London office real estate company Flexioffices, a marketplace for serviced office space, recently began trialing a 4-day week, and has been writing about it.

The account has aplenty of detail about the challenges they faced, which I think is great: knowing how these things actually work, what kinds of speed bump people encounter, and how problems get solved, is essential for making the 4-day week seem like something that other companies can actually implement with confidence.

It’s also interesting because they are both a 4-day week and flexible company, and figuring out how to make that work is a challenge.

Despite its name, it’s also not a company with an awful lot of flexibility in terms of deadlines and client communication:

Flexioffices generates a lot of inbound enquiries [about 2000 a month]. Our job, to put simply, is to engage with the client, understand their needs, then assist them through a range of flexible space choices so that they can occupy an office which will help their people and business thrive….

Lots of leads means we needed enough people to handle them every day and to give people sufficient time to deal with the volume effectively. We also split the teams into ‘tiers’ responsible for different enquiry size bands. So, on any given day we would need to make sure that appropriate levels of experience were present to engage with the full range of possible customers.

We also saw scope to cover a broader range of hours whilst still reducing the total weekly hours and giving people flexibility with how to allocate them. Historically, we utilised ‘golden hours’ after 5.30pm to successfully reach out to clients, and many have always been in the office early to effectively manage admin etc.

So you can imagine how figuring out how to do this in four days, at the same levels of responsiveness and customer satisfaction, could be an issue.

The whole thing is well worth a read.