Becky Spencer reports on businesses who have adopted a four-day working week and looks at the impacts, particularly on health and wellbeing.

For six months in 2022, 61 UK companies with a total workforce of around 2,900 took part in the world’s largest trial of the four-day working week – an idea that has been talked about for quite a while now but one that not many firms have embraced.

However, the pandemic and the homeworking/remote working revolution it brought about have proved that new ways of working can bring positive benefits for both employers and employees, and it was from this starting point that the UK’s four-day working week trial began.

Organisations involved in the trial ranged from online retailers and financial service providers to marketing companies, animation studios and a fish and chip shop. Two-thirds of firms in the trial had fewer than 25 employees, around a quarter had more than 50 employees, and one firm had around 1,000.

All organisations signed up to trial a four-day week but that’s not as straightforward as it sounds. Like most things in business, one-size doesn’t fit all and so there are many different ways to implement a four-day week – however, all are based on the premise of a 20 per cent reduction in an employee’s working time for 100 per cent of their salary.

For example, in the trial, some firms implemented a traditional four-day week and closed on one day, so all staff were off together. Others split teams so that some staff had Monday off and others Friday. Some firms trialled a shortened 32-hour week but split over five days, and others had days off on a team-by-team basis. One restaurant calculated their 32-hour working week over an entire year, in order to have long opening times in the summer but much shorter in winter. The key was to implement a four-day week that worked best based on each participant’s organisational challenges.

Working less hours for the same money sounds like a dream come true for employees and a nightmare for employers, but the trial has shown that working fewer hours does not have to mean getting less work done. The vast majority of companies found that business performance and productivity were maintained during the trial. 

Researchers who analysed the trial data found the main reason for this was that organisations decreased or cut activities with “questionable or low value in the day-in, week-out operation” – a big one being a cut in the number of meetings, with any meetings taking place being short with clear agendas. Some firms introduced interruption-free ‘focus periods’, while others reformed email etiquette to reduce long chains and inbox build-up, or looked again at their production processes.

Another key element to maintaining/increasing productivity was that four-day week employees tended to use their extra day off for doctor’s appointments or other personal errands that they would otherwise try to cram into a work day. In addition, researchers found workers were much less inclined to kill time and actively sought out technologies that improved their productivity.