What works for one may not work for another…
…with one notable exception: a company that listens to its employees and uses those insights to inform its workforce strategies. That works every time.
Case in point: Safeguard Global. After piloting a four-day workweek in 2023, the Austin-based workforce management company used employee feedback from the program to inform its strategy going forward, Bjorn Reynolds, Safeguard Global’s CEO and founder, told HR Brew.
That pilot has since given way to a culture of “freedom and choice” for Safeguard Global’s roughly 1,000 remote employees based in 78 countries, Reynolds said.
How the four-day workweek evolved. The goal of the pilot, Bjorn previously told HR Brew, was to help recruitment and retention. Over time, however, he found that the arrangement wasn’t working for everyone.
Some employees worked longer hours Monday through Thursday in order to take off on Friday, leading to burnout. Others secretly worked on Friday. And some of those who did adhere to the four-day workweek felt like they were falling behind. It was “not the culture we wanted to create,” he said.
Instead of mandating that employees work Monday through Thursday, Safeguard Global started giving employees the option to choose their own working hours and days, Reynolds said.
“Choose the hours that fit best for the work product you need, and if you can do that in four days, great, if you do it in five [days], but you’re taking two half days, whatever works for you,” Reynolds said.
To allow for this sort of flexibility, Reynolds said he leaned into “outcome-based measurements” of performance.
“How does everybody’s daily productivity or daily outcomes ladder up to part of a broader initiative?” he said. “We really make sure you understand what you do is super critical, and where you’ve placed in the organization, and then what are the key metrics that show that outcome versus time.”
What it means to be outcomes-focused. As return-to-office mandates have gotten stricter, some experts have recommended companies measure outcomes vs. working hours. “Just because [leaders] work 9-to-6 doesn’t mean [employees] have to work 9-to-6…Let them be outcome-oriented instead of hours focused,” Sam DeMase, career expert at ZipRecruiter, previously told Kate Noel, Morning Brew’s SVP and head of people operations, on HR Brew’s People Person podcast.
At Safeguard Global, employees’ performance is measured based on three role-dependent outcomes, Reynolds said. For instance, a customer service rep might be evaluated based on account growth, customer satisfaction, and points of failure.
“If someone’s customers are raising more than average tickets, and we’re not answering them, and the time to answer is longer than the average, it gives you the ability to then say, ‘Okay, well, hey, here’s an anomaly,” he said. “Maybe it’s your working patterns leading to that. Maybe we have to have that conversation. Maybe it’s just the client or maybe it’s a qualitative thing.”
This report was originally published by HR Brew.
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