Of Course Workers Want A Four-Day Week. Companies Should Too.

BY JULIET B. SCHOR

Businesses and nonprofits that adopt a shorter work week see excellent results in performance metrics and revenue—and they rarely want to go back.

In 2022, I signed on as lead researcher at 4DWG, an international NGO that aims to make a four-day workweek the new standard. Since then, we have studied 245 businesses and nonprofits as they adopted fourday- week pilot programs for more than 8,700 workers, in countries including the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Portugal, Germany and South Africa.

For those employees, the results of working one day less every week, with no reduction in pay, have been outstanding: 69% experience reduced burnout, 42% have better mental health and 37% see improvements in physical health. Thirteen percent of participants say they wouldn’t go back to a five-day schedule for any amount of money.

These findings may not sound surprising. Who wouldn’t prefer to work less? What may be unexpected is how much success organizations are seeing with this model. We ask them to rate the success of the trials, and they give consistently high scores— an average of 8.2 out of 10. After a year, only 20 companies, less than 10% of the total, decided to discontinue their four-day week. We also saw excellent results in performance metrics such as revenue, absenteeism and resignations. The bottom line is that the four-day week has been a huge win for the companies.

The philosophy of the four-dayweek trials is that companies can maintain 100% of their performance despite 20% less time at the workplace. With a little help, most of the companies figure out productivity hacks. The most common is to cut down on meetings.

Microsoft Japan is the poster child for this strategy. In 2019, it instituted a temporary four-day week, closing the office for five consecutive Fridays in August. To make it work, the company mandated that no meetings could go longer than 30 minutes. It also told managers to avoid unnecessary meetings and use face-to-face chats instead. Its widely reported results were striking: Productivity increased by 40% over the trial period, while time off fell by 25%.

Another way the four-day week makes workers more productive is by allowing them more time to be creative. In his book “Slow Productivity,” Cal Newport, a professor of computer

After a year, less than 10% of the companies we studied had returned to a fiveday schedule.

science at Georgetown, explains that the pressure to fill time and appear busy undermines quality and results. He advocates doing fewer things and working at a natural pace.

In the fall of 2023, we asked participating employees to rate themselves on a creativity scale with items such as “I am a good source of creative ideas” and “I suggest new ways of performing work tasks.” After adopting a four-day week, 46% of participants registered an increase in creativity, while 29% declined. One interpretation is that the former are able to take advantage of the schedule change to solve problems and do things differently, while the latter group feels more pressure at work and has less time to let their minds wander.

Most of the companies in our trials are white-collar organizations, where eliminating meetings and other distractions goes a long way toward making a four-day week feasible. In industries such as manufacturing and construction, time savings are more likely to be found by making the flow of work more efficient through process engineering.

That was the approach taken by Pressure Drop Brewing, a London craft brewer founded a decade ago that currently brews about 2,500 liters a week of high-quality beer. Ben Freeman, one of three co-founders, runs the brewing side of the business and explained that for the fourday- week trial to succeed, employees would have to own it. That meant figuring out how to reorganize their own activities: “Everyone was on board with it, and everyone came up with ideas, but some guys really gave it a lot of thought and had whole lists of things we should be doing differently.”

For about two months, workers timed all of their tasks to see how long each took. Brewing involves many different tasks; Ben’s estimate was 10 to 15. That offered multiple opportunities for sequencing things differently and slotting new tasks into unaccustomed places.

Pre-trial, the company had a Monday-morning meeting to list and allocate tasks. They moved that meeting to the previous week, which meant that if someone had a free moment on Thursday or Friday, they could set things up for the coming week. By cleaning the equipment, labeling the kegs and lining them up in advance, they were able to save one to two hours on Tuesday.

Economists tend to be skeptical of the idea that organizations can increase productivity enough to make up for a large reduction in work time. An old joke sums up their attitude. Two guys are walking along the sidewalk. One looks down and says, “Hey, there’s a $20 bill on the ground.” The other quickly retorts, “Nonsense. If there were a $20 bill there, someone would have already picked it up.”

If there really are productivity gains to be had, why haven’t companies already found them? And do they have to give their workers a day off to enact changes in meetings practices or processes? Why aren’t companies doing these things within the structure of a five-day week and getting even more performance from their employees?

It’s a great question. One answer might be that most productivity-improving changes are expensive. But the four-day-week doesn’t require buying costly software or machines in order to raise hourly productivity. Only a handful of companies in our trials have brought in consultants to figure out how to do this without reducing performance. Instead, they’re making these changes with little to no cash outlay, by mobilizing workers’ time, energy and creativity.

This innovation is what people call a win-win. Economists generally don’t believe in those, so the idea behind today’s four-day-week movement— that there’s a way to benefit workers that also benefits management and owners—is highly implausible in the world of conventional economics.

And yet it’s already happening organically. At many companies, Fridays are becoming a different kind of day. There are No Meeting Fri-days, Work From Home Fridays, al ternating Fridays off and early Friday closing times in the summer. These are all signs that we are evolving away from Monday through Friday to a workweek that is more in tune with the needs of a knowledge-based, technologically sophisticated, high-productivity economy.

There’s a certain urgency to this moment. We are facing a high degree of uncertainty about jobs as a result of the rapid introduction of artificial intelligence. The ability of large language models like ChatGPT to wipe out millions of well-paying positions means that we need to think about how we adjust to that technology. Instead of reacting by eliminating people’s jobs, maybe we could all work less. Juliet B. Schor is an economist and sociologist at Boston College. This essay is adapted from her new book, “Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter,” which will be published on June 3 by Harper Business (which, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp).