It’s a great time to reevaluate the potential benefits, challenges and drawbacks of the 4-day week. The results of the first major public sector 4-day week trial are out, and other transformative new ways of working have proven possible.
The good news is that employers don’t need to make their decisions alone. I would warn against launching head-first into allowing employees to work four days yet get paid for five - without meticulous planning and consulting.
Experts such as Dr Charlotte Rae help employers weigh up their options and advise on the right steps to consider if a 4-day week without reduction in salaries would work for their business or organisation. Could we keep the money coming in and would our customers be happy? Are we causing undue stress for the Financial Director in our quest for wellbeing?
In this article, I quiz Dr Charlotte Rae on latest developments in the take-up of the 4-day week and she gives great advice on how to measure a 4-day week trial for anyone considering one.
How many people are enjoying a 4-day week in the UK?
There’s been plenty of hoo-ha about the possibility of ‘having Fridays off’.
A key point is that fewer employees are now working a 4-day week than you might think. In the UK, there are now thousands of people working 4-days a week on full-time salaries, but not hundreds of thousands. This is obviously far fewer than 1% of the UK workforce. We are in the early stages of growth.
Another important point is that a large proportion of organisations who do offer a 4-day week have their staff working and not working on different days of the week – so the wheels keep turning on a Friday as usual.
Are any councils offering staff a 4-day week in the UK?
Yes, South Cambridgeshire District Council has just completed a 15-month 4-day week trial with a limited number of carefully selected teams. The analysis of this trial by researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Salford has generated great media interest. Productivity was analysed before and after the South Cambridgeshire experiment and the shorter working week resulted in improvements in performance in 11 out of 24 areas, little or no change in 11 areas and worsening of performance in two areas.
Additionally in the public sector, a pilot of a four-day working week involving just 140 staff in the Scottish Government was launched in January 2024. “The Scottish Government recognises the environmental, health and wellbeing benefits, and efficiency gains that a four-day working week could bring and plan to take forward unique pilots in public sector organisations in Scotland.” Interesting.
Dr Rae from the University of Sussex gives her view: “I think with the change in national government in July 2024 and with the increasing data that's coming out of South Cambridgeshire District Council, we will start to see more councils exploring the 4-day week. They are the only English council who has been publicly trialling it so far. I think this Cambridgeshire trial is a fantastic journey. They thought very carefully about just going stage by stage, and they were looking particularly at teams where they had recruitment and retention problems and were having to spend a fair amount of money on agency staff.
Good independent researchers tracked a wide range of performance metrics very carefully. The trial went really well because no one left the planning team with the 4-day week trial. The council then rolled it out to another team, due to the recruitment cost savings achieved. The council’s view was ‘Actually, by all accounts we've saved money and we think we could save some more money here. So we're going to continue it’. They gained some early data that it could work and it built their confidence to grow it from there.”
Why would an employer offer a 4-day week?
Frequently, an employer’s main objective here is to try to improve rates of staff retention and recruitment. A 4-day week on full salary is of course an attractive perk! Departments offering it may have struggled to recruit candidates and want therefore to stand out to candidates. Obviously, it can then be a ‘can of worms’ to offer one team different benefits to another team. But taking a roll-out step-by-step approach, a team at a time can help make a switch more manageable.
Read on, I’m not finished about the possible reasons to offer a 4-day week…
Why would an employee want a 4-day week?
Here’s the thing – it can be for the same reason that an employer might choose it – potentially for better wellbeing at work. Everyone wins from better wellbeing and better mental and physical health. Happy people do better work for you. There’s a reason why wellbeing at work is so high on the employer agenda – it’s because it makes good business sense.
Just remember that there are many paths to be taken besides the 4-day week to achieve that wellbeing result with your team members. Embracing ergonomics, offering workplace adjustments and taking good care of mental health being just a few starters for ten.
Measuring the results of a 4-day week trial
Dr Rae and the Sussex 4-Day Week team help employers all over the UK with the planning phase, but then also with measuring phase, because they collect data on staff performance, productivity and wellbeing. She is a scientist (with a PhD in neuroscience, please note) so “I’m led by the data, I’m independent and I’m honestly reporting what the data we’re collecting is showing. Much of the data is really encouraging and therefore it means I'm an advocate for at least giving the 4-day week a try because I'm seeing the results with my own eyes. You need to observe your own data to be really sure if a 4-day week trial has done what you want it to do. Make an evidence-based judgment call.”
