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GVPOD is the podcast of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade. President and CEO Bridgitte Anderson talks to leaders in the business community about the challenges and opportunities they experience, as well as issues impacting our region.
Bridgitte Anderson (00:03):
Welcome back to another episode of GVPOD Greater Vancouver's Premier Business podcast where we delve into the challenges and opportunities facing our region. I'm your host, Bridgitte Anderson, president and CEO of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade. In our ongoing series on the future of Work and Mental Health in the Workplace, we've covered some groundbreaking ideas. Notably, we hosted Dr. Alex Pang program director of Four Day Workweek Global, who shared his insights on the benefits of working Less to Achieve More, along with strategies for implementing such initiatives. That episode provided a fantastic theoretical foundation, and I highly recommend giving you a listen if you haven't already yet. We all know that theory is just one side of the coin. It is the practical application that truly tests and ideas viability, and there's nothing quite like a local example to see how big ideas can be implemented in the local context.
(01:00):
So with us today is Rory McGuire, president of Blackbird Interactive, a creative fueled, future driven independent studio behind such games as hard space, ship breaker, and a highly anticipated home world three and Minecraft legends. Blackbird made a bold move by transitioning to a four day workweek a couple of years ago, maintaining the same salaries, daily working hours, and a hybrid work environment. And according to their vice president, the shift has been a wild success. Their story garnering attention from outlets like the Vancouver Sun to the Washington Post. And so today we get to hear about it firsthand from Rory. Welcome to the show.
Rory McGuire (01:40):
Thank you for having me. Yeah, very excited to talk about this. Excuse me. This has been something that's been really near and dear to our hearts over the last couple of years and something I'm excited we've got to paved the way for other game companies and just other companies in Vancouver really.
Bridgitte Anderson (01:55):
Well, let's talk first about your motivation. What was behind the move to go to a four day workweek? I already think of these creative environments having worked in one years ago myself. It's kind of loosey goosey anyway. You've got pool tables and basketball hoops and beanbag chairs and all that kind of stuff, and it seems like it's a pretty good work environment, one that drives people pretty hard because those deadlines are kind of the fuel of all of it. So what really motivated you to go to a four day workweek?
Rory McGuire (02:23):
Yeah, it was driven by, it was really driven by wanting, sincerely, us wanting to provide for our employees just the best place to work. One of the goals we set out was to be one of the best game studios in Vancouver or Canada, and we actually engaged with our staff and asked them What are benefits that we could offer you to align us with that, to align us with that goal? Specifically with, we wanted to help with retention, we wanted to help with recruiting. We wanted to track the best staff, and so it was actually born out of an employee suggestion. We hit up our senior staff and asked them, what are the things that would motivate you? And we got things like, I'd love a dog walker that helped me with walking my dog or somebody to do laundry if I could bring laundry in.
(03:06):
And then one person mentioned the four day workweek in the meeting, and immediately all other suggestions stopped. Everyone was excited about the four Day Workweek. And then something happened in that meeting that I've actually not seen in about 20 years of working in an office is we left that meeting and I probably got five or six messages from people that were not in that meeting messaging me about the four day workweek and basically saying, if we did that, that would be a game changer for me. It would change my life. It would help us so much. So it was like literally what happened was the people left that meeting, talked to other people, and it went viral at the studio, the fact that we were even talking about it. So to me that was a real big indicator that it would move the needle and it would really provide a lot for our staff.
Bridgitte Anderson (03:46):
And I can see that from the employee perspective because, well, honestly, who doesn't want to work less days? People's lives are very busy and people with families and pets and all kinds of other responsibilities, and you want to have that work-life balance. Talk to us about the implementation, because I can't imagine that the following Monday you automatically went, okay, we're on a four day work week, everyone.
