What is it like to work one less day a week and get paid the same? The four-day work week, seen as a utopia by the vast majority of workers and as an economically unsustainable idea by many companies, is something that 33 companies and 906 workers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and Canada have tested for a period of six months. It is the first international study to be published on the pros and cons of this reduction in working hours. The conclusions of the study prepared by the think tank The 4 Day Week reveals that the company’s profit account is not affected, while the mental health and happiness of the employees improves across the board.
The results prove that the main beneficiary of this measure is the mental health of the workers. According to the interviews held with the 906 participating employees of the pilot, stress, fatigue and conflicts resulting from not being able to reconcile work and personal life decrease across the board. An improvement for employees that, at least in the participating cases of the pilot, does not result in a detriment to the companies. In fact, the companies analyzed have increased profits, on average, by 8.1% from the time they started the pilot to the end. Three out of four say they have already decided they will continue with the four-day work week after the experiment.
Joan Sanchis, economist, associate professor at the University of Valencia and one of the designers of the Valencian Generalitat pilot, asks for caution when reading the results. “They project more a series of intuitions that are not strictly scientific, but they do allow us to see what the potential effects are”, he acknowledges. It cannot be determined, for example, that all companies that implement the four-day work week will increase the income statement, since the test does not have control groups with similar companies that do not implement this same reduction in hours. But it does show that it is compatible to work less and for companies to remain competitive.
“The processes of reorganizing the work and reducing unproductive moments were mostly successful”, point out the researchers. In other words, maximum “dead time” is eliminated and employees have to work more intensively for the rest of the day. The results indicate that workers do perceive a little more intensity and workload during the four working days, although this does not translate into more stress.