She continues: “We write each employer a report at the end of the 4-day week trial saying ‘this is what we saw in your staff’. They receive the hard numbers, graphs, percentages, statistical significance, to get a sense beyond just a subjective ‘Oh we think it's gone well. Shall we keep it?’. We provide quantitative data such as ‘productivity went up 10%’ and ‘burnout went down 15%’.”
It’s important to measure both:
- employee experience
- productivity.
“As part of our research programme, we take a range of wellbeing measures during a 4-day week pilot. We're looking at mental health, such as depression, anxiety and stress symptoms. Additionally we evaluate lifestyle, including sleep, diet and exercise. How do those change when people trial a 4-day week? Participants anonymously answer questions about positive mood, negative mood and burnout, before and after the 4-day week trial.
One of the methods we use to look at productivity is by asking staff to set themselves some goals or work tasks for the coming week ahead. Then at the end of the week they tell us how well they met their goals. Did you tick off your most important jobs?
We also work with each employer to look at what a custom measure of productivity might be. So if it's customer service, it might be the number of customer service tickets closed and for an architect’s firm, it was how many design steps did they complete across the week.
We also look at work engagement – which is how enthusiastic and motivated you feel about work – and your intention to stay in the company.
It's important that participants feel they can answer honestly so the questionnaires remain completely anonymous.”
One of the employers that Sussex 4-Day Week worked with trialled 4-day working in just in one team initially, and another comparable team was the control group, staying on their original hours of 5 days. “In the 4-day week team, there was an increase in productivity of 10%. In the control group, there was an increase in productivity of only 1%, suggesting that the 4-day week team became more productive, and that it was due to the reduced hours (instead of just being ‘observed’).”
One Managing Director I spoke to when writing this article asked:
“It’s natural that within the confines of a study and in the short term, a worker’s productivity will go up as they will welcome the opportunity to work 4 days a week. However what happens when this schedule is normalised ie everyone adopts it, will it still be the case that real productivity has gone up because of these changes?”. Fair point.
Sussex 4-Day Week has been following up with the employers in their study longer term, to measure how long any changes last, or if there’s a ‘honeymoon period’ where productivity then drops back to where it was. They reply to the director’s query by telling me:
“Our current data so far show that productivity actually went up by 10% six months on from the original trial ending, but this is on a smaller sample size than we have for our main trial period, as not everyone has got to the 6 month follow up point yet. So we need to get a larger and more diverse sample to be sure what happens longer term. So far, though, it looks like benefits are retained. We think that is in part because staff know there needs to be strong buy-in on their part in continuing to deliver, if the organisation is going to continue with the 4-day week.”
Which job roles have experienced the most 4-day week trials?
Dr Rae tells me that the majority of the people who've tried a four day week at this point in time are office workers, though she has also worked with manufacturers and people in the construction industry. ‘Office work’ of course encompasses many different roles within the term.
“Office jobs do lend themselves very well to this kind of work redesign, where you’re attempting to get more work done in less time. The kind of work that you and I do – writing and research – this is where we can find those small efficiencies by changing habits, by looking at human behaviour, changing how we're doing emails and meetings and company policies. It's such a cliché but it really is working smarter, not harder.”
Which sector has been the most enthusiastic about 4-day weeks?
Marketing companies seem to love a 4-day week. Globally, marketing is the sector which has seen the largest take-up (I suggest they also saw the PR and SEO value!).
But let’s look at other sectors:
- Atom Bank experienced a 49% increase in applications for jobs attributed to their 4-day week offering. They say “Candidates are telling us that they’re attracted to a business that is bold in pushing the boundaries and doing things differently.” It marks them as a progressive employer.
- Accountants Cooper Parry state that “With our innovative 100-80-100 experiment (you may know it as the 4-day working week, but we’re trying something a little different), our employees feel less stress, have greater job satisfaction and take far fewer days off sick. We each work 20% LESS than we did in 2022. Giving us personal time. To rest. To grow. To live. To make life count.”
