When Rewards Outweigh the Risks

by Mike Neundorfer

AsI drove in our Sprinter motorhome from Cleveland to Florida in January 2022, I kept thinking about how I would manage shifting Advanced RV from a five day to a four day work week. Marcia and I would be in Florida for three weeks of business meetings, a friend’s wedding and, in between, camping in the Keys, but my mind kept turning to the commitment I had recently made for ARV to join an international trial of a four day, 8 hour per day work week at full pay.

The trial was to start in three months and run for six. While driving south, I kept returning to the question of what we could do in the short trial that would make a big difference. We were already a strong, effective engineering and production team. Could we do the same or better in four days rather than five? How could I lead this?

Success meant achieving our current 40 hour week production rate in a 32 hour week. This meant we had to increase productivity by 20%, while maintaining the same or better production quality and attention to clients. Although we would make some adjustments to paid time off and staff compensation, raises and profit share would stay the same.

We had to create better measures of productivity, quality, and client attention. Our productivity measures have always been a challenge because each of our motorhomes is custom made and takes varying amounts of time to design and build. Production had been measured simply in months to completion, so we had to add more refined measures. We also had to add a detailed set of metrics to score our quality process. We decided we’d continue to anecdotally assess our level of client attention.

If I could make the trial work and make it permanent, it would likely be my most important business contribution in over 50 years of creating and operating businesses. The potential benefits were huge, but I estimated our chance of success at about 50%. The risk was the loss of 20% financial performance for the trial period. As with many business and personal decisions, the benefits of success far outweighed the short term financial risk, so as sole shareholder, I was willing to take the risk.

Sometime during my ruminating on our trip, I realized that success of the trial and ultimate permanent transition was not up to me. The success of the new schedule would be up to the staff, and I could only try to help prioritize and support their initiatives. This was a huge insight and relief.

Shortly after returning, I again assessed the interest of the staff and confirmed that there were only a few doubters. I conveyed that this process was in their hands, and they had me for support. I felt energized as I saw their enthusiasm and willingness to embrace the challenge.

I didn’t think we were ready to start the program on April 1st and neither did the staff, confirmed by jokes about starting on April Fools Day. We began before we had our new measures completely in place. We were still working on process improvements and a large production software tool. Despite this, we moved forward with it.

The six month trial flew by. We achieved only about half of our 20% production improvement, but quality continued to increase and informal client feedback was good.

When I announced to the staff that we would continue the trial for another three months, there was spontaneous applause. The skeptics had been converted and zealots rallied. As I listened to staff members’ stories of how the added personal and family time had changed their lives, I was more determined than ever to make the 4 day week permanent.