Science confirms what we all suspected: Four-day weeks rule Employees work better and tire less when working a four-day week, according to a six-month trial involving thousands of individuals. The research, led by Boston College associate professor of sociology Wen Fan and economics professor Juliet Schor, also found that changes to working patterns led to better job satisfaction and …
Surely the translation is that people who worked a five day week were so much happier working only four days that they did a lot more work in the reduced time? During the first miners' strike when Ted Heath was the UK's PM, we had a three day working week for factories, and productivity was allegedly only marginally less than for a five day week.
In Charles Dickens' book 'Hard Times' people worked six or seven day weeks. In 'A Christmas Carol', Bob Cratchit was expected to work on Christmas Day. Poor people have always had to work long hours. It would be interesting to compare with the productivity of people who have never worked more than four day weeks, or whether the effect lasts after a few years of four day weeks.
It's useful to consider that, although some studies have involved productivity, this one didn't. The article makes no mention of whether workers were as productive per hour or per week across the study but instead refers to "burnout, job satisfaction, and mental and physical health". Those things have a major effect on productivity in the long term, but they do not prove productivity is unchanged in the short term. Some other studies have found that productivity is unchanged, although others do not, usually because whether productivity changes depends on annoying little details like whether the companies that switched canceled pointless meetings to free up time or not, which depends on how many pointless meetings they had to cancel.
"Those things" have an immediate impact on productivity, as someone who isn't satisfied with their job is not going to do it to the best of their ability for the simple reason that they don't enjoy what they're doing one little bit. They don't want to do it - they just need the money! Because like it or not, life takes money, and a hell of a lot more of it each and every single year of the kind of Trumptardian inflation the whole world is having to deal with. (Not to be confused with the Whovians, who are a noble and peaceful lot except when discussing which is THE best Doctor...)
And if that's the case, then you can put numbers to that and ... the authors didn't. Maybe they didn't because collecting and comparing productivity numbers is actually really hard. I'm sure that all of us in an IT-related field have seen the attempts to put a number on our performance, but number of computers fixed, lines of code written, task board tickets closed, plan document pages written, etc per week tend not to be useful numbers. Perhaps that's the only reason they didn't draw a conclusion about that.
And maybe they didn't because it's really not as simple as you state. Whether I'm productive can have lots of causes, my happiness is only one of them, and it has a larger effect in the long term than it does in the short term. I've had weeks where I was not enjoying my work at all but I was getting a lot done, usually because someone wanted something urgently (occasionally there was a real need, other times they just demanded it and were in a position to do so). Quite frequently, that was accomplished by working lots of hours to do it. Great, we have a datapoint, everyone should work long nights and we'll get productivity. Except, of course, that at the end of such a week, I was a lot more tired, things had been neglected, and even if I wanted to work that hard continuously, I couldn't, and of course I didn't want to which would have made it even worse. Let's take the opposite approach: I'll work one day a week on full pay. That will make me very happy, but the job won't get done. I may be very productive during that day, but it won't be enough time for me to do as much stuff as I was doing before. The link is not as absolute as you describe.
For each set of person and task, there are a few curves modeling productivity. Work too many hours and it suffers. Work too few hours and it does as well. The short term, medium term, and long term curves will be different. Somewhere on that curve is the local maximum for output of suitable quality, but that peak on the short term curve might be well into the very bad end of the long term curve. The biggest problem though is that the only way to even start to guess at what those curves might look like is to make everyone run through multiple years of tests, and by then, the data is likely out of date and they hate you. This is why we end up having to guess at something that's reasonable for those doing the work and those paying for the results, using large studies to try to evaluate it. This study doesn't, but that doesn't mean you can decide for it what the answer should be.
Despite talking about nuance you are attempting to view this as black and white. It isn't and that was stated.
On one hand we have a perceived successful study with a one day reduction that concentrated on measuring employee health and happiness. This often isn't measured in any substantive way for these comparisons because metrics are seen as more important despite their known inaccuracy (often enough outright inapplicability).
On the other hand you are talking about measuring metrics while confirming they are useless, then arguing essentially that it's all in their heads and comparing the reduction to only one willing day a week.
This is incoherent, for one thing it was a 6 month study. A year would have been better, but "yay less hours" doesn't carry that long. In many offices actual productivity cannot be measured with the metrics most often gathered. The only thing left is whether expectations or predictions map to results in a meaningful way. This is itself unreliable depending on who makes those predictions and why the results are different. Investors only care if line go up every quarter, so their perspective of a problem will always blame not working harder, but that is almost never true.
If you actually want productivity to factor in you need a job with fixed input and output with static goals. That only exists in government and even then many things can interfere. Even HR offices have times they are either overrun or empty, Trying to chase productivity there would cost money. What is "productivity" when you manage a power station at a dam? What about a hotdog stand, where location matters far more than anything an employee can do? What about a team of engineers? Are they "unproductive" for not solving hard problems fast enough? What about when management decides to use an external product that alerts performance? Who is productive, or not, then?
This is about employee health and happiness, a metric that affects productivity more than any other change an employer can make.
I argue about productivity because some people stated that this study found that the benefits of a shorter work week were present with equal productivity. The study did not find that. The study did not determine what happened with productivity. The people stating that it did were misinformed and their statements would mislead others.
Productivity is relevant, and it being difficult to measure will not make it irrelevant. Convincing people who can make this happen will require more information about this number, making this study incomplete. Sometimes, needed information is annoying to obtain, but we cannot ignore it because it's inconvenient. We can't decide that the answer is what we would like because it's inconvenient. There are only two things we can do:
1. Act scientifically, try to find a way to measure it, study that thing, and expose the methodology to challenge by other researchers.
2. Decide not to study it and just demand a change without research.
The approaches in the middle, only researching the parts that look good while skipping the rest, is pointless and counterproductive.
It won't when employers start trying to bring pay into line with the 4 days.
That one extra day in the week is a lot more than just 24 hours to a lot of people. It's one day less of childcare (which is between £5k-£7k a year in some parts of the country), it's one less day of commuting expense, it's an extra day to mentally recharge...it's a lot of things to a lot of people.
As long as pay doesn't decrease and the value of that day is preserved, productivity will remain.
I'm not really interested in the productivity and labour impact to be honest, this isn't China or Soviet Russia, productivity is important, but it's not core to the progress or society. I'm interested in the health impacts. Will a 4 day week generally improve the health of the population? I think so.
"I'm not really interested in the productivity and labour impact to be honest,"
The companies who are asked to implement it will be, though. If you want this to happen, there are a few ways to convince someone with the power to make it happen:
1. It will save you money.
2. It will make you the same amount of money, but people will like working for you more, which simplifies back to "it will save you money" after all once you think about reducing recruiting and turnover costs.
3. It will cost you a small amount of money, but when you factor in those things, you come out even.
4. It will cost you money, but it will cost your competitors more money.
5. You don't have a choice; if you don't do it, nobody will agree to work for you.
6. You have no choice, it will be mandated.
If you can convince someone that one of those things is correct, it could happen. If the one you convince them of is number 6, their response will be to do what they can to make it not mandated, at which they will succeed, so better that it's one of the first five. If you can't, then it won't be implemented. A productivity number helps with this, and some studies can be cited which found that productivity was not impaired. I'm not sure how much I believe them, because the summaries tend to suggest that productivity wasn't impaired because pointless meetings got canceled which suggests you could have probably improved it by just doing the cancel meetings bit without the extra day off bit, but still, that can help make the case. This paper doesn't consider that aspect, which is fair enough, but that means it's missing an important element because "health improves with same amount of work done" is a much more convincing headline than "health improves, work done decreases", and we don't have enough data to know which one this is.
Don't forget, now that generative ai exists, every CEO wants to believe they can eventually fire everyone and just have a money button. For now they will be content to argue that current positions aren't worth as much as they used to be and try to cut as many full time positions as possible (the next best things to getting rid of employees is dripping any benefits they used to make). This is their business case and it's being tested right now.
It is, and I expect that many of them will find that it doesn't work and they've destroyed something that used to function quite well. In my opinion, I wouldn't mind if they could actually accomplish it; if they can make a computer do the job with equal or better quality, I don't mind that they do and someone loses the manual job that's now been automated. My primary concern is that they will pretend that's what they've accomplished when they actually have a computer that does the job much worse, then use unethical tactics to make the customers or other employees compensate for that externality.
I'm not very sure how this is related to the four-day week thing, though. I'm referring to productivity because, if we can prove that productivity is unchanged when shrinking the week, then it will be much easier to make it happen, whereas if we can't or say we can without actually proving it, it will be harder to convince those who can make it happen to do so. The people paying others to work don't want to pay more to get less, and they will try not to do that, but if we can demonstrate that they're not getting less, it might actually work out. That requires to actually know that would happen, and the people employing others are going to be harder to convince than I am.
I downvoted you for two reasons:
1. "As long as pay doesn't decrease and the value of that day is preserved, productivity will remain." makes no sense
2. "I'm not really interested in the productivity" where do you think your pay comes from - if productivity goes down so may your job
The pay wasn’t reduced, but the hours were. That is a pay rise - per hour, per day, and per unit of life reclaimed. Less unpaid commuting, fewer incidental costs, and more time to sleep, think, or simply exist. Of course people were more satisfied.
Next they’ll commission a study to confirm water is wet.
More sleep = better functioning brain.
Not just sleep, but probably more actual leisure time.
Back in the day when a single worker could support a family and their partner kept house, they could come in from their 40-hour week and switch off - because the housewife/husband (yes, rarer, but do exist!) had cleaned, done the laundry, shopping and collected offspring from school and probably got dinner on. The worker's unpaid commute was probably also shorter and less stressful, and they might even have done some reading or relaxing if they were on public transport rather than having to drive (on much quieter roads). Mixed development meant a lot of light industry was co-located with residential work, so lots of people were walking-distance from work. They might have had a Friday drink at the staff social club before coming home, back when those still existed.
That's a rosy picture and it wasn't all sweetness and light. But it's also not an entirely unfair representation of how the labour market worked, at least for a while.
The contribution of the home-maker in cleaning/cooking/shopping/childcare went unnoticed by economists, since no money changed hands. The GDP valuation of a week's housework was zero. It only counts as "real" work if you pay someone to do it!
Effectively, a couple did 10 days work between them - 5 in the household, 5 in industry.
These days, most households are reliant on dual income to pay exorbitant rent or cover the mortgage on expensive housing. This means that two adults each work a 40-hour week, but when they come home they still need to clean, shop, cook, do laundry and manage childcare (which is exorbitantly expensive). So they've done 10 days a week in industry, but the weekend only affords a further 4 days for housework. So basically, people don't get weekends any more. They can't make up for that lost 5 days of housework. They have to make an effort to plan going out, and catch up with chores in the evenings when they're already tired. Some of this is managed by lowered standards. You don't have the houseproud homemakers pointlessly hoovering twice a day. Many offices are also more casual, dispensing with the need to iron 5 shirts for the week and pick out a tie. Conversely, you have to devote time to thinking about your broadband/phone/energy provider because they're all going to pillage your bank account if you don't keep on top of your "new customer deals" and switch supplier. This was not something you even had to think about when you just got your monthly bill from BT or the Electric Board.
It's unsurprising that home deliveries and services like Hello Fresh/Gousto have become more popular, relieving people of having to finish work and then engage in cognitive effort for domestic chores. Food just arrives with a recipe and you make it. People are tired. They're tired of coming home and then having to spend the evening doing housework and admin to the exclusion of all else. Modern life is unnecessarily complicated. I want a broadband tariff where I pick a speed/tier and never have to f-ing think about it again, or worry about it jumping from £30/mo to £50/mo because my "deal" ran out.
Moving to a 4-day week isn't just about actual sleep in bed. It gives people a "housework & admin day", which means they can actually have some leisure time over the actual weekend (or do housework on a Sunday. How you use that time is up to the individual).
Paints an accurate if Dickensian picture of modern life for the majority.
I don't think that is going to change, certainly not for the better, anytime soon if ever.
The back pressure from observing these dismal lives of their parents on today's youth might well encourage many of them to seek alternative life journeys.
(Well. I mean is that all there is ? No thanks !)
In England, Sunday trading laws mean supermarkets open late and close early - so your only real day to catch up becomes a battle of queues, noise, and crowded car parks. Saturdays aren't much better, with reduced hours and longer waits. And forget the peace of a 1am shop - 24-hour supermarket opening times are gone.
If you're neurodivergent, it's a weekly assault on the senses. What used to be a quiet, manageable task is now engineered chaos.
They’ve quietly stripped away every margin of rest and dignity. Shopping takes longer. Life admin eats your evenings. And somehow we need studies to realise that giving people a fraction of their time back makes them happier. The system isn’t broken - it’s working exactly as intended. Keep workers tired, hungry, and too drained to question it.
"They’ve quietly stripped away every margin of rest and dignity. "
The flip side is that now the supermarket staff are not expected to do the overnight shifts.
I see this quite a bit with the 4 day week supporters. They want the extra day of no work to run errands and do stuff that involves lots of other people being at work.
"keep workers tired, hungry, and too drained to question it."
By making them work night shifts to satisfy your desire for an easy shopping experience?
The benevolent decree: “Night shifts aren’t good for most people” - therefore let’s remove them entirely, even from those who want them.
People took night shifts for a reason - they often paid more, were quieter, and suited carers, neurodivergent workers, students, and anyone juggling life outside the standard 9–5. Just because you don’t want that schedule doesn’t mean it should be abolished for everyone else.
Stripping away options in the name of wellbeing isn’t progress - it’s control dressed up as care, where people are denied autonomy so others can feel virtuous about “protecting” them.
The problem is in the first reason: "they often paid more". Why did they often pay more? Because they're worse jobs. And the more normal the bad shifts get, the less well paid they are.
I remember when Sunday opening started: people got triple time (only double time on Saturdays) and it was presented as a good thing because worker choice. Now every hour, every day of the week is often just single time, because now it's "normal" to work at weekends so everyone has a choice. But the buses aren't there, and we now have people getting taxis to there supermarket job and back on a Sunday, burning up more than half of their wage. They do this because if they don't agree to work the Sunday shift, they'll be flagged as "not a team player" and be let go.
But weekend work is only bad in that it involves missed opportunity for leisure and time with family. Night work is biologically, medically damaging. The human is a diurnal animal and adopting a nocturnal lifestyle is actively harmful. The true cost of night work is borne by the workers in most cases. I imagine air-traffic control is exceptionally rigorous about night shifts and probably pays it exceptionally well because the affect on the worker of broken nights has clear and obvious consequences in the real physical world.
There is a small cohort of people who biologically prefer night shifts.
While the majority might like 9-5, significant minorities are wired to stay up very late - and are harmed by getting up in time for a 9am start.
Most of the issues come from forcing everyone into the same mould, really.
Nobody is saying that we should or even can deny people the choice to take worse positions. Shops that cut night shifts did not do it because we were trying to stop them. Mostly, they canceled them because those are the worst shifts, they would have to pay a lot to get people to agree to work them, and they didn't want to pay a lot. Either they didn't want to pay any shift more than another, and they would have to, or they were willing to pay a shift more, but doing so meant it wouldn't be profitable enough for their liking. That was considered easier than cutting a different shift because there are fewer people who want to take it or because there are fewer customers making it worthwhile.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here, since presumably you're not suggesting we mandate that businesses fill shifts at all hours. The businesses and workers will continue to follow the very typical pattern of deciding what shifts to offer and take based on costs and benefits.
Agreed. I've done stints at two companies that had shift work. The first one had fixed shifts and those that liked graveyard were happy staying on graveyard. In fact they preferred not to mingling with anyone from the other two shifts. The second company had rotating shifts. Everyone hated that.
No, asking for a four-day week or extended opening hours isn’t a demand to enslave others for my convenience. It’s a call to design an economy that reflects reality - that people live complex, asynchronous lives and need flexibility, not paternalistic uniformity.
Night shifts weren’t scrapped out of compassion. They were cut to reduce costs - hurting workers who chose those hours because they fit their lives better. Stripping away flexibility and calling it “dignity” is like slashing bus routes and branding it a wellness initiative.
And the idea that wanting time off while others work is selfish? That’s pure fantasy. Economies function because of specialisation and division of labour - not because everyone does the same thing at the same time. Not everyone can build a house, bake bread, drive a bus, dig a trench, repair a boiler, or deliver a parcel simultaneously. The entire point of a functioning society is that people do different things at different times - that’s what makes anything work at all.
Pretending that rest is only legitimate if everyone rests together isn’t solidarity - it’s a delusional control fantasy. It flattens reality, ignores how complex societies work, and imagines dignity as something handed down, on a timer. Worse, it disguises cost-cutting and erosion of services as concern for worker wellbeing - corporate gaslighting at scale.
The problem isn’t that people want more rest. It’s that the system gives them none - then shames them for noticing.
You can also say that night shifts in retail shops were created to increase profits.
The world has changed massively from the first concepts of the 5 days work, 2 days rest. There was no consumerism. The local shop had some meat, some vegetables and some bread and you went to the pub in the evening. That was it.
"Pretending that rest is only legitimate if everyone rests together isn’t solidarity "
Actually it is legit. Realistically the only time the vast majority of the UK actually rests is the 25th and 26th of December. Unless you work in an essential profession such as medicine or emergency services or keeping the lights on. And really the 26th is now when a load of sales start so if you're in retail you get 1 day... The idea of the 'bank holiday' was to give everyone a day off. Now they are days for rampant consumerism.
As an educated salaried wage slave I get the luxury of a predictable set of days off so people in badly paid shift work to allow me to give my hard earned to the megacorps.
Night shifts were embraced because electricity allowed for useful productivity at night. They did not turn every business into a 24 hour shop because that is a headache to manage. B2b arrangements are going to be during the day because you need periods of regular time to *do* business, there are far less people willing or able to work those hours for many reasons and also because the night shifts downtime off regular business allowed for asynchronous work that would interrupt the day employees (anything from janitorial to maintenance).
Having most employees work in an office at the same time is not about solidarity at all, and never was. It's just two things, external meetings control.
Why do you think so many corporations pulled people back from remote work despite saving enormous amounts of money on real estate? It sure wasn't productivity or efficiency to restrict you pool of employees to people who are willing to come in or move there.
Your essential services point actually gives up the game because there are a truly massive number of people working on holidays you didn't seem to be aware exist. Also, a lot of employees work every bank holiday. In nice places they get extra pay for it, and it can even be a competition for who gets the bonus, trading your holiday for being able to buy a nice meal out with the family and pay the bills. Whenever your next weekend is.
>” And forget the peace of a 1am shop - 24-hour supermarket opening times are gone.”
For a period this suited our lifestyle: baby didn’t want to sleep, might as well go shopping…
It was a shock a few years later when working, having a real need to visit a local 24hr supermarket to discover they had a few months previously ceased overnight opening…
>”The contribution of the home-maker in cleaning/cooking/shopping/childcare went unnoticed by economists, since no money changed hands. The GDP valuation of a week's housework was zero. It only counts as "real" work if you pay someone to do it!”
Whilst the economists (mostly men…) didn’t notice, from reports divorce lawyers did notice and argued accordingly in their efforts to achieve an equitable settlement for the “unpaid homemaker”. Which probably says something about the observational skills of economists…
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A brilliant summary - I did 4 days (80% pay) for years and it was brilliant. I'm temporarily back on 5 days, in a new job, as I need to get up to speed. But it's brutal and you can really feel the difference. No time to do anything, and the weeks go by in a blur. I hope to revert to 4 days next year...
I upvoted you because I agree with a lot of your post, but I think you've either missed out or deliberately ignored an expenditure category (there's one brief mention). Back in the rose tinted days of yore there were nowhere near as many ways (oooo shiny) to spend/waste money.
Please refer back to Mark Twain - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Back in the rose tinted days of yore there were nowhere near as many ways (oooo shiny) to spend/waste money.
Yes... and no. There have always been ways for people to spend money. People had hobbies - whether it was stamp collecting, pigeon fancying, darts (and drinking!), astronomy, photography or target shooting. It is true that there has been huge growth in consumerism, and that's been coming for a long time - fast fashion emerged in the 1950s-70s. Zara refined this in the 90s and Shein have raised it to an art form in ultra-fast fashion, with cheap clothes treated almost as single-wear disposable items. The tsunami of textile going to landfill is unbelievable. There was no shortage of rubbish to spend your money on in the 1970s, often advertised quite aggressively as well. Although you probably had to put more effort into actually making a purchase than just clicking your phone (even if it was only picking up the phone to place a telephone order).
I think the interesting thing there is that much expenditure was on hobbies that people went and participated in over the weekend and evenings. They supported local businesses (camera shops, whatever) although mail order was also popular. These hobbies were often sociable - their loss is driving the loneliness epidemic we keep hearing about.
The growth of low-effort entertainment (anything TV-related - Prime/Netflix/etc, some gaming - through there's nothing wrong with video games per se, any more than getting a group together to play board games) and labour-saving services (Gousto, Hello Fresh, etc) are not - I think - coincidental and reflect that people have a bunch of life-admin and housework to do when they get home from work, and then just want to flop for an hour before bed. Businesses have also pivoted the products they previously sold into lower-value, higher-margin subscription services that keep the MBAs happy in their doomed pursuit of perpetual growth, fuelling their fevered imaginings that quarterly profits actually mean higher productivity and broader economic success.
Alas, the economy doesn't work like that, although our political classes still don't seem to have figured out why all these "record profits" aren't converting into economic growth or tax revenues!
Well put, you could argue this essentially started to take off in the 50's. There was huge inequality, but for the middle class that did exist, things were looking good. Mail order was huge, home shops became a staple hobby of the technically inclined and that generated enough commerce to increase social mobility for the poor too, as long as they were in the right place at the right time.
Only if you think hours worked is more important than work product delivered.
Study after study has shown that there's an upper limit on productive hours one can work per week and 40 is in excess of that by average. At a point extra hours become anti-productive as the errors accumulate and take more time to fix than the time spent making them.
Despite pretty much every such study finding that four-day work weeks are a massive benefit for employees and have negligible impact on work "productivity", I expect that both corporate managment and politicians will still delay, deny, and defend against any such change for decades to come.
Sheesh. The senior manglement where I work recently issued an edict that everyone has to be in the local head office at least three days every week, regardless of whether they have colleagues that they work with in that office or not. All my colleagues are in another office some 450km south of me, but even so, I've been told that I face disciplinary action if I refuse to waste six hours every week travelling to and from the company's HQ to sit in an open plan office and try to do work which requires extended periods of concentration.
Trying to sell a four day week to manglement which is this incompetent, has zero chance of succeeding. Evidence, logic or common sense based thinking is beyond these people.
If it wasn't for the fact that I'm now old enough to not even be considered for a position at a new company, they would have received my resignation the same day the edict was announced.
One reason WFH is disliked by management is that they can only measure their effectiveness as managers when the staff are present to be managed. If staff can get the work done unsupervised, how do they justify their position (status and pay)?
Factories paying piece-work are vilified as slave drivers; the option is to pay people for attending, irrespective of productivity. The former, if properly established, requires less supervision and management to be productive, as staff are incentivised to do their best work (and there is peer pressure on slackers). The latter often requires active supervision and incentives to get anywhere near the same output.
A third option is a cooperative where staff are trusted to play their part as well as they can.
A lot depends on trust, both ways.
"A lot depends on trust, both ways."
That's the problem: The management cannot be trusted.
The management is hired and paid bonusses to extract maximal profit from the lower staff (shareholder value maximization).
"Trust" is there to be betrayed in the name of shareholder value and bonus incentives.
-- A third option is a cooperative where staff are trusted to play their part as well as they can. --
Brilliant idea. Will the staff also be liable for debts & liabilities?
My aging memory could be failing me again but I recall reading that paying for hours worked came about because a coal mine wanted to smooth output. Previously with piecework the workers did enough to get the amount of money they wanted and knocked off for the week.
"Brilliant idea. Will the staff also be liable for debts & liabilities?"
That depends on the legal status of the organisation. Most companies are legal entities and the debt liability of any individual is limited by their investment - basically as shareholders. The biggest risk for staff in a cooperative lies in the level of their earnings - always positive in the absolute, but can run negative when taken in relation to expectations. This bites when future earnings are used as a hedge against debt and, if those earnings fall below expectations, then the resulting debt becomes a financial liability. However, that risk is not limited to cooperatives.
This is definitely a lie. And it's exactly the kind of thing that led to the redneck revolt, which was essentially a war and the US debt in the army to put it down. Consider who said that, and when. Do you think those miners had *any* incentive to work hard at the pay they had?
See also working from home. Over COVID, our productivity *improved* when everyone was WFH, but the CEO owns the office and rents it back to himself for tax purposes etc, so BACK TO THE OFFICE EVERYONE, BIG JIM NEEDS A NEW YACHT etc.
Edit: I see myself and may_i are on the same page....
In some ways productivity improved, but in others it's reduced. Taking a sample size of one (i.e. ME), we now do a good amount of WFH, and I quite like it - being autistic I often find the office hard to cope with. But, there are serious downsides in that as a team we just do not get that time together where the ad hoc interactions really make a difference. I doubt if there are many, if any, who have never discovered something important just by overhearing it talked about in the office. And while we have online tools to communicate, they don't work for this aspect of office life.
When sat with colleagues, you can look up and tell from their body language if they are free for a quick ad-hoc question, or are engaged in something they really don't want interrupted. You really cannot tell that from the "busy/free" indicator in ${collaboration tool}. The result is that you tend to interact less, and get interrupted more when trying to concentrate.
Of course, with so many (including myself) WFH so much (or being based at different offices, because "we can do everything virtually these days"), as others have already pointed out - you can end up commuting into the office to not sit with your colleagues !
For good measure, some of our offices have been "improved" - instead of having Your desk", you now have to hot desk (which means either having the foresight to know when you need to be in the office, or just fight to get a decent desk - not to mention playing the "will the IT work" russian roulette). When it was pointed out that the new arrangement was actively hostile to a fair number of employees - the answer is "go an use one of the quiet zones". FFS, if you do that, you are sitting in a different part fo the office to your colleagues - so why bother going into the office in the first place.
There are partial solutions to the interactive office thing, but I've never seen it applied outside very small very independent teams. And that is live chat. Not Zoom, but ideally something that supports positional audio. This allows for not just office socialization, but the ad-hoc communication you get when someone overhears you discussing a problem with someone else. It also simultaneously gives you the ability to hear the drone of your teammates, and shut it off if necessary. You can also take it with you.
Back when I did this it was with Mumble on a company VPS over VPN, it's a room people can pop into rather than a call, very different.
This.
The company I work for built their huge swanky HQ a decade ago and then promptly sold it to a property management company and entered into a 30 year lease. Now, the senior manglement are doing everything possible to try to maintain the illusion that this was a good idea.
Not strictly true, the 4 day working week in public sector organisations showed a distinct decrease in productivity and in many customer facing organisations, productivity (as defined as being available to customers and responding to queries also declined.) You also have to wonder how long before the 4 day week benefit wears off and we are pushing for a 3 day week. Much like the benefits from working from home all wore off and productivity and issues with company culture and the loss of intrinsic company information all came to the fore with the work from home option.
And as for people being upset about it, of course they are, working from home is a great way to have a couple of jobs on the go and do all you want at the expense of the company. UK productivity is some of the worst in the world.
Upvote. When a council ran their staff on a 4-day week, the housing dept closed on Friday afternoons. Because.
Of course, Friday is the peak day for evictions, so that meant that just-made-homeless people had to spend a weekend on the pavement until Monday morning. (https://web.archive.org/web/20240303220106/https://swale.gov.uk/news-and-your-council/news-and-campaigns/latest-news/changes-to-office-opening-times)
> When a council ran their staff on a 4-day week, the housing dept closed on Friday afternoons. Because.
Why was *everyone* off on Friday? Why didn't management consider when the majority of critical calls would come in? If what you say is true (the provided link does not mention evictions or any other downside, so I cannot say), it sounds like the "because" was the poor planning and poor execution on the part of the people in charge, not because of the 4-day week.
I don't know the situation there, but one reason that might happen is what happens when you don't have many staff to begin with. It's easy to make sure there are always people available when there are ten of them, because you could make it so only two are taking each day* and there are always eight left. It doesn't work very well when the number is low and the normal day off plus one or two people off sick could make that zero people available. Knowing the risk, someone might decide that predictably shortened hours might be better than turning someone away because there's unexpectedly nobody available today.
* This brings us to another question about four-day weeks: how do we decide which day people are going to not work? When does it make more sense for everyone to take off the same day, and when do we need to spread it out? And when we do spread it out, how do we balance those who get the good days? Because getting Friday off is nice, because you can do something longer or get a longer rest, whereas taking of Tuesday will be equally useful if you're just doing small things but is not as flexible for anything larger. If it changes randomly so everyone gets some Fridays, then it makes scheduling recurring things on that day off difficult.
In practice this isn't a problem and yes something that every 7 day shop already handles even with 5 day weeks. People bid for shifts and sick with them unless there's a problem. Periodically you give everyone an opportunity to change deliberately, most will want to start on Monday.
As for scheduling things, being off on Monday is actually great. You can get almost anything done or started.
This isn't from 4 day weeks, it's very obviously mismanagement, period. 4 day weeks doesn't mean you cut a day off the week, it means you have some staff starting on Monday and others starting on Tuesday. It actually leads to better coverage because the weekend fatigue doesn't hit as hard, and in 6-7 day offices you have people bumped into the weekend too. This adds up to very reliable, even coverage of services throughout the week and prevents the tile off things you are talking about from happening.
"UK productivity is some of the worst in the world."
But as we, as a country, actually produce very little now, does it really matter? Does more pointless meetings, leading to more pointless meeting minutes, actually benefit anyone? Microsoft and other big corps like to talk about the extra 'productivity' which their new shiny AI-enabled, cloud based crapware enables - but what exactly is getting produced using them?
Different story in manufacturing or agriculture of course (and some essential services such as medicine) - but a vastly reduced number of people work in many of these fields than was the case a few decades ago.
> You also have to wonder how long before the 4 day week benefit wears off and we are pushing for a 3 day week.
Well we've had about 80 years since the 5-day week went global, so I don't think you need to get your panties in a bunch about that for a while. Your miserable existence will probably be over long before you have to renew your anger about people seeking a better life for themselves and their children.
EDIT: after some digging i found an opinion piece by the author which had a footnote about the actual article, and it's yet to be published...
I won't go on a rant about journalism reporting on unreleased and unverifyable reasearch articles today...
I'll keep this for posterity, and hope that the actual research won't have the same issues, but many fundamental flaws remain, especially the amount of variables introduced by efficiency improvements.
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For anyone who wants to read along, here's the paper [PDF].
Google scholar mentions this as published 2025, looks like a draft or preprint maybe?
The same researchers have published in 2023 too, but i'm assuming what i found is the paper the article mentions. (i haven't seen mention of sleep data though, which is odd).
(Note for el reg: Please provide DOIs, that makes my life a whole lot easier....)
They went with a 100-80-100 rule, so 100% pay, 80% worked hours, 100% of the work done. To accomplish this, they give company-wide help to reorganize work, along with some "individual adaptation".
> "While there is individual adaptation to achieve that goal, for approximately eight weeks before starting a trial, 4DWG offers webinars to help companies engineer “work reorganisation,” in which low and zero-productivity practices, such as unnecessary meetings and excessive distractions, are reduced. Companies are encouraged to initiate a bottom-up, participatory process in which employees discover ways to save time and improve productivity." (pp.4-5)
So the question is, are they measuring the effect of the work week here, or the effects of cutting the b.s. and working for a company that listens to your feedback about the work process?
> "While most organizations attempt to maintain 100% productivity, not all do. In some cases, high levels of employee burnout and resignations have led management to offer less work with no expectation of higher hourly productivity. Anecdotally, these seem to be primarily health care organizations, service providers and nonprofits (Schor 2025)." (p.5)
I predict that a lot of companies will end up this way. Increased efficiency = higher workloads for most for-profit companies, and the sample of companies here is voluntary, which means companies that likely have an interest in employee well-being in the first place.
Another issue with this is that it's not possible to do a double-blind test for obvious reasons. The paper itself mentions (rightfully so) that they only use qualitative measures, and quantitative measures should be used in future research (p.16). In this situation that is a significant shortcoming in my opinion, due to the subjective nature of the measures and extensive level of participant engagement that is generally considered positive.
A lot of companies seem to agree:
> "Of the fifteen companies that provided a reason, four reported wanting to see better, more effectively-measured benefits from the trial. They mentioned not observing significant improvements in well-being, and/or performance, which was largely consistent with the reported changes on these metrics among those who provided them."
I would be very interested in seeing some more raw data from this paper, as they do a poor job dissecting it. They generalize a lot of statements, and they fail to explain what constitutes to success or failure when implementing a 4-day workweek. What i gather, they determine a "success" is when the company implements the 4DW, and a failure if they don't. I don't like this at all. These companies invest significant resources on improving work efficiency and employee well-being, sometimes reducing the work the employees do for the same money. I would posit that it is only successful if they see a certain degree of benefit from 4DW, given the investment. Companies that choose not to revert 4DW for some employees may have other reasons, i can imagine quite a few barriers to reintroducing a 5DW to people who have had a 4DW for half a year, and if there are no apparent downsides they may as well keep it around. This does not negate previous investments, and i'd consider this a failure from an economic standpoint.
I believe this may also be an indicator of bias, as the auther clearly states there is little empirical analysis showing there are benefits to a 4DW, but he still believes simply implementing it is a success.
There's more, but this essay has been long enough already. I really think they could've gotten more out of this research, but this is a bit of a nothing-burger the way i see it.
>> unnecessary meetings
That's entirely on management, who have the "need" to be seen "managing." Instead of doing actual work.
So much "management" is performative art, a con game that only fools other management that ANYTHING productive is being done by management. As one example, PowerPoint presentations. If you can't whiteboard it with a few sketches, you haven't spent enough time to actually know what you're talking about, so spare us the demotivational task of sitting through you reading the text off boring slides.
Return to office is something management needs to help justify their useless make-work.. Everyone knows it.
I especially love management-heavy teams where the week is filled with meetings about why work isn’t getting done - and when the people actually doing the work point out it’s because of the meetings, management schedules another meeting to unpack that revelation.
Now they’re demanding a return to the office, convinced that physically breathing down people’s necks will somehow restore the productivity lost when workers were forced to sit through the same idle meetings - just with worse coffee and a longer commute.
I see another problem with this article: it is only relevant to shop and office workers. It is utterly inapplicable to manual workers, miners, agricultural workers, train-drivers, airline pilots, etc, i.e. everybody whose job REQUIRES them to be present and actively involved for a fixed amount of time during the working week, so bung it in the waste bin along with all the other imperfectly thought-out woo-woo lifestyle rubbish.
Not really. A four-day week should work as well for manual workers as office workers. The problem is that some of that may be equally badly. A person working 80% of the hours might fly 80% as many planes, but a helpdesk tech working 80% of the hours might fix 80% as many user errors and a retail clerk working 80% of the hours might sell 80% as much stuff. There may be occasional positions where productivity isn't as linked to time spent, and the reduction in time available might encourage management to waste less of the time that remains, but there's no guarantee of either.
That doesn't mean it wouldn't work. The health benefits reported in this paper may be a little obvious, but they are also real. That helps the employer even if the employees aren't being more productive as a result. It might reduce turnover rates, increase morale, and various other things which, while difficult to calculate, do have compensatory benefits to the employer. Whether those are enough to be worth 20% I don't know, but they are definitely not 0%.
4 day works weeks actually show the most benefit for factory jobs. Move the factory staff to 4 days with 10 hour days and keep the maintenance staff on 5 days 8hours which gives then a day of downtime a week to do maintenance, this increases uptime and thus output.
4 day works weeks actually show the most benefit for factory jobs.
Out of interest have you ever tried doing heavy manual work for 10 hours a day?
YMMV, but factory work is rarely heavy, manual work these days. Anything that might be a 2-person lift has a crane or lift-assist available because this is both safer and faster, benefitting both the operator(s) and business. In the world of automotive or machinery, factory workers are doing the fiddly bits that robots can't, like threading wiring looms through bulkheads and final assembly.
