Four-Day Workweek Experiment Results in More Efficient Employees
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Here's your money briefing for Thursday, August 3rd. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. The idea of shortening the five-day work week to four days isn't new, but a recently concluded study involving dozens of companies and hundreds of employees put the shorter work week to a real-world test.
They gave high scores for work-life balance, less burnout, less stress, more time, of course, with their families and other personal time. And the result was that people actually did produce almost the same amount of work in four days, not five.
We'll talk with WSJ's Vanessa Furmans after the break.
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Should the work week be cut to four days? Results of a year-long study to answer that question are out. WSJ's Vanessa Furmans joins me. So, Vanessa, how was this study carried out?
So, this was a combination of a number of trials that have been conducted around the world, actually.
What four-day workweek study is being summarized at the start of the episode?
This one involved the data from companies in India. the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, and Canada, and was several dozen companies that participated in this. And it looked at the effects of a four-day workweek over 12 months.
About how many employees were involved?
Several hundred.
And to be clear, we're talking about four days of work, period, not four days in the office.
That's right. The idea behind this is four days of work, regardless of where you are. That means on average, the ideal would be 32 hours of work. The concept is basically testing out whether employees working 80% of the time can still carry out 100% of the output at 100% of the pay that they would traditionally get in a five-day work week.
What was it that caused the researchers to want to do this study? What is it that brought them to this point of rounding up these companies and employees in doing this?
The concept of a four-day workweek has been kicked around for decades. It was already brought up in the Nixon era, if you can imagine, and even before that. And so you have had here and there companies flirt with, experiment with a four-day workweek. I would say the pandemic is really what has galvanized a lot of the momentum around looking at this again. We saw, first of all, a big study that even preceded the pandemic that that took place in iceland several years ago and that showed quite promising results that looked at the experience of dozens of companies in iceland and the results there were promising and since then we've had this huge pandemic that has really caused so many of us to rethink the way work gets done we know
For instance, remote work has become more of an option for a lot of people. Companies are flirting with giving their workers flexibility in other ways. And this four-day workweek comes really out of that whole re-examination of our relationship to work.
All right. So what were the results?
They were pretty promising. If you're looking at wanting to work four days a week, this is good news for you. What they found were that on the whole, when it came to how workers felt, their well-being held up.
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