When dozens of companies in the U.K. experimented with a four-day work week, employers and employees loved it. Could a four-day work week work in the United States?
, CEO of Trio Media, a digital marketing agency in Leeds, U.K., co-founder of Pressure Drop Brewing in London., chief strategy officer and head of sustainability at Kickstarter. The company has been doing a four-day work week since April 2022.CHAKRABARTI: Five days, 40 hours a week. The conventional work schedule, though I know for many of you that's not the schedule you work at all. You might do three twelves; you might do 60 hours over six days.
KELLY: I think it's one of those things where if you get told you can do something in five days, you take five days to do it. And as soon as I was told I needed to do it all in four days, the same standard, I just became a whole bunch more productive. CHAKRABARTI: I'm going to gently slide that across the table to management in my world. Now, 61 companies in the U.K. participated in the study over a six-month period, and as you heard, employees loved it. A sizable percentage of them even said that no amount of money would ever get them to go back to a five-day workweek. But what about their employers?
CHAKRABARTI: Now, this pilot project ended in December, but both companies Pressure Drop Brewery and Trio media say they are going to stick to the four-day workweek. And even more interesting, more than 90% of the companies in the study overall are sticking to that four-day workweek, too. SCHOR: So the parameters were pretty simple. The companies were obligated to keep pay constant, so 100% of the pay, and they had to offer quote-unquote ... meaningful reduction in work time. So a couple of them may have gone to like 35, 34. The vast majority went for the full day off, the 32-hour workweek. Very important for listeners. This is not a compressed workweek. It's not four tens. It's four eights. So 32 hours, that was pretty much it.
SCHOR: So one answer to that would be every kind. So we had fish and chip shop, you know, a brewery. We had manufacturing and construction. But most of them are in the white-collar world. So they're professional services, nonprofits, banks, marketing and design, and of course, quite a few I.T. So it's a big range, but it skews white collar.
And also just that process of sort of stepping back and saying, okay, let's just reevaluate what we're doing, figuring out, you know, what low priority things are taking a lot of time or what do we need to devote more time to. So all that's key. But the costs are really key because there are growing costs associated with resignation and inability to attract employees. So those two things, we've been running trials for over a year now. And those two things I think are becoming more important in sort of driving companies to this innovation.
I currently work four days a week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I'm off on Thursday and I'm back to work on Friday.The work life balance that it's provided has been amazing. It's made the last few years not only tolerable, but actually enjoyable.I recently looked at a job offer that was working five days a week, and that was actually the reason why I turned it down.
SCHOR: I do think a four-day week is feasible here. There are things that would have to be put in place for some companies and some kinds of industries. At the moment, there's a wide range of industries primarily and white collar who can do it fairly easily, I think. Not necessarily every company within those industries. But it is viable. And we can talk about the more complicated industries. Health care being the one, the poster child for what would be difficult.
As Professor Schor said, you know, a lot of that seems to come from this idea that we can reevaluate work. In all of our organizations, lots of inefficiencies creep in. You know, we talk about meetings and all of these other things.
CHAKRABARTI: So basically you're saying ... work more efficiently across five days, so get more done. Well, I'll let Professor Schor jump in on that, because it does seem I can understand the calculus of what Professor Bidwell is saying, but it also is a point of view that could potentially look at workers like an inexhaustible resource almost. Professor Schor, go ahead.
BIDWELL: It is hard to do. I mean, I don't think it's just that the people want that on-the-job leisure. There've been lots of other attempts to do this, not around five-day work, not around the four-day workweek, but instead organizations just at various points realizing they need to get more efficient. We've seen it sometimes it's Toyota production systems being one example of this workout system, even without this kind of big speed up. Often inefficiencies creep in.
But something that Professor Shaw had said earlier was basically they also found in their pilot study a reduction of certain costs that are a drag on businesses, you know, reduction in turnover, a reduction in burnout, reduction and having to train new workers. ... I don't know if the study was long enough, but potentially reduction in the number of sick days that workers take, things like that.
CHAKRABARTI: I do want to get a sense how it actually has worked or hasn't worked on the ground. So Shawn Noratel joins us from Annapolis, Maryland. Shawn is the CEO of an advertising agency called Liquified Creative, and his company tried a four-day workweek for three summers beginning in 2020. NORATEL: And we found other alternatives that we presented, and we still have for example, we have, you know, to work from home days still in place within the business. We also saw that there was impact with being able to do professional development, which we offer all of our employees for additional, you know, growth in the professional aspect of what they do.
CHAKRABARTI: So that's an important point that you just made ... that your business is run via billable hours. So just the structure of how you make your revenue is quite different. But nevertheless, are you glad that you tried the experiment? STEWART: People have said, well, why do we need a bill for this? Shouldn't companies already be doing this, or shouldn't we let the market work? A lot of companies are on the fence about that. So a lot of companies see what their peers are doing, and they see what the study suggests. But their inertia is a powerful force. They're not sure they can make it work. They have questions.
CHAKRABARTI: So, Professor Bidwell ... California as well, I think has also been trying to pass some legislation to encourage a 32-hour workweek. But, you know, I'm reading a white paper from the California Chamber of Commerce.
And last year, Kickstarter decided to pilot a four-day workweek with their 100 employees, meaning everyone would work 32 hours and, yes, have the same pay and Fridays off. But they didn't just flip the switch to four days. They actually spent several months strategizing with every department at Kickstarter about how to implement a different workweek.
CHAKRABARTI: And Jon stresses that although the goal is four day workweeks, the key to making it work is actually just being flexible. TYNER: Off the chart. 11. Honestly, you know, mentally, it's really hard to think about a five-day workweek again. SCHOR: These companies that you're seeing, able to do it with not just maintaining productivity, but increasing productivity, you know, are sort of one end of the spectrum, companies that have a lot of slack. And so we can go to the other end and think about places where it seems like it'd be a lot harder. Factories for sure, although we are seeing factories do it because there are inefficiencies in factories too. Some more, some less.
... Okay. Now, speaking of health care, there's another big difference. I mean, in this country, health insurance is very much tied to your employer. And so I'm wondering if that makes us sort of less able to make major changes in what a workweek looks like then, say, someplace in in the U.K. where they have a version of national health. So perhaps that gives them more flexibility.
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