Rory McGuire (04:08):
Yeah, I mean, I could talk about this for hours. There was a lot of stuff that goes into a transition like this. I'll kind of hit some of the big stuff. One was we wanted to do a test, so we didn't want to just flip the switch and have 300 plus employees swap over to it and then just have a train wreck on our hands of problems. So what we did was we chose two projects, one that was fairly early in its development cycle, and then one that was finally one that was quite late. They were both independent projects, so they were owned by us, and so if we messed it up, we were the only people responsible. We didn't have to get buy-in for partners on it. And so we did a six month trial to just shake out how it went and the results were just stellar.
(04:47):
Basically every metric that we could measure, whether it was employee satisfaction or the amount of lines of code going in or the amount of bugs fixed, all of that was in every single metric we measured. It was at least the same as a five day workweek, if not higher. And in the case of things like employee satisfaction and things, obviously that was dramatically higher. So yeah, that was the first thing was trying it out. The second thing was rolling it out. Once we knew that it worked, we had a whole bunch of things that we had to do. So one was we're an independent game company, so we worked with partners like Microsoft. We worked with partners like Gearbox, we worked on homeworld, we worked with, which is a whole deluge of various partners. We had to talk to each one of them. So we had five independent partners that we had to convince that by doing 20% less work, they would still get a hundred percent of the product that we promised them. So that was a little challenging. Sorry, go ahead.
Bridgitte Anderson (05:41):
No, I was just, I'm thinking through how this works. So did you then transition to four days at 12 hours a day, or was it still the 8, 9, 10 hours? And I know it's different in a creative environment because you're really working on a project deadline more than the hours that you're putting in.
Rory McGuire (05:56):
So this was also one of the things we had to resolve was do we want to do 10 days, four days a week or do we want to do eight hour, sorry, 10 hours four days a week, or do we want to do eight hours across four days a week? So that was something that we discussed, and ultimately where we netted out was we want our staff working 32 hours a week, but we also have commitments to our partners, to our projects, to our milestones. So our statement to the staff was, you have to hit the same deliverables that you had before. The goal is do it in 32 hours. If you can get there, then work 32 hours. That's all we asked from you. So some staff, we found the average hours worked after about a year was around 35 hours, and that's across four days. But of course when a project is final, people work longer hours. So yeah, we really put it on our staff that because we're an independent company, they needed to earn it. Right. There was no financial backers or anything like that.
Bridgitte Anderson (06:51):
One of the concerns that I've heard from business leaders is around productivity. This country does have a significant problem when it comes to productivity, and there are concerns that if there was a move wholesale to a four day work week, we would continue to see that decline in productivity. What has been your experience in looking at your own staff as you made this mood?
Rory McGuire (07:15):
So our measurements that we've taken of it and we've taken real hard measurements and we also did them blind. We didn't tell the staff that we were taking these measurements so they couldn't fake them, essentially was that every metric that we've looked at, we were the same or higher in productivity scores within plus or minus 3%. So variable sample size. So that's the raw data of it. What I think is happening in it, because immediately when you say that, people are like, well, how does that work? That's bs when you work in software or games or media or in most office environments, we're not on an assembly line. We're not making do hickeys, right? So if we were the downtime from the assembly line being down would be minus 20%, but we're not. We're creative people. We're technical people. And what I think happens is it's very similar to what we see if you do a six day workweek, which for 30 plus years as business leaders, we've known that when you swap to a six day workweek, when you crunch, as we call it in games, when you push your people to work on weekends, you see about a 20% uptick for about two weeks.
(08:28):
That's what the math of it's. And then after that period, you see a minus 20% downtick from your baseline indefinitely basically as long as you do it. And the theory behind that is that people burn out. The people aren't fit to work six days a week on complicated technical or creative problems. Long story long. What I think is happening with a four day workweek is it's the opposite effect, which is that people come into work more rested, they have more time to spend with their family, they have more time to solve life problems, they have more time to do laundry and be thinking about things that aren't work so that they can actually think about work. Many technical and creative people will tell you their greatest breakthroughs happen when they're not thinking about work, when they're not thinking about the problem. So I think what's happening is people come back hungry, they come back excited. Think about when you come back on a Monday after a three day work week or on a Tuesday after a three day weekend, that fire that you have in your belly, we think people have that every week and they really push themselves in the time that we have to keep that longer weekend as well because they know as an independent company, we have to earn it.
