Is Your Office Ready for a Four-Day Week? Most Are Not.

What is AV and why does your business need it? The plain English guide to the six components of a meeting room and how to get it right.

Chris Gore \ Updated 2026

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The four-day week trials have run. The data is largely positive. Productivity holds or improves. Staff wellbeing improves. Retention improves. The case for it as a concept is reasonably well established at this point. The question that gets far less attention is a practical one: is the office actually capable of supporting it?

One fewer day means one fewer day of available time. Every minute lost to bad technology, ineffective meetings or an environment that fights focus becomes proportionally more expensive. The four-day week does not give anyone a day off. It requires the same work done in the same quality in less time. That demands an environment that is genuinely frictionless.

What the Four-Day Week Actually Requires

Same output, not same hours

The four-day week is not a compression of five days into four. It is a genuine reduction in hours with the expectation that output does not drop. That is only possible if the organisation is already running efficiently. If significant time is lost to dysfunctional meetings, broken technology and friction-heavy processes, compressing the week makes all of those problems worse, not better.

No tolerance for technology waste

Six and a half minutes of AV failure at the start of every meeting is an annoyance in a five-day week. In a four-day week it is a structural problem. Multiply it across the organisation and the lost productivity is significant enough to undermine the entire model. The rooms need to work before anyone walks in. Not when they walk in and discover something is broken.

Meetings that produce decisions

Every meeting in a four-day week needs to justify its existence. Too many meetings with no agenda, no decision maker and no clear output are the fastest way to make the four-day week unworkable in practice. This is a culture and management change. But it needs to be in place before the week is shortened, not after.

Infrastructure that earns the commute

The office has to be better than home. Not by mandate. By evidence. If people spend the commute time only to arrive at an office where the meeting room does not work and the environment is not designed for the way they actually need to work, the four-day week becomes four days of doing what they could have done from home. Read return to office mandates will not fix productivity for more on what the infrastructure gap actually costs.

What Kills a Four-Day Week and What Enables It

What kills it

•       Meeting rooms that require a laptop to start the call

•       Audio that drops out during a discussion that cannot be paused

•       Six minutes of technology setup before every call can begin

•       Meetings that produce no decision and get rescheduled

•       People who work from home because the office fails them

•       One day fewer but exactly the same broken processes

What enables it

•       One tap and the meeting starts. Every time. SPORTrack monitoring ensures every room is confirmed working before anyone arrives

•       Audio that works without anyone thinking about it

•       Rooms monitored proactively so faults are fixed before they affect a meeting

•       Meetings with a stated decision owner, agenda and output

•       An office that is genuinely better than home. Use the AV pricing estimator to understand what your rooms need

•       97 percent uptime across monitored rooms through SPORTrack

The Bigger Picture: Work Isn't Working

The conversation about the four-day week is part of a bigger conversation about whether work, as most organisations currently structure it, is actually working. Chris Gore, CEO of SPOR Group, is writing a book called Work Isn't Working: Why most companies get workplace technology wrong and the 5-step fix. The book uses the DITAM framework, design, integrate, train, asset manage, monitor, to give business leaders a structured approach to building a workplace that performs.

The four-day week requires every element of that framework to be in place. Design: are rooms built for how people actually work? Integrate: does the technology connect properly? Train: can everyone use the rooms without IT support? Asset manage: are warranties tracked and devices maintained? Monitor: are problems caught before they affect output?

Join the waitlist at 'Work Isnt Working' If you want the thinking before the book, sign up for the Work Isn't Working newsletter.

Is Your Office Built for a Four-Day Week?

SPOR Group helps businesses build meeting room environments that support genuine productivity. Start with the AV pricing estimator — no form, no call, just a realistic budget.

Get an instant estimate  >  wearespor.com/av-pricing-estimator

Frequently Asked Questions

Does a four-day week actually work?

The evidence from trials is broadly positive, productivity holds or improves in most cases when organisations implement the four-day week properly. The critical factor is whether the infrastructure, processes and culture are in place to support the same output in less time. Organisations that attempt it without addressing those foundations typically struggle.

What does an office need to support a four-day week?

Meeting rooms that work reliably without any technology delay. Meetings that produce decisions rather than further meetings. A physical environment that enables focused work. Processes with clear ownership and deadlines. All of these need to be in place before the week is shortened.

How does meeting room technology affect a four-day week?

Every minute lost to technology failure in a four-day week is more expensive than in a five-day week. Meeting rooms that require setup time, experience audio failures or need IT intervention reduce the available productive time. Proactive monitoring through SPORTrack ensures rooms work before anyone walks in.

What is the DITAM framework?

DITAM stands for Design, Integrate, Train, Asset Manage, Monitor. It is the five-step framework SPOR Group uses on every workplace technology project and the basis of Chris Gore's forthcoming book Work Isn't Working. It provides a structured approach to building a workplace environment that performs consistently.