In mid-2022, an unlikely ball started rolling.

4 Day Week Global – an outfit started by two Kiwis, Andrew Barnes and Charlotte Lockhart, plus a UK equivalent (A 4 Day Week campaign), the Autonomy think tank and a bevy of academics to track the whole thing – started a pilot program trialling a four-day work week in the UK. It involved 61 companies, nearly 3000 employees, ran for six months and was the biggest field trial to date of the four-day work week idea.

Companies could choose which flavour of four-day week best suited them. For some, it was your standard Friday off. Others trialled a staggered version if they needed to be open 24/7. Others worked four days out of five, but averaged over some longer period such as a year. All versions included people keeping their full five-day pay and committing to keep up their previous five-day productivity.

Doing more with less

You might have thought that trying to do five days’ work in four would have frazzled employees. The opposite happened. Employees benefited across a wide range of dimensions: 39% were less stressed and 71% had reduced levels of burnout. In addition, anxiety levels, fatigue and sleep issues decreased, and mental and physical health improved, as did various measures of work-life balance.

You’ll likely be thinking at this point, ‘Yeah, right – who wouldn’t like five days’ pay for four days’ work? But what about the business?’. Unfortunately, to my mind the quantitative evidence on business performance was on the skimpy side. You’d really like to see how profits behaved but we don’t know, nor were there any measures of productivity. The post-trial report says it was because these smaller-scale businesses didn’t have the suite of performance data you’d get, say, from a big corporate. Only revenue data was available.

The revenue numbers proved to be a mixed bag. If you were wary of trying a four-day week, your main worry would surely have been that sales would go down when you were operating with only 80% of your previous staff. That sky didn’t fall: revenues rose by 1.4% during the trial. That, however, was adrift of the 4.6% growth in the overall money GDP of the UK in the second half of 2022, so while it wasn’t the disaster you might have feared, it wasn’t so flash either.

They also compared trial period sales with comparable historic data. That was up by 34.5%, but that’s not hugely helpful as it is boosted by pre-trial sales growth in previous years and we really want to know post-trial performance. So, beyond ruling out an outright decline in sales if you go the four-day work week route, it’s hard to form a strong view from these data on how businesses fared financially.

Businesses sold on a new model

However, tellingly, the businesses themselves implicitly revealed how they thought it had gone for them. A large majority of the businesses in the pilot elected to carry on with the four-day regime after the pilot ended: 56 decided to keep the pilot going. Of those, 18 switched to a permanent four-day work week. One factor in the businesses’ assessment may well have been that employee attrition dropped away. It could have been the novelty of the thing, with people hanging around to see what happened next, but equally it could be that happier employees stay with you longer. That’s a fine outcome from everyone’s point of view.

It’s evidently hitting the spot more widely since the trial. According to the 4 Week Day Foundation, some 200 UK companies with about 5000 employees have implemented a permanent four-day week.

Since then, the four-day work week idea has developed legs. In the first half of 2024, 4 Day Week Global ran the second biggest trial in Germany with 45 companies. Most companies didn’t go the full four-day route and opted for smaller reductions, but otherwise there were broadly similar outcomes. Employees reaped various benefits and, while we’re still shy of all the business performance metrics we’d ideally like, the sky again has not fallen. According to the post-trial report the data was not conclusive, but suggestively positive: “Although organisational-level data did not show a significant change in revenue or profit during the trial, the fact that these metrics remained stable while work hours were significantly reduced suggests that at least some productivity gains have been realised.”

There was a smaller-scale trial in our part of the world in 2022. It had 10 Aussie companies, nine Kiwi and seven others. While it was also light on hard quantitative data, it rang the same bells: “Companies rated the impact of the four-day week to attract new employees at 8.3/10, with productivity scoring 7/10 and performance 6.8/10.”

In line with other trials, 95% of the 20 participating companies indicated that they would continue the four-day work week, with only one business not moving forward with the model. Home life improved, people took more exercise in their extra spare time, and it was even good for the planet, largely due to the 36-minute reduction in the pollution-causing commute.

Everyone’s a winner

You get a strong feeling that there’s been a win-win here, as there likely has been from the rather larger experiment that’s also been going on in the labour market – ‘work from home’ or ‘hybrid’ employment. Mutual gains are something of a surprise: we’re used to thinking of the labour market as either a zero-sum game – your pay comes out of my profit – or as a market with substantial employer market power that needs to be curbed via, for example, collective employee bargaining.

Maybe the labour market is actually more workably competitive than its caricature: after all, it doesn’t feel like an employer monopsony when a quick check on Seek Australia throws up more than 13,250 ‘accountant’ positions available. If so, then we’ll see innovations like four-day weeks and working from home competing with the ‘return to the five day office – or else’ stance that some of our harder-nosed employers are currently taking.

I think I know who’ll win that competition.