Flourishing with Fewer Hours:

How Less Time at Work Strengthened the Montana Nonprofit Association

Tylyn Newcomb was the first staff person to have a child at the Montana Nonprofit Association (MNA), and initially the organization’s personnel policies made things unnecessarily stressful for her. There was no parental leave policy, so she had to use her vacation days and then ask for extra time off piecemeal. She ended up taking off 16 weeks, but 12 of them were unpaid.

Before the COVID shutdown, everyone had been expected to work in the office five days a week from 8:30 to 5 pm, which would have been a difficult schedule for a new parent.

During COVID, like other workplaces, MNA had to figure out how to pivot to remote work. “COVID was awful,” says Tylyn, “but it helped show that flexible work can work just fine.” When the pandemic subsided, the flexibility of working partially from home remained. When her child was chronically sick and couldn’t go to day care, Tylyn was able to work remotely with her daughter beside her on the couch. 

Then when MNA switched to a 4-day workweek, the workplace became more supportive of parents with young children. Tylyn says she gets more time with her daughter on the weekends, since she can do errands and chores on Fridays. In addition, employees are welcome to bring children to the office when necessary; one staff member picks up her son from school at 3:30, who then reads or colors by his mother’s desk until 5 pm. 

MNA’s transformation to a more staff-friendly workplace accelerated when Associate Director Adam Jespersen was promoted to Executive Director, but the impetus had begun before his promotion. The executive director who immediately preceded Adam was aware of heightened staff stress and turnover in recent years during the COVID shutdown, and while they were working on the 2020 national census. He asked MNA's board of directors for ideas on preventing staff burnout. Adam reported, “I think they were expecting a gym membership or a pizza party…  But one of our staff members happened to find a call for organizations to participate in a pilot program from 4 Day Week Global.” The board proposed the suggested six-month trial period; and afterwards decided to put the workplace on a permanent Monday-to-Thursday schedule.

The heart of the four-day week experiment was the “100-80-100” formula: producing the same amount of work product in 80% of the time with no reduction of pay. To succeed at that goal took intention and forethought. 4 Day Week Global offered MNA training and support from a cohort of other four-day week pilot sites. It also offered measurement of several key performance indicators, including program quality and staff satisfaction. 

MNA was clear that if reducing work hours meant less service to their 875 member nonprofits, they would not continue the experiment. After six months, member groups were surveyed, as well as staff, board, and funders. The members reported consistent levels of responsiveness from MNA, and just as much programming and member support. In the survey results, “the number of people that noticed [the reduced work hours] could probably be counted on one hand. It was just a shift that, in many ways, was almost invisible, but internally made such a huge difference.”

Not surprisingly, MNA's eight employees were enthusiastic about the four-day work week. Says Adam, “Burnout levels decreased significantly. Job satisfaction went up. People reported feeling more energized and more present at work. It really helped with work-life balance in a way that was more than just rhetoric—it was felt day to day…” He went on to say, “One [outcome] I didn’t anticipate was how it changed the rhythm of our week. Mondays feel sharper, more energized. People come in ready to go.” Tylyn describes the impact on staff this way: “MNA’s cultural philosophy is very much family first. Take care of yourself and your family first. And you doing that allows you to show up as the best employee you can be.” Adam reports that his own stress level as ED has dropped from intolerable to manageable. 

Like other organizations that have converted to a four-day workweek, MNA has needed to focus on efficiency and productivity. Meetings are shorter and only scheduled as needed. “It’s shifted how we prioritize,” says Adam. “We’re more focused in meetings, more intentional with our time. We ask, ‘Is this essential?’ a lot more now.” 

The National Council of Nonprofits, of which MNA is a member, quotes Adam as saying,  “Especially when new things pop up – if we do that, we can’t do something else. The container in which we work is limited. It was limited before at 40 hours, but it’s a little more limited now. Being clear about what we want to accomplish and what it’s going to take to get there, our filter for saying ‘no’ to things, or saying we’ll do a little bit but not a lot of this new thing, that’s where the conversation gets pretty real.”

The new work schedule has required flexibility. When employees need to work on a Friday, such as before their annual conference or during the short biannual Montana legislative session, they can take another day off to make up for it. The four-day week is a norm, not a rigid rule. 

Besides the shortened work week and the flexibility to work remotely sometimes, MNA has made other upgrades in their newly improved personnel policy. Parental leave is now set at eight weeks paid with the option of eight additional weeks unpaid in addition to accrued paid time off (PTO). Other staff with new babies have had a much better experience than Tylyn did. 

Bereavement leave was also added. Sabbaticals of four weeks are now offered after five years of service. “Health leave” at MNA now includes not just sick leave, for staff illness and those with sick dependents, but also time off for health-enhancing activities such as hiking and massage. Health leave is now separated from vacation days. As Tylyn describes this change, “especially those of us with young children were using a lot of PTO to take care of sick kids…we don’t have to feel like we’re eating into our vacation time, because we have a separate bucket of sick time.” 

Adam sees the four-day week as “a signal of trust, and a commitment to sustainability. It allows people to be their whole selves, not just their work selves.” Tylyn also connects it to increased trust: “[Previously], there was almost this sense of mistrust in employees, not necessarily feeling trusted to do my job without being in the office and visibly seen doing work… Employees were not necessarily allowed to be as leaderful as today’s MNA is… There’s now a strong culture of trust. Since Adam became executive director in May 2024, four women have been promoted. There’s a real shift away from top-down management toward shared leadership.”

As a result of these changes, turnover has dropped to almost zero. Tylyn says, “For those of us with kids, knowing that we can take our kids [into the office] or take a day off, there is not much turnover. We’re a pretty stable organization. And that leads to deeply knowing our jobs, deeply knowing our members, understanding what we’re doing, and doing it better because we’ve all been in our roles for some time.”

In addition, recruitment has become much easier. Adam notes that a few years ago, a job opening attracted only three applicants, but recently there were more than 50 qualified candidates for one job. 

Since MNA’s mission is to support the nonprofits in Montana to succeed at their goals, the organization has become an evangelist for four-day workweeks. Tylyn says, “I think MNA, being an association with about 875 members, is in a unique position to model best practices and show that this actually works… We’ve even had direct human service organizations adopt it, which people often say you can’t do if you have 24-hour staff. You can. You just have to be more creative.” At least a dozen member groups have converted to reduced work hours for full-time staff.  

MNA’s experience shows that when nonprofit working hours are modified to emphasize trust and staff sustainability, organizations can better retain talent, strengthen performance, and deliver more consistently on their missions.

The Case Study series is the latest component of the Upgrading Nonprofit Workplaces study. Its purpose is to give examples of the practices in the Sustainable Jobs Toolkit, co-created by All Due Respect and the Staffing the Mission project, now part of Fund the People. For more best practices for Hours of Work, see here.

Written by Betsy Leondar-Wright, Ph.D.
With research assistance from Nikki Mirala
Published by Fund the People
In collaboration with All Due Respect
March 2026