Will We Ever Get the Four-Day Work Week?

This article originally appeared on VICE Germany.

Between June and December 2022, 61 companies in the UK embarked on a radical experiment: They gave employees the option to shorten their work week to four days. Organised by the non-profit 4 Day Week Global, the trial found that the vast majority of companies reported no change in business performance and productivity. On top of that, employee satisfaction improved significantly, with reported rates of stress and burnout dropping by up to 70 percent. 

The businesses involved ranged from fish and chip shops to large companies with thousands of employees. Over 90 percent of participating organisations decided to continue the programme after the end of the trial. Similar experiments have been conducted in multiple European countries, the U.S., New Zealand, Japan and South Africa, with equally positive results. 

But companies are still tinkering with how to actually carry out the programme. Even in the UK trials, some organisations just couldn’t make it work, and the ones who decided to keep with the programme are running into problems. Critics also say some industries are, by nature, incompatible with this setup, like caregiving or customer support where staff are needed 24/7.

What’s clear, though, is companies are increasingly aware that the needs of the current and future workforce are changing: People are looking to tip the scale of the current work-life balance. Some European trade unions are pulling their collective bargaining power behind this, including German metalworkers’ union IG Metall, the largest industrial union in Europe. 

So is the four-day week actually on the cards? And why aren’t most of us working shorter weeks already? We asked researcher Philipp Frey, who’s currently studying the future of work at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

VICE: In March, Lidl Austria cut short their trial of the four-day work week because nobody was interested. This is one of the biggest flops of the concept to date – what went wrong?
Philipp Frey: Their experiment didn’t have any reduction in working hours. It was a compressed workweek where employees would work the same amount of hours in fewer days. It’s no surprise it wasn’t that popular.

Having one less day of work sounds pretty awesome.
Regularly working ten hours a day is just very, very exhausting. Even worse, the rate of accidents increases, with people getting injured and making more mistakes.

So what would be better?
The ideal solution would be to have a four-day work week with significantly reduced working hours, like 32, AKA eight hours a day. Some companies have already tried the four-day week with nine and employee satisfaction increased even then.

The UK study shows that productivity actually increased slightly. People were also less likely to get sick and identified more with their companies. Resignation rates more than halved in some cases, too, making the companies more attractive to applicants.

Why four days and not three or two?
Actually, this topic is still under-researched. Perhaps we would be even more productive with fewer days, but at a certain point, there would just be too few working hours to get all your work done. You could question whether economic growth should be the most important factor in times of the climate crisis, but for now, the four-day week would be the next big step.

How can productivity be higher despite the time crunch?
Productivity is usually measured as value creation per working hour. It increased because people were simply more motivated to work. They thought, “Cool, I like my employer.” They felt more refreshed.

Productivity out of gratitude, so to speak.
Well, even more importantly, companies introduced a number of innovations in their workflow. Most of them roughly halved the number of meetings and shortened them, for example.

They also introduced “focused time” when people could work without interruptions – no emails and calls, no bothering colleagues. The interesting thing about this was that not only did people become more productive, they felt less stressed.

Some companies even made a deal with their employees to reduce working hours and introduce new technologies in return. The workforce was very receptive.

So is this a straightforward success story? Why haven’t all companies jumped on the bandwagon already?
Based on the results in the UK, that’s a valid question. Companies did achieve a slight increase in revenue, on average, but the four-day week also requires a cultural shift.

What do you mean?
“Business as usual” won’t work anymore. Those UK companies spent months thinking about how to better organise their work to maintain revenue, despite the reductions in working hours. Many people in management were hesitant to rethink their structure and fundamentally reconsider how wisely they’d organised work so far.

Could this setup work in industries like caregiving?
Yes and no. It would require staffing adjustments, which isn’t what other companies plan to do. In caregiving, the main issue is having enough staff, but this sector also has particularly poor working conditions. That's why so many people would rather work behind the cash register at Aldi, even if they’re trained. A four-day workweek with staffing adjustments could help solve that problem.

Do you work four days yourself?
I have a 75 percent contract, which means I work 30 hours a week.

That's not quite the same, is it? 23 percent of Brits already work part-time. Why would companies introduce shorter workweeks if people are already satisfied with part-time jobs?
Because the system is unfair. People have to give up a part of their salary for that, especially women with private caregiving obligations – this puts them at risk of poverty in old age. They’re punished for having to raise children. Companies would become much more attractive if it was possible to reconcile family and work, and still make a living from your salary.

How can I convince my company to participate in such an experiment?
By showing them good examples – all of this is backed by studies.

What if my management doesn't want to read the studies?
Well, if employees want a reduction in working hours, the first and most sensible step is to join a union. They can fight for it on a broader scale.

So your advice is to join unions?
Well, as a researcher, I can only say that there seems to be a positive correlation between a high level of labour organisation and better working conditions.

Then I'll ask you as a scientist: Will we get the four-day week in the near future?
I'm at least optimistic. Internationally, there’s a trend towards reducing working hours, too. Working hours in Germany were declining for decades, until 1990, and since then, they’ve stagnated. So if we were to adopt the four-day week now, we’d be coming back to the promise of progress from back then. That's why I wouldn't find it surprising, and I hope the trend is victorious.