in 2008, the state of Utah was facing a number of compelling issues. Utility costs were rising, but there was no funding available to retrofit public buildings. Our government workforce was showing a demographic imbalance, with the state finding it difficult to attract employees just beginning their careers. State agencies wanted to provide better service, but they didn’t have any new resources. And urban parts of the state were suffering declining air quality.

Utah’s four-day workweek initiative (“Working 4 Utah”) was implemented to address these four different, yet interrelated, areas of energy usage, workforce makeup, customer service, and environmental quality. Roughly 24,000 state employees in 23 agencies were told to take Fridays off and work four 10-hour days instead of five eight-hour days. State police, public universities, the state court system, prisons, and other critical services were exempted from the pilot program.

Cities and counties across the US have shifted to a four-day workweek, but Utah’s initiative was the first of its type and scale, and it complements other efforts designed to meet the state’s goal of increasing energy efficiency by 20 percent by 2015.

The state consulted with professor Lori Wadsworth at Brigham Young University’s Institute of Public Management, whose research on work schedules indicated that employees would be heavily impacted by the change. She advised us to communicate clearly and frequently with employees, and to work with them to resolve issues around work/life balance, holidays, scheduling conflicts, and workday fatigue.

She cautioned that employee performance generally improves with a four-day workweek, but said it’s difficult to quantify unless the employer can measure productivity before and after the change. Fortunately, she credited Utah with being one of the few states that effectively measures productivity of both program output and mission outcomes.

Our four-day workweek pilot program, implemented in August 2008, reached its halfway point in February 2009. Early findings indicate that the initiative is making a positive impact generally.

at the beginning of the study, each state agency was asked to provide the governor’s office with an inventory of structures that would be affected by the change in operating hours. The total number approached 1,000, but it was evident that the vast majority of employees were located in about 100 of them. We focused on those buildings because many of the less-populated ones (e.g., fuel islands for fleet vehicles) consumed very little energy.

Early data indicate that half of the 100 buildings are achieving 10 percent to 20 percent energy usage reductions, and energy savings overall should improve with an employee awareness campaign that began in May. (The buildings that are not showing notable savings typically have older mechanical controls that can’t be modified easily.) There has also been an unexpected reduction of $203,177 in the cost of custodial service contracts this year.

State employees have generally responded positively to the change. Approximately 70 percent of affected employees say they prefer the 4/10 schedule. Employee turnover rates have decreased by about 10 percent since last year. Surprisingly, cumulative leave usage and overtime across agencies in the executive branch is down approximately 9 percent.

By having employees commute to work four days a week instead of five, we estimate that gasoline consumption by state employees has been cut by 744,000 gallons. We also estimate greenhouse emissions will drop by 12,652 metric tons over the course of a full year, the equivalent of taking 2,300 cars off the road.

In general, state taxpayers seem to appreciate state agencies that stay open later. State agencies report no decrease in their productivity measurements, and customer service survey results are similar to what they were in the time periods prior to the initiative. Wait times at the Division of Motor Vehicles have improved, the utilization of Utah.gov Web services continues to increase, and the number of calls to the Working 4 Utah hotline has decreased substantially.

From a high-level perspective, the success of the alternative workweek initiative is always going to be difficult to quantify. For example, energy consumption depends heavily on weather patterns. Demand for public sector employment always increases during an economic downturn. And it is difficult to accurately assess the public’s opinion of how the state provides services when almost 900 of those services are available online.

We know state officials from around the country are watching to see how our experiment works. The state will continue to monitor the performance of this initiative and present its findings to the governor later this year. A formal decision will be made at that time on whether to make the experiment permanent.

Jamie Nagle is the workforce engagement specialist for the state of Utah, and Mike Hansen (pictured) is the director of strategy and management initiatives in the governor’s office.