How the 4-Day Work Week Actually Played Out at One Company

Gareth Nolan will tell you, with the blunt self-awareness of a man who has spent twenty years in management, that he was a sceptic. When his leadership team at Thornfield Creative — a sixty-two-person marketing agency in Minneapolis — proposed a trial of the four-day work week in early 2025, Nolan's initial response was a single word he later described as unprintable. "I thought it was a fantasy," he said. "We bill by the hour. Our clients expect availability five days a week. Cutting a day felt like cutting a limb."

Eighteen months later, Thornfield Creative has made the four-day week permanent, and Nolan, now a convert, spends a not-insignificant portion of his time explaining to other business owners how a policy he once dismissed as naive produced the best operational results in the company's history. Revenue per employee is up 11%. Client satisfaction scores are unchanged. Voluntary turnover has fallen to zero — a figure Nolan repeats with visible disbelief — from a pre-trial rate of 18%, which was roughly the industry average.

The trial began modestly. Thornfield gave employees Fridays off for a twelve-week period, with the understanding that the experiment would be reversed if productivity fell or clients complained. Nolan expected both. Neither happened. Weekly output, measured by deliverables completed and client milestones hit, remained within 2% of the five-day baseline. Billable hours per employee fell by 8%, but revenue per billable hour rose by 14%, more than compensating.

The productivity story, Nolan believes, is less about people working harder and more about eliminating the work that was never productive in the first place. "We killed the Monday status meeting. We killed the Friday wrap-up. We killed the one-hour meeting that should have been an email and the email chain that should have been a five-minute conversation," he said. "When you take away a day, you are forced to ask which hours actually matter. The answer, it turns out, is fewer than you think."

The most significant benefit, though, has been retention — what Nolan calls the "loyalty dividend." In an industry with chronic turnover, where the cost of replacing a mid-level employee runs to 150% of their annual salary, Thornfield has not lost a single voluntary departure since the four-day week was introduced. The savings on recruitment, onboarding, and lost institutional knowledge are difficult to quantify precisely but, by Nolan's estimate, exceed $400,000 annually — far more than the notional cost of the lost day.

Client concerns, which Nolan had anticipated as the biggest obstacle, proved manageable once addressed head-on. Thornfield informed every client of the change, guaranteed response times on Fridays through a rotating on-call system, and offered a trial period during which any client could request a return to the five-day schedule. None did. "We showed them the data," said account director Lena Hsu. "When you can demonstrate that turnaround times are the same and quality is the same, the conversation ends quickly. Clients care about results, not about whether your lights are on on Fridays."

Nolan is careful not to oversell. He acknowledges that a marketing agency — project-based, largely digital, staffed by knowledge workers — is an easier environment for the four-day week than a hospital, a factory floor, or a retail store. "I am not going to stand up and say this works for everyone," he said. "It works for us. It works for companies structured like us. Whether it works for a 24/7 operation with shift workers is a different question, and I do not pretend to know the answer."

The broader four-day-week movement has gained momentum rapidly. More than 200 companies in the United States have adopted some version of a compressed or reduced schedule, up from fewer than 40 three years ago. The results from the largest coordinated trial — involving 61 UK companies and roughly 2,900 employees — found that 92% of participating firms chose to continue the policy after the trial period, with revenue either stable or improved at 95% of them.

For Nolan, the experience has changed how he thinks not just about scheduling but about the nature of work itself. "We spent decades equating presence with productivity," he said. "The pandemic cracked that open, and the four-day week finished the job. The real question isn't whether people can do their work in four days. It's why we ever assumed they needed five. And once you start asking that question, you start asking a bigger one: what is work actually for? I don't have a complete answer. But I know it's not for sitting in a meeting on a Friday afternoon pretending to be busy."