off with agencies The main reason why more agencies haven’t implemented four-day workweeks is that they have to be at their clients’ beck and call. And maintaining good relationships with clients is even more critical as marketers cut budgets amid the shaky economy. “The tension the whole industry wrestles with is that, if we’re experimenting with a four-day workweek, that often means we're taking a day when clients aren’t,” Paul said. “My guess is that similar experimentation [to Martin’s] is happening across a lot of big agencies. What's hard is, as soon as an agency is like ‘we have four day-workweeks,’ you're going to immediately bump up against the person who's having to work over a weekend and it's like, ‘no, you don't.’ So, that's probably why you haven't seen more declarative policies.” Paul said ad agencies might never see the formal adoption of a four-day workweek because of that tension. “Client demands are often 24/7/365,” said Greg Paull, principal and founder of consultancy R3, “so it seems hard to manage a four-day workweek when the people paying you are working five days.” Holding company Dentsu said it isn’t considering a four-day workweek because of that reason. “As a client-focused business we need to be available to collaborate with our partners on the days they are working, so a set four days isn’t realistic,” Jamie Barash, chief people officer, Dentsu Media Americas, and Carolyn Meacher, chief people officer, Dentsu Canada, said in a joint statement. Barash and Meacher are leading Dentsu’s “future of work” initiatives, which include “Me Time”—the holding company’s policy that encourages employees to block off 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. every Friday to “catch up on emails, take training classes, work uninterrupted on deliverables, or, when workload permits, use our flexible time off to start the weekend early,” they said. Dentsu also schedules no internal meetings during that time. Successful examples of the four-day workweek Still, U.K.-based agencies and marketing companies have found some success in transitioning to a four-day workweek. The pilot program in the U.K.—which ran from June to December 2022 with 61 participating companies and 2,900 workers—saw 56 of the firms extend their four-day week trials and 18 make it permanent. Of companies in the pilot program, the largest category were marketing and advertising companies (18%), while professional services firms (16%) were second. An increasing number of advertising companies found that employees are more productive when they have an extra eight hours a week of personal time and, in turn, deliver better results for clients. Awin Group, a global affiliate marketing platform with 25,000 clients, 1,300 employees and 17 offices worldwide, implemented a permanent four-day workweek in February after finding success with a pilot program it first tested including in the U.S. in 2020. Employees continue to receive full salaries. More: Ad salaries come down from peak Great Resignation levels During the pilot program, Awin’s gross profit grew 13% on average annually from 2019 to 2022; clients’ net promoter scores improved by 20.7 points; employee turnover decreased 33%; and workers took 21% fewer sick and leave days, according to the company. Awin CEO Adam Ross said clients have been receptive and it’s been successful because the company maintains a five-day-a-week business. He said Awin generated approximately $16 billion in revenue in the last financial year for clients in its biggest markets, including the U.S., U.K., Germany and France. Employees can choose the day they want off each week, so long as they coordinate it with their teams so someone is always on the clock. “With us being a business that has to support a large volume of customers, and most customers are not operating on a four-day week, one of the prerequisites that we said to everybody was, ‘we have to maintain a five-day service,” Ross said. The company also has “peak weeks,” including around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the busiest times of the year for the firm, during which they ask employees to work five days a week. Project Worldwide-owned creative communications agency Praytell transitioned to a four-day workweek after an initial trial period in October 2021. The 180-person agency with offices in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, London and Sydney and Austin, Texas, gives employees Fridays off, with exceptions. “By the nature of what we do, it’s never going to be a completely fair system for all employees, all the time,” Praytell Founder and CEO Andy Pray said. “We’ll have client launches or events that make it impossible for all staff to enjoy the day off every single Friday. We're trying to empower folks to, one, feel OK to ask for help if it's a true emergency, and two, feel OK in pushing back on asks that day, professionally and kindly, if they're not urgent.” How to make it work It takes a good deal of preparation to make a four-day