Most employees, companies in four-day-workweek study say there’s no going back

A four-day-workweek study in Great Britain has both companies and employees saying there is no going back.

Worker morale and energy soared, and productivity followed. So did revenue, when compared to the same period a year earlier.

In the six-month study launched last year, 61 U.K. organizations committed to reducing employee working hours by 20% with no pay cut.

“The trial was a phenomenal success,” Boston College professor Juliet Schor, one of the study coordinators, told the Daily News. “Our well-being outcomes for employees are really superb on every measure.”

She and colleagues at Cambridge University in England interviewed employees and CEOs throughout the six-month trial. They reported less stress, burnout and fatigue; better physical and mental health; and improved life satisfaction, exercise and sleep, Schor said.

Of about 2,900 participating employees, 71% reported lower levels of burnout and 39% reported less stress than when the trial started. In addition, there were 65% fewer sick days used and a 57% decrease in turnover compared to the same time period in the previous year.

The sked was found to be a win-win for companies, too.

“Company revenue barely changed during the trial period — even increasing marginally by 1.4% on average for the 23 organizations able to provide data,” the authors found.

Revenue rose compared to the same period a year earlier for about two dozen companies.

“On both the sort of business side and the employee side, it’s been a huge success,” Schor said.

More than nine out of 10 of the companies said they’d keep the experiment going, with 30% making the change official policy.

This included online retailers, financial service providers, animation studios and a local fish-and-chip shop, with companies in the housing, skin-care, recruitment, hospitality, marketing, health care and housing industries.

The results mirrored those of 2022 studies in the U.S. and Canada, but this was a deeper dive, the authors said, because it was the first to include the in-depth interviews.

Besides Boston and Cambridge, the researchers worked with Autonomy, a think tank focused on the future of work, and the 4 Day Week Global nonprofit, which to date has overseen such pilot studies with a total of 91 companies and 3,500 employees.

Companies had lots of leeway in structuring the deal. Some granted three-day weekends, others staggered workers’ schedules and one restaurant averaged it out over a year with seasonally light and heavy workload months. Others kept the program in place as long as performance targets were met.

“We feel really encouraged by the results, which showed the many ways companies were turning the four-day week from a dream into realistic policy, with multiple benefits,” said David Frayne, a research associate at the University of Cambridge.

With News Wire Services