Bridgitte Anderson (09:33):
Have you had to evolve or change your strategy as you went from that pilot phase to the implementation phase to where you are now?
Rory McGuire (09:41):
A little bit. I mean, we've had some contracts come through that were the idea of us doing a four day work week was challenging. Namely it was support and uptime specialization, but we've managed to work through it. We actually haven't had to compromise the four day work week aside from the occasional push for a milestone or a game funneling, which is fairly normal for the industry and one that we've set out understanding we would do, but I would say we actually haven't had to compromise there. That said, we're still the odd company out in that if we're bidding on a contract or something, people are like, don't you run a four day work week? And we'll say yes, and they'll go Interesting
Bridgitte Anderson (10:21):
And interesting is one of those loaded words, is that positive or is it negative?
Rory McGuire (10:25):
Totally. So yeah, we have to sell ourselves in ways beyond that, though honestly, most companies when we talk to 'em and we say that they actually want to hear the details of it and want us to pitch their management and things like
Bridgitte Anderson (10:38):
That. Yeah, I bet. But how do you ensure to these companies that you are going to meet the deadlines that you've set out and agreed to given that everybody's working one day less than the competitor?
Rory McGuire (10:49):
So where we are now, we've shipped multiple games, multiple high quality, high fidelity games using a four day work week. So it's a little easier for us to make the argument. I will say what we did when we started out was again, we had partners ranging from the $3 trillion sized Microsoft all the way down to a partner in Korea named Smile Gate, a partner in France named Focus. So disparate countries, all the different work ethics as well, right? The American work ethic versus Korean or French. So it was a challenging conversation for us, and what we did was first we floated the idea. Our partners in France were immediately like, that is great. We're so happy for your workforce. Please.
Bridgitte Anderson (11:34):
Yeah, the French have got a good work ethic, don't they? On the
Rory McGuire (11:37):
Balance? Yeah, they've got a much more relaxed work ethic. But across the board, many of our partners had questions or they had concerns, and rightfully so, we're working on contracts for projects that are north of $30 million. So no publicly traded company wants that $30 million investment to be at risk, especially if you're halfway through it. So I think the key thing that we did was we made a promise that we would measure all of our metrics. So we took all of our data and we made a promise that if we were not tracking to our data, that we would add staff to that project to compensate for the lack of productivity, but maintain the four day workweek. So for example, we basically said, if we have a hundred people on your project and we miss our productivity by 20% because we implemented this, which is a worst case scenario, we'll add 20 people to the project and we'll pay for it out of pocket. But to get there, we had to show the data and we had to monitor the data and we had to miss our milestones and things like that. And to the last, every partner basically said, okay, if you're willing to back up your play to that way, you'll pay for it out pocket. If you screw this up, then we'll back you guys up.
Bridgitte Anderson (12:49):
So when it comes to data, what kinds of things do you measure that are really meaningful?
Rory McGuire (12:54):
So I think if you look at any one piece of data, you can debunk it. You can say, well, okay, the amount of Jira or bug fixing software, the amount of Jira bugs closed. Well, you could gain that this way, or you're getting a false read on that data. So what we tried to do was just pull as much data as we could. Basically we brainstormed different metrics that we could measure that as long as we were seeing a general similar trend in the data, we felt like it didn't, you could debunk one thing like Jira commits and it wouldn't matter. We had so many other data points that indicated it. So we track things like Jira tasks created and closed, which is kind of a key metric that you use in games development, basically velocity, essentially. We also track things like the amount of commits that happen.
