Media Briefings

Results from the world’s largest trial of a four-day working week have just been revealed. For a six-month period beginning in June 2022, sixty-one organizations in the UK committed to a 20% reduction in working hours for all staff while retaining full-time production targets and maintaining full pay.

The companies reported significantly reduced rates of stress and illness in their workforces, with 71% of employees self-reporting lower levels of “burnout,” and 39% saying they were less stressed, compared to the start of the trial.

There was also a 65% reduction in sick days and a 57% decrease in the number of staff leaving participating companies, compared to the same period in the previous years. Meanwhile, company revenue increased by 1.4% on average during the trial period.

In a report of the findings presented to UK lawmakers, some 92% of companies that took part in the pilot program say they intend to continue with the four-day working week, including 29% which have made it permanent.

Research for the UK trials was conducted by a team from the University of Cambridge, Boston College and the think tank Autonomy. The trial was organized by NGO called 4 Day Week Global.

Companies from across the UK took part, including companies and NGOs involved in consultancy, housing, IT, skincare, recruitment, hospitality, marketing, and healthcare.

Many personnel in the study said they found it easier to balance work with both family and social commitments: 60% of employees found an increased ability to combine paid work with care responsibilities, and 62% reported it easier to combine work with social life.

Before the trial, many questioned whether they would see an increase in productivity to offset the reduction in working time — but this is exactly what they found.

Many employees were very eager to find efficiency gains themselves. For example, long meetings with too many people were cut short or ditched completely. Workers became much less inclined to kill time, and they actively sought out technologies that improved their productivity.

The researchers call the results a “major breakthrough moment” for the idea of shorter working weeks. As they documented, these incredible results show that the four-day week actually works across a wide variety of different sectors of the economy.

The Cambridge team conducted a large number of extensive interviews with employees and company CEOs before, during and after the six-month UK trial.

This trial follows on the heels of other pilots run by 4 Day Week Global in the U.S. and Ireland. However, the UK trial was the largest to date as well as the first to include in-depth interview research.

In terms of motivations, several senior managers told researchers they believed it would give them an edge when it came to attracting talent in the post-Covid job market.

A number of different scheduling variation were used in the trial.  Some companies stopped work completely for a three-day weekend, while others staggered a reduced workforce over a week. One restaurant calculated their 32-hour week over an entire year with longer opening times in the summer, but much shorter hours in winter.

A few companies in the trial attached strings to the reduced hours, including fewer holiday days, agreement that staff could be called in at short notice, or a “conditional” four-day week; that is one that only continued while performance targets were met.

Interviews documented how companies reduced working hours without compromising on targets. Common methods included shorter meetings with clearer agendas; introduction of interruption-free ‘focus periods’; reforming email etiquette to reduce long chains and inbox churn; new analyses of production processes; and end-of-day task lists for effective handovers, or next-day head starts.

When employees were asked how they used their additional time off, by far the most popular response was “life admin,” which includes tasks such as shopping and household chores.  Many explained how this allowed them a proper break for leisure activities on Saturday and Sunday.

As one CEO stated, when you realize that “the extra day has allowed you to be relaxed, rested, and ready to absolutely “go for it” on those other four days, you start to see realize that to go back to working on a Friday would feel really wrong.”

When it came to workplace culture, employees were generally positive, feeling more valued by their employers and describing a shared sense of purpose arising from efforts to make the four-day week a success.

However, several staff at one large company had concerns about intensifying workloads. Meanwhile, some workers at creative companies expressed disquiet over reduced worktime conviviality due to ‘focus time’ and they argued that unstructured chat often generates new ideas.

By the end of the six-month trial, many of the managers said they could not imagine returning to a five-day week.