The pandemic has served as a driving force in
Currently, just 15% of employers offer a four-day schedule, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. But as an increasing number of companies explore the idea, employers are looking to HR technology to help make a shorter, more productive week a reality.
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“Unhappy and overworked employees are less productive overall,” says Rob Smith, founder and CEO of Team Huddle, a tech company that uses artificial intelligence to improve the way companies hold meetings. “If employees aren’t really focused, if they're stressed out, those five days are going to be less productive than four healthy and balanced days. Three days of time off is going to become the norm in the next five to 10 years, as automation grows and AI becomes [more prevalent].”
Smith and the crew over at Team Huddle know that ineffective meetings are a universal business problem. In fact, 71% of senior managers surveyed by Harvard Business Review say meetings are unproductive and 65% say meetings keep them from completing their own work.
To combat this issue Team Huddle developed a way for employers to utilize AI automation to make meetings less stressful, time consuming and more productive.
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“As I was moving with my core team from my last startup, we created a consulting firm and we noticed two things,” says Smith, who previously helped cofound and run such companies as Pecabu, an artificial intelligence and big-data analytics startup based in San Francisco, and RS Consults, which helps startups deal with challenges related to their strategy, technology and marketing. “The first was that we hate consulting, but what we also noticed, oh my God, there are a lot of meetings, and oh my God, most of them are not very productive.”
Six weeks ago, Team Huddle debuted ScheduleIQ, an
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“Instead of just finding everyone’s next availability — because that's not necessarily the best time to have a meeting — our software takes a minute to get to know you, the industry you work for, and what your hours typically look like,” Smith says. “We analyze your calendar’s history and we assign you a schedule score, which is an indication of how well your work-life balance is and how optimized your schedule is.”
The idea is to boost productivity by helping employees find the best mutual time for a meeting, without sacrificing personal time or creating additional conflicts. In turn, meetings will be more effective and shorter, giving employees more time to focus on their individual tasks at hand — eliminating the need for five working days.
“The four-day workweek will come in three iterations,” Smith says. “Step one is, we’ve identified a problem: we’re working too much and productivity has declined. The second step is assigning a day where we still work, but we work quietly, like no meeting Fridays. The third step is realizing certain jobs will move to a four-day workweek first, followed by others, like those in the C-suite.”
