The wellbeing of Hutch staff is REALLY important to us. We’re passionate about continuing to offer a great place to work in the gaming industry and we saw the 4 Day Week trial as something that could help our staff feel happier and healthier. After the success of the trial, in January 2023 we added the 4 Day Week as a rolling 12 month policy for all our staff (to be reviewed annually). 

Of course, the 4 Day Week is still a relatively new concept and presents a new way of working to adapt to. With that in mind, we wanted to put together a guidance document for anyone who might be thinking of applying for a job with us, or for those of you who might be joining us soon! 

We’ve tried to answer all the questions we think people might have - if there’s something we haven’t covered, please feel free to ask during the interview process or drop us a note on LinkedIn and we’ll get the info added to this doc!

Does everyone get the same day off?

Yes, everyone gets Friday off. We felt this made the most sense as it means that Hutchies can get a long weekend.

Won’t I just have to work overtime on the 4 days I do work to make up for day off?

The premise of the 4 Day Week is for staff to work 4 days a week instead of 5, using the 100:80:100 mode. This means you get 100% of you salary, while working 80% of the working week, while maintaining 100% of the productivity. We definitely don’t want to create a situation where you feel like you have to work outside of your 4 day working week, and we help staff with techniques and advice on the balance of productivity and wellbeing. We’ve implemented a number of company wide initiatives too, like a meeting free 2 hour period every Wednesday afternoon.  

Do I get EVERY Friday off?

In order to adopt the 4 Day Week after the trial we had to make some adjustments to ensure its success long term. These adjustments include bi-monthly team days that give us opportunities to focus on business and social activities (without this we felt like we lost a bit too much of our social and ‘together’ time). We also now work on Fridays when there is a bank holiday to avoid having a number of 3 Day Weeks throughout the year - where this happened in the trial we found that people were struggling to fit their work into an even shorter week. 4 days a week works well for us, but 3 days was a bit too short and became untenable.

Does the 4 Day Week affect how much holiday I get?

Your annual leave allowance will be pro-rated in order to reflect the 4-day working week - this means your contractual holiday allowance for the year will be 80%, which amounts to 18.5 days upon joining. As a gesture of goodwill, one additional day of annual leave will be added to holiday entitlement in order to reflect team day participation. Therefore holiday entitlement will be 19.5 days initially. Bear in mind that you also get the period between Christmas and New Year as holiday, and that is on top of the 18.5 days. And of course you will have every Friday off throughout the year - which is equal to approx. 10 weeks of additional paid annual leave.

Is the 4 Day Week permanent?

We’ve finished the trial and made this a rolling 12 month policy - this means we will review the situation each year. If everything continues to work then it will carry on forever - but making it a rolling policy gives us, as a company, the flexibility to tweak things or return to a 5 Day Week should there be a major reason to do so. Of course, we very much don’t intend this to be the case, it’s more of a safety net - but something we definitely want to be transparent about!

But what about player support when everyone is off?

Our games are very live ops driven with events and offers for players running 24 /7. As a result, we were already operating outside a standard 5 day week previously with the assistance of some outsourced customer support over the weekend. So now that we have implemented a 4 Day Week, we have extended this support for the additional day. 

We are also working to enhance the ability of our systems to ‘self-heal’ to avoid generating customer support issues in the first instance, and our support system has a number of automations to try to help our players without needing human intervention.