Is the Four-Day Working Week a Fad?

I still sometimes find it strange that so many people have heard of working time reduction – more commonly known as the four-day working week. When I got interested in this over 10 years ago, it was something you had to learn about in the history books. I would read about the union struggle to establish the eight-hour working day, or utopian dreams of the coming ‘leisure society’, where robots would be doing much of the work.

Perhaps in part due to the Covid pandemic, however, a lot of the norms about when and how people work have been thrown up in the air. Organisations have been experimenting with reduced hours and this has given me the opportunity to turn my head from the books towards developments in the here and now.

According to the definition backed by the UK’s 4 Day Week Foundation, the four-day week involves reducing standard full-time hours from five days to four. Unlike a compressed hours policy, it does not mean squashing the same hours into fewer days, and unlike part-time working, it doesn’t involve taking a pay penalty. Instead, the four-day week represents a genuine working time reduction, introduced without any loss in pay. For now, this is usually introduced on the scale of organisations, but advocates hope to see it become a sector- or even society-wide policy in the near future.

In the UK alone, two major national four-day week pilot programmes have taken place. The UK private sector pilot in 2022 ran for six months with 61 companies (including banks, charities, a chip shop, small manufacturers, and more) and following this in 2024-5, a government-commissioned pilot ran for 12 months in Scotland’s public sector.

I have been fortunate to study these pilots alongside university colleagues and partners at the UK’s Autonomy Institute. I will also be talking about the results at this year’s Wales HR Network event on May 14 at the ICC, organised by Acorn by Synergie and Darwin Gray.

The headline is that the pilots have demonstrated some huge successes. When we revisited companies in the UK pilot a year later, we found that 56 out of 61 had kept their four-day week going. The Scottish results will be released soon and are just as promising.

People often ask us what ‘success’ actually means and as researchers we try to take a broad view. With the help of specialists at Boston College in the US, we look at the impacts the four-day week had along dimensions of staff-well-being, job satisfaction and home life. We also work with pilot organisations to measure the impact on business performance, along lines like productivity and staff retention.

The pilots are not only about studying impacts, however. They are also an opportunity to zoom in and understand the decision-making, innovations and bumps in the road that come with implementing a four-day week. Given that these organisations are at the forefront of change, they often find themselves in uncharted waters. How will they include their part-time workers in the policy? Will everyone have the same day off? What happens when there is a busy period? Will staff be involved in decisions about the policy?

What we find when we interview managers and staff is that these questions are less a source of trouble, than an opportunity to rethink key aspects of the organisation. The four-day week pilot often acts as a kind of spark, shaking up ways of working. There are always problems, but generally meetings get shorter and more focused. Bureaucracy gets streamlined. Staff become more collaborative.

As someone who has seen firsthand the promise of the four-day week (and as a Welsh citizen) it is perhaps natural that I now hope to see progress being made in Wales. While private sector organisations are free to try the policy at any time, progress at the national level will need a lot of moving parts to align.

In April 2023, a Working Group was formed by the Welsh Government to explore the feasibility of a four-day week pilot in Wales' public sector. Following a year of consultations, a report by the group concluded that “the 4-day week is a progressive and innovative way of working which merits further consideration”. Echoing the principles of our pilot in Scotland, the group also recommended that any pilot ought to be voluntary, with employers and unions collaborating on its design. Despite the report, however, the prospects of a national pilot in Wales are still unclear.

A final thing we often stress as researchers is that, just like with the historic struggles that got us the five-day norm, the four-day week cannot happen for everyone overnight. It is perhaps better to think about a ‘road’ to a four-day week – a road in which many different powers and agencies have a part to play. A key part has already been played by the organisations brave enough to pilot the policy, but there are key roles as well for collective bargaining, legislation and advocacy – especially if we want working time reductions to spread to the areas that may need them the most, such as education and the NHS.

A lot needs to happen, but given the progress being made, it would be surprising if the four-day week was a passing fad. As of now, all signs point to it as a policy that is here to stay.

For more info, please visit: https://www.waleshrnetwork.cymru/