“Help! My workload would never suit a 4-day week!”
I ask Dr Rae what she’d say to someone who believes that completing all their work in fewer days or hours would be a ludicrous notion.
“It’s not unusual to think this” she replies. “One thing to unpack is there may be a fundamental workload issue here that we can't do much about. And that's something for HR and for the leadership of that organisation.
And then there's the other aspect to unpack that even when you have a lot of work, there are always efficiencies that we can find and that can be made. Maybe because of that high workload we couldn't get you to 4-day week, but maybe we'd get you to a 9-day fortnight or maybe a 4.5-day week. Behaviour change can absolutely buy you back a few hours.
Only engaging in email for set portions of the day is a great idea. Literally turn it off!
I notice that when I do focus groups, I ask who switches their email on first thing when they start work? Usually about two thirds of hands go up! So what's your actual job? And very few people say it’s to monitor the email inbox…
Whereas if you say ‘Right! First thing Monday morning, I'm going to write my report for two hours and I'm going to mark myself as unavailable for any meetings. Suddenly you've got it all done. Really allocating yourself time for the larger tasks can help reduce feelings of overwhelm.”
The norm for the number of working days fluctuates
I was intrigued (and alarmed, let’s face it) to read a headline about Greece introducing a ‘growth-oriented’ 6-day working week.
“It's maybe been a little bit skewed and sensationalised because when actually if you dig down into it, the news is basically just about overtime pay and it's saying if you want to work overtime, then you should be paid extra overtime rates. So that's a positive thing, rewarding people for overtime work. Bear in mind though that for every additional hour worked, it's not going to lead to a proportional increase in productivity because people get tired. And unfortunately, that's the reality of our human biology. As someone who's a psychologist and interested in the brain, I’ll point out that we're not machines!”
Dr Rae reminds me that if we look back to Victorian times, it was normal to work six days a week. And then, over many decades, that social norm shifted. If the 4-day week gains in popularity, it could well take many years.
Is a 4-day week the same thing as ‘flexible working’?
Not really. Dr Rae explains the terms: “I think it's very it's very allied to flexible working, but it's not quite the same as it and it doesn't necessarily replace it. So flexible working is about saying ‘here's the number of hours that I'm going to work and I can work them at different times or in different places to where might be the standard’.
Whereas the technical phrase for the 4-day week is ‘working time reduction’, so that's where you have an original number of hours, let's say it's 37.5 a week, and then you reduce the overall time that you're spending at work across the whole length of the working week, with no loss of salary.
But those hours might well be worked completely flexibly, so you might go down to, say 32 hours, but they’re worked at a time and place of your choosing, with the agreement of your employer.”
Where should you start if you’re an employer thinking about the 4-day week?
Start with investigation and planning – and with talking to your department heads and employees about processes. You can get free help and support from Sussex 4-Day Week (you needn’t be in Sussex) where Dr Rae and team welcome enquiries to have an initial discussion, and she emphasises that you don’t need to yet be ready to start a trial. She’s keen to welcome new companies to expand her research still further.
The 4 Day Week Campaign organisation also has excellent advice.
Read up about companies who tried 4-day weeks and didn’t like the results; and remember that your happy employees won’t be happy if the business flounders and redundancies loom.
I do feel for HR Managers who would surely be swamped with complex additional work if their organisation wanted to try a 4-day week. This may be where support from Dr Rae’s team or from the 4 Day Week Campaign can help.
Consider too the risk to your reputation if clients don’t like the idea of your 4-day working week.
Have a good explore of the results from the national 4-day week trials:
- UK four-day working week trial results (61 companies and 2,900 workers), 2022
- Updated results on the above trial after one year
Both Dr Charlotte Rae and I are focused on wellbeing and wanting people to have a good work-life balance; it’s been fascinating to explore this 4-day week path that a few trailblazers are on. She encourages you to avoid “assuming that just because you have to stay open on Fridays, you can't do a 4-day week. No ‘one size fits all’ and the approach to working time reduction really looks different for every single organisation. See what suits your business best.”
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