Four-day week trial ends and some firms make it permanent

When Joe Dance was offered the opportunity to earn his full salary just four days a week, he was skeptical.

“I thought I was so used to working five days. How are we supposed to offer the same service to customers if we’re not there?” said the consultant.

But during a six-month trial in which 3,000 people worked fewer hours for 100% pay, the new father found his productivity improved.

The experiment ended today and the results will be published next year.

The four-day weekly trial, involving 70 UK companies, began on June 6 and is believed to be the world’s largest pilot of the work pattern.

It’s not about cramming five days’ work into four. Instead, workers earn 100% of their wages for 80% of the hours they would normally work. The goal is to be more productive.

It was organized by a group campaigning for a shorter workweek but without a drop in wages.

Researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and Boston College are overseeing the experiment along with the think tank Autonomy. The full results are not expected to be released until February next year.

But at mid-term in September, 86% of participating companies said the four-day week is working well and they’re likely to keep it.

Mr Dance said: “I kind of ate every single word I said just because it actually made us better.”

The 30-year-old from Stoke-on-Trent works as an Ecology Associate for Tyler Grange, an environmental consultancy with six offices in England.

The approximately 80 employees do not work on Fridays, but still receive 100% of their salary.

“It has forced us to be more pragmatic and proactive and to manage our time more effectively, in other words, to focus on the most time-sensitive work,” said Mr. Dance.

He said he used his day off to spend time with his young son and to volunteer with a local program that helps reintroduce water voles into the wild.

“It’s not exactly relaxing, but it’s wonderful. Having a newborn was one of the reasons I decided to give it a try as best I could. Because when that time is over, you don’t get it back,” he said.

Fridays are now “sacrosanct,” and Joe said he would really struggle to go back to a five-day workweek.

He’s lucky because his employer has now decided to introduce the four-day week permanently.

“It worked so well that I would be pretty crazy not to keep it,” said managing director Simon Ursell. “We are 101% productive 80% of the time.”

He added: “We look at a person’s productivity and as a consultancy we bill clients by the hour. So we measured how much our employees can charge for their time… and it’s been a pretty dramatic increase.”

He said it meant unproductive meetings were quickly canned. “Everyone just wants to keep going. If we had a five-day week, the meeting would have just kept going because you fill in the time you have.”

Additionally, Mr. Ursell measured his team’s well-being via an alertness app and found that his employees are 18% less tired and 10% happier than before.

The company has also seen a more than five-fold increase in job vacancy requests.

“My theory on this is that if you give someone a great reward or a really good incentive to do something, they’re going to really put in the effort. And I can’t think of a better incentive than time,” he said.

Mr Ursell said many months of preparation ahead of the pilot were crucial, as was the decision to effectively close the store for one day a week rather than have split rosters, a move he acknowledges was not for each company is suitable. He also lost two employees who did not want to switch to short-time work.

Brighton-based skincare company 5 Squirrels has also made the decision to work fewer hours.

“We’re much, much more productive,” said Gary Conroy, Founder and CEO

He’s rearranged their workday so that there are times when employees aren’t chatting, taking calls, or responding to emails – instead, the team of 14 focus on focused work.

“It has a big impact on the amount of things we can get done,” says Gary.

Like Tyler Grange, they also don’t work on a Friday and ran a “pre-pilot” before making the big move.

At Pressure Drop Brewery in Tottenham, north London, not all workers can take the same day off as they have to keep the beer flowing and the orders getting out.

Management hasn’t always been easy, but still, the benefits outweigh the challenges, said co-founder Sam Smith.

“We are happy with how it went. The main problem we had was that we weren’t really able to test it properly in a full fur environment…because the last six months haven’t been great economically in terms of the environment,” he said.

His employees gave him the thumbs up. Office manager Clare Doherty says it’s “fantastic”.

“I’m expecting a baby now, so I’ve been able to schedule all my appointments on my day off. It gave me a little bit more room to plan and organize,” she said.

The brewery will tentatively continue the four-day week for another 12 months.

“We expect a difficult year next year. And that, frankly, occupies our minds and attention a lot more than the four-day workweek,” Mr Smith said.

Late last month, the 4-day-week campaign group announced separately that it had signed up more than 100 companies and organizations to operate a 4-day week with no cut in workers’ wages. The program started in early 2021.

It’s still a tiny percentage of workers, but they’re hoping this is the start of a fundamental rethink of the way we work. At the beginning of next year we will find out how many of the 70 companies participating in the study will also switch.