The Benefits of a Four-Day Workweek, According to a Trend Advocate
Companies exploring the possibility of letting employees work four days a week hope to reduce burnout and retain talent seeking a better work-life balance, according to the chief executive of an organization promoting the idea.
The trend is gaining traction in Australia and Europe, says Dale Whelehan, CEO of 4 Day Week Global, which guides companies through the months-long process of reducing their employees’ working hours. Japan has launched a campaign in August, encouraging employers to reduce working hours to four days.
American companies haven’t yet adopted the four-day week as widely, but that could change. Eight percent of full-time employees surveyed by Gallup in 2022 said they work four days a week, up from 5% in 2020.
The Associated Press spoke with Whelehan about why companies might want to consider the change. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.
A: The most important question is why shouldn’t they? There’s a lot of evidence that suggests we need to radically change the way we work. We have burnout issues. We have a recruitment and retention crisis in many sectors. Stress in our workforce is increasing, which is leading to ill health, work-life balance issues, work-life conflict. We have people sitting in their cars for long periods of time, which is contributing to the climate crisis. Some sections of the population are able to work longer hours and are therefore rewarded for doing so, which is creating new inequalities in our societies. Finally, we look at the long-term health consequences of stress. We know it’s linked to issues like cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes. So stress is not something to be taken lightly, and it’s only increasing in our world of work.
To understand where we are today, let’s go back a little to pre-industrial times. My grandfather was a farmer, he worked seven days a week and had to be on the job site at all times. He worked long hours, but he also had a lot of autonomy.
When my father entered the workforce, he was a technician in a mechanical occupation. He was expected to produce on a large scale. Therefore, he did not receive the rewards of a farmer, but a salary. This change between my grandfather’s time and my father’s gave rise to a discipline known as management. And management, led by Frederick Taylor, studied the relationship between fatigue and performance. Many scientific studies were conducted to try to understand this relationship, which led to the need for a five-day week instead of a six-day week. When I entered the workforce, we no longer had a very physical, hard-working workforce. It was a very cognitive, very emotional workforce.
The fundamental physiological difference is that our brain, as a muscle, cannot support the same number of hours of work as our muscles in our body. So it’s a mismatch between an outdated 40-hour work structure, rooted in very physical work, and what is today a highly cognitive workforce.
A: Reducing working hours leads to productivity gains because people naturally have more time to rest and recover, allowing them to come back to the next week more motivated and refreshed. That’s one way we see productivity gains. The second way to look at it is the fundamental change that organizations undergo when moving to a four-day week.
When we work with organizations, we use what’s called the 100-80-100 principle. So, 100% compensation for 80% time for 100% output. We ask organizations to design their trials around that kind of philosophy: How do you keep your business the same or improve it while doing less work? The fundamental shift we’re seeing is that productivity is no longer about the time it takes to get something done, but rather about the outcomes that we know move businesses forward.
A: Women are more likely to work part-time. As a result, they typically experience lower pay. This is despite the fact that, according to data collected during the trials, these part-time workers produce the same output as their counterparts working five days a week.
During the four-day-a-week trials, everyone gets involved in the adventure. We see men taking on greater responsibilities in the household or in raising children.
The alternative is for women to take part-time jobs and take a pay cut. Men have to work longer, higher-paying, more stressful jobs to make up the shortfall. … This creates a vicious cycle.
A: Meetings. We are addicted to meetings. It has only gotten worse since the pandemic. I think a lot of it comes from a culture of indecision. There is a sense of not wanting to make decisions, which delays the process or involves many people in the process, so that everyone has a responsibility, and therefore no one has responsibility. And that is not good when it comes to the larger issue of productivity.
