Adopting the four-day work week

gamesindustry.biz:

Jeffrey Rousseau

Staff Writer

Monday 25th April 2022

The games industry has seen a number of changes over the last few years as competition for talent has grown and developers have pushed for better working conditions.

These adaptations include remote work, hybrid office work, and the implementation of a four day work week.

That last change has recently been taken by a handful of developers and publishers for the good of their staff, and they're starting to share results. A panel of studio heads who've experimented with it spoke about their findings during GDC 2022.

With more companies embracing the new work environment, GamesIndustry.biz reached out to various studios to ask them about their progress with a four-day work week and the lessons they've learned.

"...The teams did a good job on creating team level policies to make shorter work time work"

Jaakko Kylmäoja CEO of Fingersoft

Fingersoft CEO Jaakko Kylmäoja says that the most pressing business reason for the change was to improve staff wellbeing.

"Working in the games industry one can easily find himself working too much and not paying enough attention to one's well being," he says. "Also many of our employees are in life situations where finding time to recover might be challenging."

The Fingersoft CEO says optimization was the big concern, particularly "how well the teams would be able to plan their tasks to catch the fixed deadlines [like] Halloween, Black Friday and Christmas, especially in the beginning when we had little experience on shorter working time."

Kylmäoja admits that during the period of change he expected more problems among the studio.

"The participants and the teams did a good job on creating team level policies to make shorter work time work," he