Highgate IT Solutions started a six-month four-day week trial in April 2022, had it evaluated by Dr Joanna Burrell of Ultimate Resilience, a clinical psychology practice, and on 1st November 2022 made it official for every member of staff. Four years on, here is what happened to the numbers, for anyone still wondering whether it can work in a business like ours.
Staggered days, not a shorter week for everyone at once. Mid-month, each member of staff picks the day they want off in the month ahead. The days spread across the working week rather than all landing on the same one, so Highgate is contactable on all five. Paired with an all-remote model, the change didn’t cut coverage, it moved how coverage gets delivered.
That distinction matters more than it might sound. When Highgate first made the change permanent, the open question was whether a smaller IT business could give every member of staff a shorter week without customers noticing a difference. Four years on, the answer is yes.
Day to day, that means every team, from sales to operations and finance, runs on staggered cover rather than a shared Friday off, while the 24/7 service desk routes straight to our support partners and isn’t affected at all. A customer calling on any given weekday reaches the same team they always would, just not always the same individual within it, which is the same trade-off any business with holiday cover or shift patterns already manages. What’s different here is that it’s built into the working week by design, not handled as an exception.
Revenue. £12.7m in the year before the four-day week became permanent, to over £38m in the year just closed. That is roughly three times the size, and well past the £30m goal the business set out publicly in 2025. The year to 31st October 2026 closed last week, so the final figure is management accounts rather than audited.
Headcount. From 23 in 2022 to 60 today, past the 50 the business was aiming for in 2025.
Standards. ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and Cyber Essentials Plus, all achieved by summer 2026, independently audited evidence that service and security standards held through four years of growth, with every member of staff on a shorter week.
Recognition. 2026 was Highgate’s second consecutive year on the UK’s Best Workplaces list, moving up from the small-organisation category in 2025 to the medium-organisation category this year, where Highgate ranked fourth overall, and third for wellbeing.
Staff. In the latest survey, 100% said the four-day week has improved their work-life balance and 96% said they’re more productive. 100% want to stay long term.
It’s a fair question, and the trade press asked it. When CRN put it to a panel of IT providers in 2025, the objections were practical: customers expect cover Monday to Friday, demand for out-of-hours and 24/7 support is rising, and nobody wants to be the provider who isn’t there on a Wednesday. Those are the right objections, and they’re the ones four years of trading answers.
Every team is covered five days a week, the 24/7 service desk runs exactly as it did, and the standards above were audited with everyone on four days. Highgate isn’t a special case either: an all-remote, mid-sized IT solutions provider supplying hardware, software and managed services, in a market where response times and service consistency are the product. If the model was going to come unstuck, a business like this is where it would have happened.
“Four years in, this isn’t something we defend any more, it’s how we run the business,” says Jenny Latimer, Operations Director at Highgate. “The team delivering for customers on a Tuesday is the same team giving someone Wednesday off. Both have to be true at once, and the numbers say they are.”
The technology question underneath a four-day week is the same one that sits under any hybrid or remote team: whether people can work properly from wherever they are on their working day, not just from a desk in an office. That’s what makes staggered days possible without anyone losing continuity, and it’s the same workplace technology we deploy for our customers: the device, collaboration and Microsoft 365 tooling that keeps a distributed team working as one.
None of that changes how existing customers are supported. Response times, account contacts, and service levels are set by contract, not by which day of the week it happens to be, and the last four years of trading are the evidence for that.
Read more about our accreditations and standards, or see the full list of awards and recognition behind these numbers.