On a tour around a diesel engine assembly line, there was a majority of women working - because the company had concluded women had better dexterity and attention to detail than men. The block itself was on a conveyor rig, the cylinder heads were positioned with a lift-assist, which meant there was no need for any muscular "heft" - a child could do it. All the other components were individually quite small. Air tools and torque wrenches made quick (and light) work of bolts.
Most industries are not as heavily optimised as automotive, but moving heavy components around is work for a forklift or hand-truck. Companies that don't invest usually get fined by HSE within a year when an employee ends up in hospital for avoidable workplace injuries.
The biggest problem with line work is that it's dull and repetitive. Bored employees become complacent and get hurt.
In terms of heavy manual work, you want to look at farming. And yeah, they work 10 hour days when they have to (although that's also not necessarily a good thing, and one reason why farming has a high rate of workplace accidents).
So seems like what Krystal Hosting found, its a shit idea. They trialed it and then binned it. The staff apparently hated it as they had to do more work in a day to meet the missing day. And everyone became miserable.
More work from home should be allowed instead of this forcing everyone back into the office just so Alan Sugar can still collect rent on all his office properties (its the only reason he hates people working from home, as it hurts his business interests which is now mainly just property. Especially if you look back at a lot of the tat he used to make that failed, the e-mailer phone being one of those). Cutting down on the stress of having to travel and the time saved all adds up. And although you should discourage it, you'll get some people that will continue to work after hours. You can advise them not to, that they won't get paid for it, but some just want to so you can just leave them to it. Obviously, still provide a space for people that do want to come into the office.
Well duh.
Look, I have personally seen the benefits that COVID-19 has brought (albeit to horrible expense). I am a freelance Notes specialist working in Luxembourg. Before COVID-19, I was on the road every day going to one client or another. Hours wasted in commute (Luxembourg highways are notorious for being locked up in traffic jams). Up at half past five, on the road at 6:20, get to my destination at best at 8:30 - destination that is at most 50km away. That's an average of less than half a kilometer per minute. The return trip was never much better.
During COVID-19, the lockup meant that my customers all sent me detailed log-on credentials and procedures. Suddenly, I could work from home, log into a secure VPN from my professional laptop (or I was given a company laptop), and work continued. Targets were hit, progress was attained. Life went on. I had a discussion with one IT manager during that period and I told him : "Look, you call me and, if I'm available, I'm logged in and working within 10 minutes. Before, we'd have to schedule a day for me to come in, which might have been tomorrow, or next week depending on my workload and when you were able to recieve me. Isn't this better ?".
It was. But now it's almost over. The majority of my customers have recovered their precious laptops, forcing me to once again go to their office. Those for whom I have a VPN login have, for the most part, left it active - probably because they appreciate the reactivity more than having me occupy a desk in their workspace (some people are actually intelligent).
The fact is : in my line of work, working from my office/home office is 100% efficient - and sometimes I even stay logged on just to see the result of an agent running after hours (without billing that time - hey, I'm just logged on with my work computer, while I wait I'm playing Diablo III on my gaming rig).
I do not have a crystal ball, I have no idea where the workplace is going. I am sure, however, that if we manage to get beyond the "I need to count my peons and see them sweat" type of management, working will be better and more productive for everyone.
In these conditions, I don't need a 4-day week to feel and be productive.
I was able to work four days at my previous job and it was awesome for everyone involved. However, a day less... Not so sure. Too much weekend interfering with work and trying to cram everything in just three days sounds stressful.
Anyway, we will all be displaced by AI real soon now so what are we on about. Zero day work week it is (without pay, of course).
Sadly, because of the Peter Principle, middle micro-managers will always exist as they're grift their way into those positions. And because the people above them are also grifting they'll either not see it or just allow them to grift to cover up their own grifting.
A 4 day week may well work better for some people in some roles, and a 3, 5, or 6 day week may be better for others. The point is FLEXIBILITY. Back when most peoples jobs involved repetitive production line work having people there to do the work was necessary. Now it no longer is and comparing modern jobs to that type of job is comparing Apples to Rutabagas. "Office" jobs in particular are in no way comparable to factory work any more than they are comparable to farming, bricklaying, etc. My job is Tech Support but I am not required to be on call most of the time so there is no need to be available all of the working week. I do need to be able to contact customers during THEIR working hours, but where I do that from and for how many days per week very much depends on my workload and the customers needs. My work hours are flexible because often customers cannot assist with fixing issues during normal work hours, so I am flexible about when I work and I fully expect my employer to be flexible concerning work hours as well, and they are. Expecting everyone to fit into one mould/pattern is a sign of incompetent management and an inability to move with the times.
I did my engineering degree 40 years ago. We did a module on psychology and it’s the only module that is still current. The principal topic was group dynamics, how to build a functioning team and set it to work. Best thing I ever learned. It’s definitely science, just not as engineering might know it.
... in some jobs.
4 days in office, 1 at home, to concentrate on important stuff without interruptions.
When I used to work IT for major banks I sometimes did this. The helpdesk could contact me if anything needed fixing and I had remote access to my desktop in the office.
If you're working on something complex, sometimes it's best to be at you're own (home) desk, with music playing, and munchies on hand. And a cat ;-)
