Following the trial, the report said 56 of the 61 organizations that participated elected to continue with the shortened week. Additionally, 18 of those 56 companies have confirmed that the policy change will be permanent. 

According to the report, participating companies varied in size and spanned different sectors. 

“You can reduce work time without [it] impacting negatively on the business. And therefore, the question is why not do it?” Charlotte Lockhart, the managing director and founder of 4 Day Week Global, said in a video interview with BNNBloomberg.ca on Feb. 17. 

“For a lot of businesses, it's just about having the agility in the leadership team’s thinking that allows them to go, ‘you know what we're going to do this now.’” 

The trial was conducted in the U.K. through a partnership between 4 Day Week Global, and researchers at Cambridge University, Boston College and Autonomy, a research organization focusing on the future of work. The trial lasted approximately six months, beginning in June 2022 and continuing until December of that year. In total, around 2,900 workers participated across 61 different companies. 

The trial's ethos dictated that employees would receive 100 per cent of their compensation while working 80 per cent of their typical hours, with no changes in productivity. As a result, each company designed their own strategy to transition to the reduced workweek, the report said.

EFFECTS ON BUSINESS

Staff departures dropped by 57 per cent over the course of the trial period, the report said. 

Employee turnover is often “quite a significant cost for a business,” Lockhart said. 

Additionally, the report found that 15 per cent of participants indicated that no increases in compensation would incentivize them to revert back to a five-day work schedule. 

“But also they [companies in the trial] saw increases in revenue, reductions in absenteeism [and] reductions in resignations,” Juliet Schor, the trial’s lead researcher who is an economist and sociologist at Boston College, said in a video interview with BNNBloomberg.ca on Feb. 17.

The trial also reported financial improvements for the businesses that participated. Results from the report showed revenue during the six-month period rose by an average of 1.4 per cent, weighted by the size of participating companies. 

Company revenues were also 35 per cent higher on average when compared to that same six-month period a year earlier in 2021, according to Schor, who added that the reopening of the U.K.’s economy after the pandemic likely contributed to the uptick.

“The results say that it [a four day week] doesn't reduce productivity,” Lockhart said

According to a press release Tuesday from 4 Day Week Global, companies rated the trial experience an average of 8.5 out of 10, with business performance coming in at 7.5 out of 10. 

EFFECTS ON EMPLOYEES 

The report said well-being improvements were seen in employees who participated in the trial, with 39 per cent of participants experiencing reductions in stress. Additionally, 71 per cent of participants had lower levels of burnout at the end of the trial. 

“We saw improvements on all of the well-being outcomes that we measure and we measure a lot. We looked at stress and burnout, fatigue, exercise, mental health, physical health, negative emotions [and] positive emotions,” Schor said. 

The report said improvements in mental and physical health were observed. Decreases in anxiety levels fatigue and sleep-related issues were also reported.

Measures of work-life balance also increased across the trial period, according to the report, as 54 per cent of employees had an easier time balancing work with household jobs. Some 60 per cent of participants were better able to integrate care responsibilities with their work and 62 per cent indicated it was easier to integrate their work responsibilities with their social life. 

“Pretty much you name it, on every metric people are reporting being better off,” Schor said. 

LIMITATIONS

The trial was not a randomized control trial, Schor said, and not every organization would be able to achieve similar results with a shortened workweek. 

“I like to think of it as sort of proof of concept, that definitely there's a significant group of companies that [it] can work for,” she said.

Schor said she thinks in terms of higher-intensity and lower-intensity workplaces regarding compatibility with the shortened week. 

In a lower-intensity workplace, she said there is often “a lot of wasted time,” on things like unproductive meetings. 

“There are ways to reorganize work that make everybody better off without the speed up, so their intensity of work doesn't necessarily go up. You just work smarter, more efficiently,” Schor said regarding lower-intensity environments. 

However, she said there are workplaces that already move at a rapid pace which are still “great candidates” for the four-day schedule, but they may not fit the typical model. 

“They [employees at high-intensity workplaces] don't go to meetings. They're not distracted. They're [for example] doctors and nurses in hospitals who are going at a really high pace and they’re burning out and leaving the profession,” said Schor. 

These types of high-intensity workplaces could benefit from having staff work for four days and hiring an additional person for the fifth day, she said.