A Four-Day Work Week: What we know so far

The main foundational case for a four-day work week is related to the idea that technological development would increase productivity and the need to work long hours would be diminished (Keynes, 1930). Keynes expected that we would be working a 15-hour week by the end of the 20th century. His predictions could not be further from true as we currently work an average of 40.6 hours for full-time workers (Eurostat, 2022).

There have been previous attempts to implement a four-day working week: in 1933, in the United States, the Senate passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported, a bill to reduce the standard workweek to only 30 hours. The main reasoning behind it is that this was a way to fight unemployment. This bill did not go ahead as Roosevelt used the threat of it as leverage to get industry leaders to agree to ban child labour, set a modest minimum wage and limit the standard workweek at 40 hours.

Over the last two decades, we have been witnessing an increase in debates around the deterioration of the boundaries between work and life (Wepfer, 2018) and an increase in the levels of burnout (Abramson, 2022). The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic increased debates around how we work and how much time we should spend working. The pandemic led to increased burnout levels, particularly among healthcare professionals (Elsevier Health, 2022), but also among workers in other sectors, which is associated to the recent ongoing phenomena of the great resignation and quiet quitting (Fletcher, 2022). Facing the need to respond to these events, several firms started to implement different forms of flexible working, and many started reducing the number of hours worked per week and implementing the four-day working week.

At Henley Business School (2022), James T. Walker and Rita Fontinha (myself) decided to investigate the four-day week to understand, from an academic, data-based perspective, the pros and cons of a four-day working week. We surveyed 500 business leaders and 2000 employees in 2019, pre-pandemic, and in November 2021, upon recovery from the pandemic. We asked business leaders who implemented a four-day working week in no loss of pay in their organisations to describe their costs and their savings after this implementation. Our findings suggest that the savings overcome the costs in the long term. More specifically, we calculated the savings for the UK economy if similar firms were to adopt a four-day week and the savings would be of £104 billion, which represents 2.2% of the total turnover of businesses in the UK.

How did firms save money? Most firms implementing a four-day week reported an increase in productivity, together with a reduction in absenteeism, they became more attractive firms to new applicants and were able to retain more staff, reducing replacement costs. The findings from our survey are consistent with the findings from the trials in Iceland, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Last week, the findings from the Four Day Week Global trial with firms mainly from the US and Ireland were published (Schor et al., 2022). Businesses participating in this trial increased their revenue by 8.14% during the trial period and their revenue went up 37.55% compared to the same 6-month period in the previous year. 96.9% of employees were satisfied with the trial and 42% of them would only move to another job with a five-day week if they had a pay increase of 26 to 50%. 13% said they’d only go back to five days if their pay was more than 50% higher, and another 13% said that no amount of money would induce them to accept a five-day schedule.

But is the four-day week the best option for all businesses? Most firms who implemented a four-day week in our Henley (2022) sample are in sectors like information technologies, finance, and consultancy, but there are examples in manufacturing, production, and healthcare. It is likely that the four-day week will be easier to implement in sectors where it is possible to work remotely and that sectors where there is a more direct link between time spent on the task and productivity and where physical or face to face interaction is needed will have higher costs in the implementation of such a work arrangement. In sectors like healthcare, retail and manufacturing, the impact on workers’ mental health may be immediate, but the economic return on investment in a four-day week may be more long term.

The economic and mental health gains from moving to a four-day week seem to start becoming apparent, but an abrupt move to such an arrangement in a large scale could have serious implications, especially in the current recession context. The four-day working week is a radical idea that should be implemented in a conservative manner for it to work on a large scale. A reduction in hours worked is needed for both economic and human reasons, but that move should not happen overnight. The reduction in hours worked should be progressive and adjusted to organisational and individual needs. It should count with the involvement of employees and line managers, and it should be assessed as the transition occurs. While moving to a four-day week may be hard, a progressive long-term transition could be strategic for firms and greatly contribute to improve our quality of working life.

References

Abramson, A. (2022, January 1). Burnout and stress are everywhere. APA. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/01/special-burnout-stress

Elsevier Health (2022). Clinician of the Future: A 2022 Report. Elsevier Health. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/clinician-of-the-future

Eurostat (2022). Hours of Work – Annual Statistics

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Hours_of_work_-_annual_statistics#Patterns_in_average_working_week:_full-time_and_part-time_workers

Fletcher, P. (2022, November 9). How quiet quitting became the next big phase in the great resignation. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2022/11/09/how-quiet-quitting-became-the-next-big-phase-in-the-great-resignation/?sh=347cb8672dae

Schor, J. B, Fan, W., Kelly, O., Gu, G., Bezdenezhnykh, T., and Bridson-Hubbard, N. (2022). The Four Day Week: Assessing global trials of reduced work time with no reduction in pay. Four Day Week Global.

Henley Business School (2022). The four-day week: The pandemic and the evolution of flexible working. https://assets.henley.ac.uk/v3/fileUploads/Four-day-week-white-paper-FINAL.pdf

Keynes, J. M. (1930). Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930). In J. M. Keynes (Ed.), Essays in Persuasion (pp. 358-373). Harcourt Brace.

Wepfer, A.G., Allen, T.D., Brauchli, R., Jenny, G. J., & Bauer, G. F. (2018). Work-Life Boundaries and Well-Being: Does Work-to-Life Integration Impair Well-Being through Lack of Recovery?. Journal of Business and Psychology, 33, 727–740. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-017-9520-y

Dr Rita Fontinha (she/her)

Director of the World of Work Institute (Flexible Working)

Associate Professor in Strategic Human Resource Management