Does the 4-day working week actually work?

So, it started with the majority of us working from offices, then COVID impacted our day-to-day lives so most of us had to work from home. Then, the 4-day working week was discussed.

The four day work week has been discussed to measure whether or not it will increase employee productivity giving employees a 3 day weekend. The best thing to employees is that they would still be paid the same as their normal 5 day work week but would have an extra day off to recharge their batteries.

Trial in UK

There are around 40 companies in the UK that have been taking part in this trial. The trial is being run by ThinkTank Autonomy and researched in universities which include Oxford, Boston and Cambridge. The main aim of this pilot is to measure whether or not employees can operate at 100% productivity for 8% of the time.

One manager from the pilot programme said, ‘More and more businesses are moving to productivity focused strategies to enable them to reduce workers hours without reducing pay’. As well as this one of the main topics was the number of companies which measure how long people are working for. Instead of this they could measure the productivity of employees which would in turn befit businesses hugely.

The Results

The results were staggering, many companies tried the 4-day work week and found the results to be very positive. A number of large companies such as Canon have tried it and found they have noticed a huge increase with productivity in their teams of 140+ employees. In short, it seems like this could be beneficial especially for the larger companies.

The main one to think of as a company is could your teams productivity be increased, if so could a 4 day week suit you business? Some businesses it’s hard to do this but most you can make it work.

I don’t think it will work?

Around 30% of businesses straight up said they didn’t think it would work for their businesses. Here are some questions to think about:

1. Could it be a way of staff retention?
2. Could it be the standard work practise?
3. Could it work out better in the long run?
4. Could it be a positive contribution of positive mental health in the workplace?
5. Could it make recruiting for jobs easier?

Ask yourself these questions and then go from there, there is no harm in trialling the 4-day work week!