(13:41):
So that's just kind of a raw blanket, like the amount of times a developer committed something to the software. Now that might be a two week body of work, or it might be a two minute bug fix, but it's a metric. We also tracked codes of lines of code. We tracked new assets created. We basically just tracked as many different data points as we could. And what we generally saw was it was about the same and in some cases a little bit higher. Again, plus or minus about 3%. And then the other metrics we tracked were we did an immense amount of employee data mining. And by that I mean we pulled them again and again and again while we were implementing this process. So for example, we did two cohorts. We did it by project. We actually did it by project, and we did it by discipline.
(14:30):
So artist, designers, programmers. And we asked them things like about their work-life balance, about their happiness outside of the workplace, basically about 20 to 30 different questions about it. But we also separated into development team, which is typically more staff or junior level folks and management. So people that were managing these projects. What we saw happen was at the very beginning of us doing this, everyone generally was positive about it, but management was like, I'm not sure we're going to make our commitments. I'm not sure we're going to pull this off. And as each team would roll over to it, we could see the data change with management where when we did our first test, we had 50 people that we were getting this data from. And at first it was about 70% of the people thought that a four day work week could work. But by the end of our first tranche of data six months, we actually had a hundred percent of the employees, including all the managers, felt that they could achieve it.
Bridgitte Anderson (15:27):
So I guess from the manager's perspective, they were looking back and it was building confidence and trust along the way that data was backing up, that they were moving in the right direction. They're meeting commitments. And so seeing that things are moving along really well.
Rory McGuire (15:40):
Yeah, exactly. They were feeling like they weren't going to be left holding the bag for a team that missed their targets,
Bridgitte Anderson (15:45):
And that's never a good feeling. Rory, when you look back over the last couple of years, would you have done anything differently? Trying to think of some of those lessons learned for any of those organizations who are listening now and thinking about implementing a four day workweek?
Rory McGuire (16:01):
I think one of the big things is the amount of logistics that actually went into it. For us, there was a bunch of things we didn't realize. So for example, in British Columbia where we're based out of, we had to update all of our employee contracts, which meant because implicit in most employee contracts is that you work a 40 hour work week. So we actually had to redo all of our employee contracts, deploy all of them, have 300 people sign them, and turn all of that around within, because we didn't realize it until we were down to the wire about to flip the switch. And our legal counsel was like, this is a giant problem. You're in violation of your catch with your employees. So I think the thing to do would be, I think most people think it's going to be a tipping point culturally, which it is, you need to convince your management that this can work.
(16:56):
But I also think that there's more work there than what people realize to actually implement it and roll it out. And the other thing I think to do is put it to the employees to earn it. I think it's a little tougher if you're a big financially backed, publicly traded company if your market cap is in the hundreds of millions or billions. But what we did was we essentially told our employees that you have to keep your targets, you have to hit your deliverables, or we have to pull it away because if we lose these contracts as a business, we'll be done. So I think if you put it to the employees that way, then everyone's earning it and everyone's trying to optimize their time. So what we saw was as managers, it didn't go top down that people would try to clean up everyone's meetings. Its employees would go bottom up and say, Hey, I'm trying to do a 32 hour work week. I don't want to be in this meeting, or this meeting is just a big information meeting. I'll watch the, or I'm going to optimize my time in this way or that way, or let's see if we can combine these two meetings. So we actually had every employee in the building trying to make it work as opposed to management trying to hit certain targets.
Bridgitte Anderson (18:02):
And it sounds like you're empowering your employees, which goes a long way for not just attracting new talent, but also retaining the talent that you have.
Rory McGuire (18:11):
Yeah, that's right. And that's really been one of our cultural ethos at the studios. We try to push as much power in the organization down to the staff.
Bridgitte Anderson (18:20):
How important was that phased approach that you took?
Rory McGuire (18:23):
I think it's really important. I would not roll it out across your studio because I think like any management tool, whether it's agile development practices or how you handle your vacation time, whether it's unlimited vacation or fixed vacation, I think there's no silver bullets for every company. And culturally, your company might be wired in a way that you run into some issues that you need to fix with this, or your business might be wired in a way where you have external partners that are counting on a certain amount of uptime from you, and you run into problems that we didn't run into. So I think the phased approach is important. I do think it'll work for many software developers, games and media companies, but you'll run into issues that are native to your organization.
