The world’s largest trial of a four-day workweek is complete and there’s good news – it had such a positive outcome the majority of companies said they would be happy to offer a shorter working week to their staff.
61 companies from different sectors were involved in the trial, which ran for six months starting from June of last year.
Managers ensured that salaries stayed the same for staff who participated in the study.
″There’s been a decline in the number of sick days taken during the period of the trial. Before the trial, on average, each person would take four or five sick days per year - that’s down to less than two,” Chief Executive Mark Downs says.
So can we finally admit that we don’t need to work five days a week? When news of a possible four-day working week first emerged, people were skeptical.
“The combination of industry time commitments varying so greatly across the board, as well as close to universal workforce shortages across the board, creates an ecosystem simply incapable of supporting the continued running of certain businesses with working hours under 37.5 hours a week,” Sarah Austin, founder, and director at the Lloyd’s Bank British Business Excellence Awards, previously told HuffPost UK.
“However, this does not mean employee wellbeing should be shelved – businesses that can’t, at this time, adapt to a four-day work week model, can still promote and initiate employee mental health holiday allowances, childcare flexibility and, where possible, hybridisation to not only support their employees, but to also allow them to remain competitive in the current job seeker-led market.”
Nichola Johnson-Marshall, co-founder of cultural transformation consultancy, Working Wonder, is also skeptical this will work for every workplace.
“It’s also great to see commitment and actual trials for a new format of working pattern around a four day (paid for five) working week,” she says, “but we believe that this should be approached as a starting point rather than the end goal and not introduced universally.”
Lockdown has shown us that there are better ways of working than “just how we have worked before”, she adds. So simply cutting working hours might not be the best solution to better work-life balance.
Employers were concerned that a shorter working week wasn’t feasible. Would workers be able to complete goals and meet their targets in a four-day working week? The results from the trial show it’s possible.
It turns out people stop pulling sickies too. The number of sick days taken by 2,900 staff involved a study surveyed by the University of Cambridge and Boston College dropped by around two-thirds.
39% of employees reported that they were less stressed. Two-day weekends come and go, it feels like you don’t have enough time to rest. “Weekends can be quite hectic, so it has been quite nice to have that extra day to see your friends and family, and then you get that extra day off during the week to do all your chores or to have that time to relax,” Tessa Gibson, a senior accreditation officer at the Royal Society of Biology, said.
Overall, it looks like the four-day working week can work. “This is a major breakthrough moment for the movement towards a four-day working week,“Joe Ryle, Director of the 4 Day Week Campaign, says.
“Across a wide variety of different sectors of the economy, these incredible results show that the four-day week with no loss of pay really works.”