Four-day work week has been good for us, but it’s not a pitch to new recruits

Anastasia Leng’s company started offering its employees the option of a four-day working week during the pandemic. “No one was taking a holiday and staff were close to burnout,” the founder and chief executive of CreativeX recalls.
“We are not a burnout type of company. The thesis I had was, if we gave people a day to themselves, would they get more done Monday to Thursday, be more productive?”
When The Times spoke to Leng last year about the initial results of the move at her advertising technology company, she said it had worked: “Productivity didn’t drop — people reported feeling happier, recharged. Some teams reported being more effective,” she said at the time, adding that it was the “future of work”.
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She did, however, express some anxiety about the type of employee it might attract to the venture capital-backed business, which helps brands including Heineken, Pepsi and Diageo to measure the use and effectiveness of advertising content.
The 39-year-old’s uneasiness was prescient: a year on, Leng says CreativeX has retained the policy, but doesn’t like to make too much of it, particularly during the hiring process.
“It has been good, but it’s not without its challenges. We’ve stopped talking about the fact that we do this externally, because [it attracts] a certain kind of individual and actually makes the hiring process much more difficult,” she says. “It can be hard to figure out people’s motivations.
“A four-day work week is not a good reason to want to join a start-up. We want people who are going to work hard and work smart, and we want to reward them for that by saying, ‘You’re an adult — how you manage your time is up to you. You’ve got these goals. If you get them done in four days, fantastic — do whatever you want on Friday.’ ”
She says the business has “had to do a lot of work to make people understand this was a privilege, not a right”. “You earn that right based on the progression of company and individual goals, and in some [cases], you will have to work Friday.”
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Despite the challenges, Leng, who founded CreativeX in 2015, says she would like to keep the policy going. “I’ve had a lot of debates about this with our management team. I’m certainly a big defender and proponent of it. I do some of my best thinking when I’m away from all the tools.
“Even when you work on Friday, the intention is that you do a different kind of work. It’s very rare that we have meetings on Fridays, very rare that there are a lot of internal emails. There is a cadence to that day which is valuable from a business point of view.”
Leng is not alone in her qualified support: most of the companies that took part in a global four-day working week trial (which CreativeX was not part of) have made the policy permanent.
Leng was born in Moscow but left at the age of six as the family travelled with her father, a journalist, to Vietnam, Hungary, Bahrain and, eventually, the United States.
She worked at Google before founding Hatch, a curated online marketplace selling products from designers and manufacturers, in 2012. She has described it as a “flaming disaster” and says she made “every mistake you could make” — but also that those struggles were the making of her current venture.
CreativeX emerged from the efforts of Leng and her colleagues to keep Hatch going. In a desperate search for more revenues, they sought to understand what it was about the images or videos that made some adverts and promotional content for Hatch perform better than others.
Prospective investors were soon telling Leng that they were more interested in the tool they had built to understand adverts than they were in Hatch.
CreativeX helps companies check factors such as whether the branding in an advert is clear enough, whether it’s the right length, and whether it is properly optimised for mobile users so clients don’t waste money on commercials that are unlikely to work.
It can also be used to check brand consistency in everything from packaging to third-party ambassadors, whether local partners around the world are using adverts properly (or at all), and the diversity of casting in commercial content. The company says it helps “embed the confidence of data in every creative decision”.
The business raised $25 million in venture funding in June 2022 and has been used by thousands of brands and agencies. Nestlé, for example, has said it has used its tools to boost return on ad spend by 66 per cent.
CreativeX has 96 staff, including 50 people in London, which it classes as its base, although its holding company is in New York.
“Brands are really struggling to understand all the things they are making,” says Leng. “Are they actually using the stuff they are paying for? Over half of the stuff they pay for never makes it out to market.”
The surge in interest in artificial intelligence amid the rise of ChatGPT and other “generative AI” tools has been an “amazing tailwind for the business”, she says. “One of the things we’ve historically struggled with is, how do you get people to care when they’re so embedded in ways of working that haven’t really changed over the last decade? The existence of AI budgets means there’s more urgency behind the things we’re doing.”
Leng says the advertising industry generally regards the rise of generative AI with “caution and trepidation”. “I think there’s more talk than walk.”
“We’ve seen reactions across the entire spectrum: some companies saying, ‘90 per cent of my content production is gonna be generative AI in the next two years,’ and other companies outright banning generative AI applications from their workforce because of uncertainty around whether their data is going to be used to feed and build other models.
“I think there’s a lot of exaggeration [about AI usage] because everyone wants to be seen to be doing this right now, but I don’t know how many people actually are.”
Leng says her company’s board has discussed the possibility of a sale at least once a year, but that it’s “never been more than a five-minute conversation” as they invariably remain excited about its growth prospects.
However, she adds: “I do think probably next year, it will be more than a five-minute conversation simply based on the state of the market. Timing is everything.”
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