Bridgitte Anderson (19:08):
Given your experience and perspective, I mean you working in the creative field and creative and tech, probably a lot of similarities, but do you think this four Day workweek would be applicable across multiple industries and sectors?
Rory McGuire (19:21):
I definitely think software and technology companies for sure. I think games companies, media companies for sure. I think many office-based environments for sure. I think if you are a company that is reliant on uptime, if you're a call center, obviously that's going to be challenging. If you're certainly a factory. I don't know if there's many folks running a factory here, but if you're providing a service that requires time up, I think it's a bit more challenging. We're fortunately in an industry where if you get your work done in 32 hours, it doesn't matter if you're here on Friday.
Bridgitte Anderson (19:57):
And what about any words of caution to those business leaders thinking about implementing this?
Rory McGuire (20:04):
We were always very careful about not getting people too excited about it. So when we rolled it out, we very much so were like, this is a trial. We may or may not do this. And I will say the meeting, we rolled it out and people were losing their minds. Stuff was literally being thrown up in the air. People were just crazy about the idea immediately,
Bridgitte Anderson (20:25):
I guess.
Rory McGuire (20:26):
Yeah. So we tried to set expectations all along the way until we finally flip the switch. And then even then we always said, Hey, we may run into a business scenario where we have to swap back, and that's that. And we've always kind of set the expectation that we have to earn it. So I think that's the biggest words of warning. I do think it is still avantgarde enough that you might run into some problems or have a team that needs to be working five days a week or whatever it might be.
Bridgitte Anderson (20:55):
Yeah, it's clear. I mean, you're a couple of years in now, it's clear, as it said in the newspaper article, it's been a wild success, but some really great lessons here, I think around phased approach and communication and data data. But it does seem maybe a last thought from you where if you're to take your crystal ball out and take a look at where things are heading over the last few years, we've come out of the pandemic people. Were working at home for the first time ever. Now we're in this hybrid work environment. Where do you see this idea of a reduced workweek going?
Rory McGuire (21:30):
So I think it's interesting in that when we rolled out the four day workweek, I think it was more of an employee's market. The market we're in now I think is a bit more of an employer's market with just what we've seen with global macroeconomics and trends with inflation, et cetera, et cetera. We'll dive into all the details of it, but I do think the idea of doing this for your employees is an unfair advantage that a company can have, regardless of whether it's an employee's market or an employer's market, it lets you recruit the best talent. It lets you retain your top talent. And I think what we will see happen as time goes on is enough companies will start to do it, or enough organizations will start to do it, that it kind of just becomes normal. And we'll just see a nice soft trend towards this over time, because I believe, especially in our industry in a few neighboring industries, it is not as dramatic shift in how you work and as what people might think.
(22:24):
Because I think right now, when I say I'm sure at the beginning of this call when I said our productivity is the same, there were more than a few eyes that rolled from people. But once you see it yourself, and our C FFO saw the numbers and was like, I can't believe this is happening. So once you see it, you believe it. And I think as we just see more and more companies experience it and employees from those companies move to other companies and implement it or do startups that implement it, I think we'll just see a natural trend over the next 10 years towards it.
Bridgitte Anderson (22:52):
And Vancouver is a very, very costly jurisdiction. And one of the biggest challenges to attracting retaining talent is around cost. And this, as you say, is a competitive advantage for organizations. And I think it also is a great retention tool. Rory McGuire, you might have me almost convinced, and it really, I think most industries and sectors could probably learn a lot of lessons from what your experience has been. So thank you so much for joining us.
Rory McGuire (23:19):
My pleasure. Thank you so much. And I'm happy for any companies or any leaders in companies that are looking to roll this out to reach out to me or reach out to Blackbird, and we're happy to share our experiences doing it.