So, we’re all agreed! The five-day work week needs to go. Working just four days a week can help to workers protect their mental health, according to researchers.
A team at Boston College said their landmark study, involving more than 100 companies and nearly 2,900 workers in the U.S., U.K. Australia, Canada, and Ireland, had revealed the shift was associated with a high level of satisfaction on the part of both employers and employees.
That included an improvement in productivity and growth in revenue, a positive impact on physical and mental health, and less stress and burnout. A 2024 poll of more than 2,000 full-time U.S. workers found that more than half of respondents reported feeling exhausted from chronic workplace stress within the past year.
“When my interviewee told her biggest client that she would no longer be working on Fridays, the response she got was ‘Good for you!’” recalled Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology who serves on the academic board of the non-profit, 4 Day Week Global.
The group was established to provide a platform for supporters of the four-day week. “I think that’s emblematic of how people have changed their thinking about the nature of work; we’re at a point where the three-day weekend is now seen as more reasonable.”
The companies took place in a series of six-month-long trials set up by 4 Day Week Global. The pilot program did not reduce workers’ pay and the companies and organizations were not interested in doing so. The study’s most recent data from the first and second trials, involving nearly 33 companies, was released this month.
Researchers, who were also from University College Dublin, gathered information from employees through surveys and interviews, and participating companies provided them with administrative data. They said they are analyzing changes before and after the trial, as well as across countries and companies, in employee demographics, and in job types.
“Hours reduced, well-being improved, and key organizational bottom-lines sustained — all of these happened without the need for workers to intensify their work demands,” explained associate professor Wen Fan.
The main reason that employees had maintained productivity, according to their assessment, is that companies have decreased or cut activities with questionable or low value, including meetings. Instead, meetings became phone calls and conversations via messaging apps.
Another key factor was that employees would use their third day off for doctor’s appointments and other personal errands that they might otherwise try to cram into a work day.
Because of these changes, employers would have lower health care costs and less employee turnover with a four-day week, researchers found.
But, it’s not a “one size fits all” approach. Some sped-up workplaces, such as manufacturers, will have difficulty with a four-day work week, they noted. Furthermore, they have yet to test a four-day workweek at a very big company. They included organizations of up to 5,000 people.
The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, builds on previous research that has found similar benefits, and comes on the heels of a recent study that found long working hours may alter brain structure.
Fan told Gizmodo that they continued to track participants six months after the trial concluded, finding that all major effects “persisted.”
“Social change is always difficult, especially when it comes to challenging the deep-seated institutional logics dictating how, when, and where we work. Let’s hope we don’t waste the crisis of Covid in terms of the profound workplace innovations it has precipitated,” Fan said in a statement.
