Of course workers want a 4-day work week

Perhaps companies should too

Excerpt: "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 four-day-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-day-week 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."