Trials of shorter work week prove ‘everyone’s a winner’

After testing the four-day week, firms reported productivity held steady and fewer employees quit.

The shorter week proves good for the bosses too.

Most British companies participating in a test of a four-day work week say they will stick with it after logging sharp drops in worker turnover and absenteeism while largely maintaining productivity during the six-month study.

More than 90 per cent say they will continue testing the shorter week, while 18 per cent plan to make it permanent. And organisers argue a similar trial just completed at 29 companies in Australia and New Zealand will likely yield similar results when it reports in about two months.

Andrew Barnes, co-founder of the advocacy group 4 Day Week, which helped run the British trial of 61 businesses ranging from banks to fast-food restaurants and marketing agencies, says results across earlier trials in Canada, Ireland and the US were consistent with the British outcomes.

In London, for the launch of the report, he tells The Deal that the good news for companies is that the trials have yielded revenue increases of up to 30 per cent and a dramatic drop in sick days.

“A four-day week doesn’t adversely impact your business,” he says. “If anything, it makes it better. Everyone wins, and if fewer people are taking sick days it changes the dynamic at the level of the economy.”

He now wants the federal government to run trials in the public sector and says: “We have to get sceptical people to give it a go. We have to able to attract talent and all the data shows that millennials won’t go to a job (if it’s a conventional five-day a week position).”

In the British trial, companies gave their 2900 workers a paid day off a week to see whether they could get just as much done while working less, but more effectively.

The idea of working less than the conventional 40 hours across five days a week has been discussed for decades. The concept has gained new momentum recently as employers and employees seek new and better ways to work.

The Covid-19 era ushered in broader acceptance of remote and hybrid work arrangements. Now, some employers, as well as policymakers, are exploring whether a shorter work week can improve employee wellbeing and loyalty.

“At the beginning, this was about pandemic burnout for a lot of employers. Now it’s more of a retention and recruitment issue for many of them,” says Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College. Her team helped conduct the study with 4 Day Week Global, think tank Autonomy and researchers at Cambridge University.

There are several other initiatives under way: consumer-goods company Unilever PLC recently tested the concept in its New Zealand offices, while Spain’s government plans to pay companies to experiment with a four-day week. In a study in Iceland involving more than 2500 employees, researchers found most workers maintained or improved productivity and reported reduced stress.

Widespread adoption faces several obstacles. Most companies that have experimented with a four-day week are small. Many larger companies haven’t embraced the concept. And at some companies trying four-day weeks, some workers have reported struggling to get everything done in that time.

In the British study, which ran from June to November, most employees didn’t work more intensively, researchers say. Rather, they and their bosses sought to make work days more efficient with hacks such as cutting back on meetings and ensuring employees had more time to focus on completing tasks. On a scale of 0 (very negative) to 10 (very positive), employers on average scored their productivity and performance over the six months at 7.5. A survey conducted halfway through the trial found 46 per cent of companies said their business productivity had remained about the same, while 34 per cent reported a slight improvement and 15 per cent a significant improvement.

Meanwhile, 39 per cent of employees said they were less stressed than before the pilot program started; about half reported no change. Nearly half observed improvement in mental health, and 37 per cent also noted an improvement in physical health.

Claire Daniels, chief executive of Trio Media, a 13-employee digital-marketing agency based in Leeds, says she joined the trial to see whether a more effectively structured week could improve her business’s productivity. Before starting, she and her staff tracked and analysed their work week and concluded 20 per cent of it was wasted in unessential meetings, business travel and other inefficiencies.

She and her staff no longer hold marathon daily team meetings. And in longer meetings involving clients and multiple presentations, employees drop in for portions and leave again, depending on how necessary their attendance is. The hardest part, she says, is for staff to make sure they don’t slip back into old work mindsets or habits. Productivity was the same, or slightly improved, and revenue rose 47 per cent compared with the previous year. Daniels says she wants to continue the trial for another six months before making a permanent change, “but I don’t see us going back to a typical five-days-a-week model”.

The Wall Street Journal