workweek work, and there are always speed bumps along the way. Ross said Awin put together an employee task force to figure out how to implement the four-day workweek. The company also regularly surveyed its staff and adjusted every six months, starting from the initial phase of the program in 2020 through February, when the company made it permanent. One of the early hiccups Awin encountered was people didn’t know the schedules of members of other teams, so requests between various teams would sometimes get lost. To address that issue, Awin started using the project management tool Asana for streamlining certain tasks, managing schedules, creating rotas and reassigning tasks to other colleagues on the clock when necessary. Working with parent company Project Worldwide and clients, Pray said, it took two tries to get Praytell’s four-day workweek strategy right. “We over-engineered it at first,” Pray said. “We had 70% of the agency working Monday through Thursday and 30% working Tuesday through Friday, as we were fearful of Friday being off. But that created problems from the jump, as it sandwiched all meetings into Tuesday through Thursday. It was clear it was off. So then we just ripped the Band-Aid, with the whole agency on a hopeful Monday through Thursday plan.” Pray said the agency rotates employees to be on call for Fridays to answer urgent client requests. Pray said the agency checked in with employees and clients at the end of the first quarter last year and found 100% of clients and 96% of employees were happy.More industry news: Ad business cut 1,000 jobs in February Four-day workweeks also require employers to trust their employees, said Matt Seiler, managing director of industry talent firm Raines International, and ex-CEO of IPG Mediabrands. “I think old people don’t trust young people,” Seiler said. “And they want them where they can see them. But I also think that creatives in particular have kept all sorts of odd hours. Nobody should care where and when people are working so long as the work is best in class.” Paul said that The Martin Agency’s program is built on trust and that it expects employees to manage their workloads appropriately to prepare for a three-day weekend and be available for their clients as needed. She added that their leaders also take the initiative to let clients know ahead of time when the agency is closed and asks them to try to be respectful of that by contacting their teams only with urgent matters—and, for the most part, they have been supportive. “Getting creative talent motivated and performing for 40 hours a week has always been a challenge at the best of times,” Paull said. “Good ideas don’t care where they come from, and agency creatives are just as likely to have a big idea at 7 a.m. in the shower as they are at 5 p.m. in the office.” “It’s based on having a relationship with your employees,” Awin’s Ross said. “That is underpinned by trust. And if you don't have that—if you're, you know, you're more of a command and control type culture, top-down type culture—I don't think it's going to work for you." A competitive advantage Companies that have transitioned to a four-day workweek report having a competitive advantage in recruiting and retaining talent, as well as in attracting new business. “One client told us they hired Praytell because they admired our progressive way of thinking and taking a chance on what they feel will be the future of work,” Pray said. Pray said it’s been a game-changer for employees, too. “It’s been such a delight to see the pictures from our Praytell parents spending an extra day with their kids or others enjoying a day in a quaint bookstore with a cup of coffee or heading to the doctor for that appointment you can never seem to fit in during the week,” Pray said. “I'd estimate 30% or more of our people log in on a Friday, get work done. But I think the reason folks feel so strongly is because it's their day; it's their choice to get things done on their terms.” Ross said Awin’s short week also helped it retain staff through The Great Resignation; the company reported 85% of staff surveyed said that having that flexible week plays a significant role in their decision to stay with the company. Seiler believes the success in the U.K. might force U.S. agencies to eventually adapt, predicting they could adopt four-day work weeks as early as next year. Long a proponent of pay-for-performance compensation models, Seiler said a transition to a four-day work week might also finally push agencies to come up with a modern pay model that more closely aligns agencies’ goals with those of clients, versus continuing to rely on fees and billable hours. “Overtime will become a big problem and add to overhead if agencies don’t get smarter about compensation models, so maybe this is finally the moment for [pay-for-performance],” he said. See all of Ad Age's 2023 Agency A-List winners here

Why four-day workweeks at U.S. ad agencies aren’t being adopted—and how that can change

Featured Stories