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Coming out of the pandemic, the conversation about flexible work has largely focused on whether employees should return to the office — and how often. A third of U.S. workers who can do their jobs remotely now do so all the time. LinkedIn research shows that in May 2023, nearly one in nine U.S. job postings offered remote work, 13% of postings were hybrid, and 66% of applications were for remote and hybrid roles. A CEO told me that by putting the word “remote or hybrid” into the job description, the number of job applicants tripled.
But a potential new disruption looms: We’re starting to hear from organizations that have piloted a four-day workweek. Early results suggest this structure offers benefits in productivity and well-being.
Let’s look at the evidence. According to research from jobs platform Indeed, while the overall number of job posts advertising a four-day workweek remains low (0.3% of total posts), that number has tripled in the last few years. And it’s most commonly seen in sectors requiring in-person work, such as medical, dental, veterinary, manufacturing, and production. United Auto Workers initially included a four-day workweek in its bargaining demands, although this provision wasn’t included in the final agreements.
In June 2022, 61 UK-based companies participated in a pilot program to study a four-day workweek. As of February 2023, when the first results were published, 92% said they were continuing to test the concept, with 29% saying the policy is a permanent change. Average organizational revenue rose by 1.4%; pilot companies also reported a 57% decline in the likelihood that an employee would quit, plus a 65% reduction in the number of days taken off as paid sick time.
One of the trial participants was Rivelin Robotics. The firm opted to close on Fridays and extend the working day to 8 am to 5:30 pm on the other days of the week. The change has not been without its challenges. A small, fast-growing startup with just eight staff, Rivelin reports that sometimes the work cannot wait, and a big product launch meant some of the new three-day weekends had to be sacrificed. Senior execs had to accept they’d take Friday calls and queries, as the team had turned off their phones.
The Challenges of a Four-Day Workweek
In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of organizations sought to implement four-day workweeks. Unfortunately, most of these initiatives — which attempted to condense a full 40 hours of work into four days — didn’t see the results that organizations had hoped for. One 1975 study surveyed the reactions of 474 employees of an accounting division of a large multinational corporation to a four-day, 38-hour workweek. Fatigue and slowing down at the end of the day were reported, and servicing of customer needs and meeting with co-workers were more difficult. Supervisors perceived that work quality and output in their units were adversely affected by the four-day workweek.
Looking back, we can see how these initiatives failed to consider a few critical factors. First, there is a non-linear relationship between hours worked and productivity; there is a diminishing rate of productivity for each additional hour someone works. Longer working hours also are associated with increases in errors and work injuries, as well as decreases in employee well-being indicators like satisfaction and engagement.
But who says you have to do 40 hours in four days? There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that reduced-hour work schedules for the same level of pay are not only feasible when it comes to maintaining outcomes but also potentially advantageous across a number of metrics. Since 2015, a new, more data-informed wave of reduced working week trials have now been conducted in growing numbers in Sweden, Ireland, North America, the UK, and Australasia. We also recently worked on our own study of nine global organizations to deepen our own understanding of the practicalities of conscious work redesign. We found that although there were some costs, trade-offs, and varying levels of work involved to prepare for a four-day workweek, the results were consistently positive when it came to things like employee well-being, retention, and even business outcomes.
These initiatives only work if companies undertake substantial work redesign to reduce hours while maintaining business outcomes. This means streamlining operations, removing administrative burdens, and prioritizing high-impact work. To achieve this, our study suggests organizations need to:
Clearly define the work that matters. Frameworks such as OKRs (objectives and key results) can define company and team-level goals and ensure everyone’s work ladders up into those goals.
Run a meeting audit. Meetings are often one of the first areas to get scrutinized as unproductive time.
Allow employees to operate to the full extent of their education and training. Many employees are bogged down with other administrative or menial tasks, so they can’t focus on priority tasks. We recommend stopping, automating, or outsourcing all non-priority tasks.
Embrace asynchronous communication. When implementing a four-day workweek, asynchronous communication becomes essential to help employees from having work interrupted. To maintain employee focus, there should be a clear understanding of what requires escalation, and who will handle it.
Resetting Employee Expectations
One major challenge that accompanies the shift to a four-day workweek is ensuring employees accept that you’re asking them to produce the same amount in fewer hours. Our own research shows organizations that successfully implemented a four-day workweek began with a well-defined three-month trial period at a minimum to assess whether they could successfully reduce work time while maintaining output. These pilots included documentation, and/or training in advance for employees on redesigning work tasks, as well as productivity coaching. (What’s interesting is that even just doing this prep to streamline operations, remove administrative burdens, and prioritize high-impact work can improve company productivity substantially.)
What does this look like in action? As part of our research project, we spoke to a workplace consultancy in Australia called Inventium that started a four-day pilot in 2020. Its leadership developed productivity training to help employees more effectively utilize their time. Tactics included calendar blocking, turning cell phones off for blocks of time, and scheduling deep work around when each employee is most productive.
At Inventium, employees are encouraged to take ownership of their time and utilize it in the way that works best for them. It seems to have worked, as the company reported a 26% increase in productivity, a 21% increase in energy levels, and an 18% decrease in employee stress.
The company refers to its program as the “gift of the 5th” — highlighting that the day off is not a given. Instead, it’s achieved by getting work done efficiently and maintaining outcomes. It also signals that there may be busier months when employees need to work that 5th day, which has now been cheerfully (so far) accepted by the entire team.
To ensure success, organizations need buy-in from leadership and employees. You can start by crowdsourcing potential obstacles and ideas from employees. It’s also critical to position the pilot as an experiment with clear expectations and to be transparent with clients and external stakeholders.
The four-day week can surface organizational problems in communication, trust, work inefficiencies, and barriers to productivity. And while it provides an opportunity to address these challenges, as Joe O’Connor, director and co-founder at the Work Time Reduction Center of Excellence and one of our co-researchers warns, “This is not a cheap fix, it’s very hard work.”
In today’s economy, employees have more power, agency, and freedom than ever. Unemployment reached a 54-year low this year, wages are increasing (5% annually), and open posts are very hard to fill. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says even if every unemployed person in the country found a job, the U.S. would still have around 3 million open positions. And the worker shortage is likely to go on for years.
In today’s competitive labor market, where attracting and retaining top talent is an ongoing challenge, adopting a reduced-hour workweek can be an attractive benefit for job seekers — and could be a significant competitive advantage for recruitment teams. And for everyone else, it’s an opportunity to really get focused on what matters.
