5-2 Four Days: Work Revolution or Fad

I've been studying work since the 1980s and I've never seen anything like what's happening today. Pandemic-fueled anxiety is surging around the world. In the U.S., more than half of all employees report feeling stressed a lot of the day. Job quits are at record levels, running at 4 million a month. People are burning out. [ 00:30 ]

In response, a growing number of companies are offering a four-day, 32-hour week, but with five days of pay. Now, it's not a new idea, but the pandemic has turbocharged it. Employers are realizing that if they can rethink where people work, they can also rethink how many days they're on the job. Sound pretty great? But is it realistic? [ 00:59 ]

Well, actually, yes. Unlike policies in which one party profits at the expense of another, the four-day week can benefit workers, companies, and society. And it can even be a gateway for addressing climate change. [ 01:17 ]

But first, let's talk about the workplace. For nearly a decade, companies and governments have been experimenting with shorter hours with no cuts in pay. While the results do vary, the research shows that people are less stressed, value their jobs more, and have better lives outside of work. In most cases, they are as productive in four days as they are in five. [ 01:44 ]

Companies can also see benefits through lower turnover and a higher-quality applicant pool. Less burnout reduces health care costs, mistakes, and poor service. With colleagues, I'm studying four-day week trials now in progress in the United States and Ireland, with summer start dates for the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. We have thousands of employees participating. [ 02:09 ]

Healthwise, an education company, didn't wait for a trial to begin. In June, their employees were quitting in droves. By August, they'd implemented a four-day week. Six months later, CEO Adam Husney reports that people are dramatically happier and have never been more productive. Resignations and sick days are down, revenue has grown, and customer satisfaction scores are outstanding. [ 02:41 ]

Healthwise employees are spending their Fridays off doing family activities like sports or errands. One mother of young children reported that now she can occasionally manage a guilt-free pedicure. The four-day week can help with self-care and managing the daily stresses of systemic racism, sexism, and classism. [ 03:06 ]

Now, a key part of the model is that in return for the gift of the day off, people are willing to squeeze all their productivity into four days. So while they may be spending less time at work, they're not necessarily doing less work. The secret sauce is work reorganization, cutting out the least productive activities. Meetings are a prime target. [ 03:34 ]

Most companies reduce their frequency and length and the number of attendees. At Healthwise, people save time by messaging colleagues rather than making phone calls, which inevitably include some social chatting. They shifted personal tasks like doctor's appointments to the off day, and yes, the pace of work at the office does go up. [ 04:00 ]

One explained, "I'm not goofing off or looking at Facebook, which I was." But people have adapted, and they prefer getting their downtime as a whole day off rather than in snippets. [ 04:13 ]

Government initiatives have similar findings. In 2015, the city of Reykjavik and then the national government of Iceland started offering 36 and 35-hour weeks, eventually enrolling more than 2,500 employees. The results have been remarkable. Physical and mental stress went down, while work ethic, job satisfaction, work-life balance, and energy levels all improved. Productivity and service quality stayed the same or got better, and the trial was revenue neutral. Today, roughly 85% of all Icelandic employees are either on or eligible for these schedules. [ 05:01 ]

The governments of Spain and Scotland have announced four-day week trials in which they'll be subsidizing the fifth day's pay. Now, one reason for these successes is that with reduced work time, each hour typically becomes more productive. Norway and Denmark, the two European countries with the shortest average hours of work at about 1,380, have outsized productivity. France and Germany are similar. In contrast, the long-hours countries like the UK and Italy have much, much lower productivity. The U.S. historically led the world in productivity and would likely do better now if its work time weren't so high. [ 05:52 ]

While tech firms comprise the biggest group adopting four-day reduced-hour schedules, companies are also making the switch in banking, PR, marketing, and design, non-profits, consumer goods, even a restaurant chain. But it's also true that doing a hundred percent of the work in eighty percent of the time isn't feasible everywhere. Manufacturing was sped up decades ago. Many teachers and flight attendants need to slow down, not intensify. And of course, health care workers on the front lines of the pandemic need to work less, not more. [ 06:33 ]

Here, another government effort is instructive. In 2014, the city of Gothenburg in Sweden gave nurses at one of its facilities a six-hour day. As expected, the nurses' health and overall well-being improved, as did productivity and patient care. But in this trial, they hired new staff for the hours that weren't being covered. The striking finding was how much lower sick pay and unemployment benefits helped offset those additional salaries. [ 07:11 ]

Now, the Swedish case raises a bigger, more existential question: how much time should we be dedicating to work? In many countries, jobs are getting more, not less, demanding, and scarcity thinking—the idea that even rich countries need to tighten their belts—has taken hold. But really, we should be heading in the opposite direction. As digitization and artificial intelligence offer the chance to reduce work time, amid pandemic fatigue, we should be doubling down on restoring the quality of life and our social fabric, especially in wealthy countries where we already produce enough for everyone to have a good standard of living. [ 08:00 ]

And this path has the added benefit of addressing the climate crisis. How so, you may ask? Well, with the four-day week, there's the obvious impact of less commuting. But if we use productivity growth to continue to reduce hours of work, just by a couple of percent a year, we can create a longer-term dynamic of decarbonization. [ 08:27 ]

Research by me and others has shown this time and again across countries, across states, across households. One reason is that when people are time-stressed, they tend to choose faster and more polluting modes of travel and daily life activities. In contrast, when people get time rather than money, they tend to have a lower carbon footprint. But the bigger reason has to do with the size of the economy. By opting to work less, countries are choosing not to expand production to its max, thereby avoiding additional emissions. Carbon success stories like Germany and Denmark tend to have low annual hours. France and the Netherlands are also low on both carbon and work time. [ 09:18 ]

The four-day week is a down payment on a new way to live and work. And yes, we're going to need government help if we're going to move beyond the innovative companies that already see its virtues. But as the three-day weekend spreads, we can realize everyone deserves a right to free time. And that brings the logic of a universal basic income squarely into view, because without financial support, low earners can't afford to take that fifth day off. [ 09:53 ]

There's a lot of talk these days about the future of work and the opportunities that it offers. But there's more at stake here than opportunity. We have an imperative—an imperative to face the challenges of our current moment: the pandemic, burnout and depression, inequalities of race and income, the climate crisis. A four-day week addresses each one of these. For now, we're starting company by company, but as momentum builds and it becomes universal, we'll have made the transition from scarcity thinking to appreciating the true wealth that we possess: our ingenuity, our compassion, and our humanity. Thank you. [ 10:46 ]

Every company does it the way that works for them, and that's one of the things in our trial. We do coaching, and we work with the companies before they start to figure out, are they a company that can shut down for one day? Do they need to have 24/7 customer service available? So really, it depends, and we're seeing every type. [ 11:36 ]