How Procurify took on the four-day workweek

While multiple organisations have taken the opportunity to test pilot the four-day workweek, many have cited the move as a way to experiment with the format, to see if the project befits the processes of their own company.  

For Procurify, a spend management software firm, they applied the four-day work week as a way to cost-cut during the pandemic, reducing overhead costs in 2020 and preventing layoffs, said Aman Mann, CEO and Co-Founder of Procurify. Employees would, in effect, get their salaries reduced by 20% but would also be working 32 hours, or four days a week, reported CNBC Make It.

The goal was to help staff through a tough economic time and reduce burnout, said Mann, for it might have taken an unexpected amount of time. After three months, when Procurify’s budgets returned to normal and salaries were restored, the four-day workweek became a permanent addition to the schedule. “I started to see a big shift in what was happening to us during those four days,” said Mann. “The concentration, the focus, the energy, the mindset of everyone just shifted. It was such an amazing experience to see that, and I decided, well, we’re not going back. We’re going to stay four days and we’re going to figure this out.”

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The biggest challenge of working a four-day week, said Mann, is continuously reducing priorities to the “big needle movers.” Additionally, his team takes a “hyper-focused perspective” to work faster and with less effort, burden and “cognitive overload that can be created in an organisation.”

“We’re just figuring it out to make sure we continuously improve the prioritisation, the focus, the tools, the processes we have to allow us to be agile yet focused in our given week,” Mann said. “There’s no playbook for this.”