Four-day working week is a success. Or is it?

We've not experienced any pushback from our website design clients or a downturn in leads from following a four-day workweek. We're a small business and are in the process of growing our team. We're unable to offer many of the employee perks you'd find at bigger brands, but we're confident that a four-day week model will make us competitive and help attract talented creatives who might otherwise have skipped our business over.

I’ve worked a 4-day week for the last 3.5 years and would never go back. Ecologists work anti-social hours doing night-time surveys, whilst also writing reports and advising clients. It is exactly because of these dynamic hours that we have embraced a 4-day week, to ensure our staff get enough rest. We are currently conducting a 9-month trial and our wordcloud for how people used their Fridays in the 1st month was pretty heavy on the housework - but as everyone settles into the new pattern, hopefully the gains in focus, wellbeing and productivity will mean they can then start to use them for more rewarding personal pursuits. We have managed to deliver the same quality of service to our clients and revenue, whilst giving our staff 3-day weekends. In consultancy, people are our only asset, and we must look after them.

During the pandemic, we took the opportunity to experiment with a 4-day week and have never looked back. For many business owners, the concern is that "businesses like ours need to be available to respond to clients 5 days a week" - and certainly that's the case in the social media market we serve. But with a little planning, it's perfectly possible to provide this level of service with your team working a 4-day week and then reap the team morale and client satisfaction rewards that follow.

The four day week is an obsession of the middle classes. And every time this circulates, shift workers get ignored. The very same shift workers who worked through the pandemic and who are the heart of our economy and the foundation of every service we take for granted. What we’d like to see discussed is that, if the 4-day week becomes the norm, does that mean shift workers get a 20% uplift in pay? Or one paid day off a week. We bet it doesn’t…

I do not believe, in our business at least, a four-day week brings the benefits indicated, as we deal with customers every day of the week and our people build personal relationships with their customers. Limiting this customer contact can increase stress and reduce revenues. A far more practical solution is flexible working, which allows our employees to have a far greater degree of control over when and where they work. Being able to manage work around family or other personal commitments by taking a few hours away on a specific day is a far better way of reducing employee stress and increases overall commitment and motivation as it shows how much we value them. This is more likely to lead to an increase in revenue. Flexible working is the answer, not an artificial reduction in working hours in the opinion of our company.

It depends on the context and the business whether a four-day week can work effectively. For a 24/7 customer-facing company, probably not. Our manufacturing clients have had great success implementing compressed hours over the working week. Employees get to finish early, and heavy machinery is on for less time, thereby reducing energy consumption. So it's been a win-win of happy employees and lower energy costs.

The four-day working week is set to widen the disadvantaged gap significantly. It is accessed merely by privilege. The actual 'needed' sectors in society, where real 'burnout' is experienced due to working to protect basic human need, do not have this privileged work pattern as an option, nor do those working minimum wage to survive, many working more than one essential frontline job. Wealth protecting health whilst depending on the 'needed' industries, which can't attain this privilege, to support and protect them at the same time. Another action that places greed ahead of need in our society. The headline should read, 'As the privileged 4-day working week pilot is deemed a success for those that can achieve a healthy work-life balance, how does this benefit the wellbeing of our frontline essential workers and reduce the poverty rate?'

Given the high stakes involved in making this type of change, organisations need to know whether the new working pattern is achieving their overall goal of improving staff work-life experience and wellbeing. Systematic evaluation is the most effective way to gain objective insights into employee experience of the 4DW.
We worked with Highgate IT Solutions to evaluate their 4DW trial over a period of six months. We developed a bespoke staff survey aimed at assessing employee work-life experience, emotional exhaustion and included measures of wellbeing and resilience at the start and end of the trial.

The results showed that the new working pattern improved workplace resilience through the development of new skills, enhanced flexibility and adaptability to future challenges. The Highgate IT team were able to make 4DW permanent.

What a statement - Four day working week is a success! It is only a success in some organisations, in some sectors and some businesses. Swiping statements like this is a problem for many employment relationships. It cant be rolled out to everyone. Some organisations need to cover every hour, every week, and every month. Having a four-day working week doesn't always allow for that. Managing staff more efficiently and providing better working conditions overall is the answer to increased revenue, reduced burnout and less stressful environments. What are the statistics for business owners who operate Four Day working weeks? I would guess that they will be more stressed or heading to burnout soon! Very surprised by the findings here. It doesn't work in all organisations or all sectors.

As a disabled entrepreneur, a 4 day working week is essential to me and many in my community; hybrid working has led to a boom of disabled and chronic sick people getting employment! It allows for rest, life admin and non work related activities without having to do all that AFTER a long work day and leaving us little time to have a life outside of work. I see only benefits and not pitfalls and as I begin to hire people I will enforce this for them too.