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A Metrickal employee was dismissed in January 2024 after the company’s co-founder said work-activity data appeared to show the employee doing work for another company during Metrickal hours. That account came from the employer, not an independent investigation, and the employee’s response was not included in the available reporting. The four-day-week experiment was the setting for the dispute—not evidence that shorter workweeks cause misconduct or fail.
What reportedly happened at Metrickal
In an as-told-to essay based on an email conversation, Metrickal co-founder Patrick Synge said the company tried a four-day workweek in December 2023. He said clients had complained about missed deadlines and the company had performance concerns before it reviewed the employee’s activity data. According to Synge, Metrickal used DeskTime, and the data appeared to show work for a US company during Metrickal work hours. He said the employee was dismissed in January 2024. Entrepreneur’s 2024 account republishes the first-person essay from Business Insider.
That is the employer’s description of events. The available reporting does not include the employee’s version, independent access to the DeskTime records, or an adjudication of the dismissal. The data and Synge’s interpretation of it should not be presented as independently verified proof of what the employee did or intended.
Synge distinguished between outside work generally and work that overlaps with the main job: “I really don’t mind people having side hustles to earn extra income. But this should be something they do on their own time and that doesn’t affect the quality of their day job.” The quotation reflects his view; the published account does not establish the employee’s employment terms or whether the alleged conduct violated them.
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Why the four-day-week headline needs context
The timing connects the dispute to Metrickal’s experiment, but the same account also says client complaints and performance concerns preceded the review. It does not establish that the four-day schedule caused the alleged conduct, nor does a single employer’s account measure whether a four-day week improves or harms performance.
“Four-day week” can describe different arrangements. Some employers reduce total weekly hours while keeping pay unchanged; others fit the same hours into four longer days. Those models have different implications for workload, service coverage, and employee wellbeing, so the number of workdays alone is not enough to evaluate a trial.
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What other four-day-week evidence says—and does not say
A UK pilot offers a broader but still bounded comparison. The Associated Press reported that 61 companies and about 2,900 workers took part from June to December 2022. Employers could reduce hours in different ways while keeping pay unchanged. Among participating workers, 71% reported being less burned out and 39% less stressed than before the pilot; 48% said they were more satisfied with their jobs. These are reported outcomes from that pilot, not results from Metrickal or guarantees for other workplaces. The AP report also said 92% of participating companies planned to continue in some form and 30% described the change as permanent. Revenue grew 1.4% during the trial among 23 companies that supplied adequate data, weighted by company size; that company-reported figure is not a controlled estimate that the shorter week caused growth.
The pilot’s lead researcher, David Frayne of the University of Cambridge, told AP: “We feel really encouraged by the results, which showed the many ways companies were turning the four-day week from a dream into a realistic policy, with multiple benefits.” That assessment concerns the UK pilot, not the Metrickal incident.
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Other accounts highlight operational limits. The BBC reported that customer-facing work can require continuous coverage, staff absences can complicate rota planning, and compressing a full workload into fewer days may raise work intensity. Some businesses found flexible reductions spread across four or five days more workable than giving everyone the same day off. The BBC’s reporting on UK participants is useful for understanding implementation trade-offs, not for claiming one schedule works everywhere.
A University of Maryland discussion of a separate, smaller New Zealand experiment cautioned that it did not provide concrete, verifiable evidence, while arguing for employee control over when and how work gets done. The discussion is an institutional interpretation of that experiment, not an evaluation of Metrickal or the UK pilot. The university’s article quotes organizational-behavior scholar Gilad Chen on the value of giving employees control over how and when they work.
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How to judge a four-day-week trial fairly
For a workplace considering a shorter week, evaluate what actually changed and what happened to the work—not just whether Friday became a day off.
- Hours and pay: Record whether total weekly hours fell or were compressed into longer days, and whether wages and benefits stayed the same.
- Coverage: Check whether customers, patients, or onsite operations still receive the required service across the full week. Compare rota gaps and overtime with the previous schedule.
- Output and quality: Set role-appropriate measures such as completed work, deadlines, client outcomes, error rates, or service levels. Avoid treating activity-tracking data alone as proof of intent or quality.
- Workload intensity: Ask whether employees are doing less total work or simply rushing through the same workload. Track workload and recovery alongside output.
- Schedule control and fairness: Decide who can choose a schedule and how teams with different coverage needs will be treated equitably.
- Evaluation period: Run the trial long enough to account for seasonal demand, leave, and operational disruption, and compare results with a defined baseline.
What monitoring software can establish
Activity-monitoring software can record signals about computer use, but a record of activity is not automatically proof of a person’s intent, the quality of their work, or a policy breach. In the Metrickal account, the software’s role and what it showed are described by Synge; the logs were not independently examined in the reporting.
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Employers considering monitoring should make expectations and policies clear, explain what is collected and why, and consider privacy and applicable workplace rules. The sources on this incident do not establish whether a particular monitoring practice is lawful in any reader’s jurisdiction. Workers weighing a second job should distinguish work done on personal time from simultaneous work during an employer’s paid hours, and check their own contract and workplace policies rather than infer a legal rule from this story.
What remains unconfirmed
The available coverage does not provide the dismissed employee’s response, the relevant contract terms, independent verification of the monitoring data, or a legal ruling on the dismissal. Later coverage repeated or reframed the account; it does not independently corroborate the alleged conduct. The story is therefore best read as an employer’s account of a performance dispute during a four-day-week experiment—not as a settled finding about the employee or a verdict on reduced-hours work.
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