Four-day working week may boost our health and performance at work

Working four days a week without a reduction in salary seems to boost employees’ health and job satisfaction – and may even help them perform better at work.

The covid-19 pandemic changed how many people work. Alongside a shift to at-home or hybrid home-office working for some occupations, certain companies have gone down to a four-day working week without cutting pay.

To better understand the effects of this, Wen Fan at Boston College, Massachusetts, and her colleagues analysed data from 141 companies in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland that participated in a pilot programme led by the non-profit firm 4 Day Week Global.

Before the trial, the companies spent two months working with outside advisors to reorganise their workflow and cut inefficiencies, like unnecessary meetings.

After the programme, which lasted six months, Fan and the team compared self-reported measures of productivity, health and job satisfaction from nearly 3000 employees at these companies against workers at 12 firms that considered participating in the pilot but then decided against it.

Those who worked at businesses that shifted to a four-day week reported lower rates of burnout and greater job satisfaction, along with better overall mental and physical health. These improvements were attributed to the employees sleeping better, being less fatigued and feeling like their ability to work had improved.

“A lot of people are worried about a process called job intensification, where, if you need to complete all of your job within four days instead of five, this might actually increase your stress level,” says Fan. “What we found is the opposite: once workers are able to [reduce hours], they feel better about themselves and this helps their well-being.”

The findings applied regardless of the employees’ age, gender or whether they predominantly worked remotely or in an office. But a person’s position in a company may have an effect: the team found that supervisors reported greater improvements to their overall well-being compared with non-supervisors.

The researchers didn’t ask the participants what exactly it was about the trial that they felt brought these benefits, so it could just have been changes like cutting unnecessary meetings, rather than the pivot to a four-day work week itself, says Lonnie Golden at Pennsylvania State University in Abington.

“If people are saying their well-being is higher, how much of that stems from the fact that their company is treating them better? That they’re trusting them, that they’re relieving them of this one day commute per week or allowing them to string together several days for leisure,” says Golden. “Or how much of it comes from just being more productive per hour and having fewer distractions and interruptions?”

Nevertheless, more than 90 per cent of the companies that opted for a four-day work week kept it after the programme ended, says Fan.