Transitioning to a four-day work week may be advantageous for employers as well as employees, a new study done in the UK by the 4 Day Week Foundation and Boston College finds.
The foundation, which advocates for shorter working hours, just released the findings of its latest national pilot program. Seventeen companies and over 950 employees took part in the six-month program, which cut the work week from 40 hours down to just 32 hours.
As you might have expected, the benefits of the change for employees were primarily positive. Almost half (47%) reported increased job satisfaction, while 62% said they experienced a reduction in burnout. Additionally, 45% of employees reported feeling more satisfied with life following the change, largely because they were experiencing better work-life balance.
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What might shock you, however, is that several of the companies that participated in the program also reported that things improved for their businesses after they cut working hours.
Several organizations reported a decrease in the number of resignations over the course of the trial, when compared with a similar six-month period. Others said that they experienced a 30% drop in the number of sick and personal days taken over the course of the trial, when compared to the same six months the year before.
BrandPipe, a London-based software company, had some of the most significant results. The company dropped working hours for its employees from 35 to 28, and reported a 129.5% increase in revenue as well as a 100% reduction in the number of personal days taken by its employees.
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"The trial's been an overwhelming success for BrandPipe because it has been the launchpad for us to consider what constitutes efficiency, progressive working practice, and the ability to focus on the things that really matter to our business and our customers," BrandPipe CEO Geoff Slaughter told researchers.
Slaughter was so enthusiastic about the results of the trial and the positive effects it had on the company that he encouraged other tech leaders to be open-minded about reducing their office hours. "[It's] a great thing for businesses to try," he told researchers. "The learnings that come out of it are kind of adjacent to the fact that you’ve reduced working hours."
Not everyone is as optimistic about the potential of four-day work weeks. King's College London public policy professor Michael Sanders told CNN that trials like the one run by the 4 Day Week Foundation are self-selected and therefore conducted in companies where the change "would be taken up enthusiastically."
A shorter work week may work for them, but it "doesn't tell us much about what would happen if someone else tried it," he said.
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