City extends police department’s ‘life changing’ 4-day workweek pilot

It’s only been six months. But by almost every indication, the four-day workweek the city of Golden, Colorado, has been piloting in its police department has been a success.

Call response times are down. Crime has statistically stayed consistent. The department has realized cost savings. Community engagement has significantly improved. Workforce satisfaction has remained above 90%. And residents in the city of 20,000, just west of Denver and nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, have not raised any objections or provided any negative feedback.

So, Golden is extending the pilot another six months. News that was well received by police officers in the department, according to Joe Harvey, the Golden police chief.

“Across the board,” he said, “employees are … ecstatic.” 

Extending the pilot will give the police department a “full 12 months of data,” according to Scott Vargo, Golden’s city manager. What’s more, the city will be expanding the pilot to other departments. Vargo made the announcement at a recent community meeting, where he and Harvey went over what the city has learned.

Golden’s 32-hour workweek pilot launched in July. Every employee in the Golden Police Department moved from a 40-hour workweek to a 32-hour workweek without a change to pay.

“It wasn’t limited to just street patrol,” Vargo said at the Feb. 8 meeting. “This is a pilot that took the entirety of the police department into account.”

The city rolled it out, in part, to address staff shortages citywide, but especially in its police department. 

“Law enforcement is a more and more challenging career path for folks,” Vargo told Route Fifty in June. “It has been difficult for us to fill openings. Our police chief has said that since 2015, the department has been fully staffed only once. It is a constant battle, so we are trying to make it attractive to potential employees, and we are trying to show how much we value employees.”

Vargo believes Golden may be among the first in the U.S. to pilot a four-day workweek in the police department. In designing the pilot, he told Route Fifty that there were “not other well-known examples in the U.S. and municipal government of police department models.”

Golden also picked the police department to test a shorter week because it’s the “perfect microcosm” of government at-large, Vargo said. The department is already flexible around scheduling changes. It provides walk-up customer service functions like many other government agencies. The agency has a variety of staff positions and a multigenerational workforce. Plus, law enforcement already tracks hundreds of metrics that the city could use in evaluating the pilot. 

City officials picked 100 of those metrics across seven departments to focus on in assessing the pilot. The seven areas include patrol, the budget department, the code enforcement team, investigative unit, forensics, records and the special operations unit.

Golden has been careful to emphasize service levels and days open will not change. During the community meeting, Vargo pointed to the “tagline” the pilot has been working under: “The four-day workweek means working less hours and doing work differently. It does NOT mean working less and doing less.” 

“That was one of the commitments that we made when we rolled this out,” he said. “The intention was not for people to work fewer hours and get less done than what they had been getting done in a 40-hour week. Instead, the goal was to try to identify ways that they could improve how they are doing their work, do it in a shorter amount of time, but be equally or more productive than what they’ve been historically.”

What Worked

So what have city officials learned so far?

To start, the Golden Police Department saw faster response times for all calls—including priority 1 or emergency calls—received in the six-month period compared to the same time period a year earlier.

“Pretty much across the board,” Vargo said at the community meeting, “you are going to see that response times are down in 2023 from where they were in 2022. We are responding more quickly to calls for service.”

The department has also seen a “significant increase” in community engagement hours, which Harvey, the police chief, credited to “our officers spending less time in meetings and in roll call. They are spending less time cubicle-to-cubicle talking, and more time out in the community.”

Since the pilot began, the city has conducted weekly surveys of employees, where they ask a handful of “how are you feeling about the 32-hour workweek” type questions.

 “On a 1 to 100 scale, they are responding with their level of satisfaction,” Vargo said. “Throughout the entirety of the trial that number has averaged above 90. Again suggesting they are feeling good about the 32-hour or the compressed workweek.”

Harvey added that the level of satisfaction varied based on the generation his employees were from. While overall the response has been incredibly positive, he said, it has taken baby boomers and Gen Xers a little longer to get used to the change.

“I’m a Gen X,” he said, “and I’ve struggled with it. I had to change the way I look at how I work. It wasn’t easy, and I’m just now starting to get comfortable with it and we’re six months in. So I think [an employee’s response to the surveys] was different based on the age bracket you were in and how you were raised to look at work.”

A somewhat surprising benefit of the pilot has been the money the police department has saved. Since moving to the 32-hour workweek, overtime has gone down.

“Overtime is an ongoing issue within law enforcement, within the police department,” Vargo said. “We saw nearly an 80% reduction in the amount of overtime spending within the police department over the course of the last six months. That represents about $115,000 in real money.”

What’s Next

One reason for continuing the pilot, according to Vargo, is to give the city more time to collect data on certain metrics.

A goal of the pilot was to improve employee retention, but Vargo said the sample size is “so small, it is a little bit hard to make too many judgements about what we are seeing.” 

During the six-month pilot, the city saw five departures, compared to nine in 2022. That would suggest turnover has dropped, said Vargo. “But retirement and resignations can be very point in time, very different circumstantially. This is a very short period of time to try to suggest we have dramatically impacted our retention. But it didn’t triple either. We feel good about the direction it's going, but not ready to say that we know for certain that this is the reason why those numbers are lower.”

Extending the pilot in the police department for another six months will not just give the city more data on retention, it will also give officials the opportunity to look more closely at other issues as well, such as understanding the impact of meeting length and frequency on productivity or how a 32-hour workweek impacts remote work and other flextime arrangements.

Golden will also start evaluating other city departments with the goal of launching 32-hour workweek pilots in these agencies in April.

And in August, the city will provide a one-year pilot update. But no permanent changes or decisions will be made on the fate of the 32-hour workweek until 2025, at the earliest, Vargo said. 

“We really do want to make sure what we are doing is measured, and that it is defensible and is rational and has data behind it, proving that it’s not causing any sort of negative impact within the community,” he said. “We need time and we need opportunity to put people in those roles to understand areas [where] it does and does not work. We also need to understand that there are going to be some areas where it’s not practical, simply not possible to move to a compressed workweek. And so how are we fair and equitable with those employees who don’t have that opportunity? We have to work through some of those bigger policy areas over the next several months.”

It is clear that the program, though, has one big fan. 

“I get the optics of, ‘I’m paying the same, but I’m getting less,’” Harvey said in a video the city released in November. “What I’m saying is that you are paying the same, but you are not getting less. Everything indicates that this is going fantastic.” The data indicates that the city has saved money and that service has improved. 

“When we look at the surveys and we talk to employees … the vast majority of them have reported back that this has been a life changing event for them,” he said. “My humble opinion is that we should be rolling this out citywide. … If this works, if this goes through, it will be a game changer and it’s going to change the face of how governments and the private sector works.”