Companies involved in the large-scale trial of a 4-day working week in the U.K. says it’s going well
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Halfway into a six-month trial of four-day workweeks across the U.K., many participating companies have found it to be a preliminary success, according to the results of a recent survey. Of the 41 companies who responded to the questionnaire, 35 of them said they were “likely” or “very likely” to continue with the reduced working week, after the pilot ends.
In all, 72 companies are taking part, where their employees—a total of 3,300 workers—receive one paid day off per week between Monday and Friday.
The trial began in June and is run by 4 Day Week Global, the think tank Autonomy, the 4 Day Week UK Campaign and researchers at Cambridge University, Boston College and Oxford University.
More specifically, the results show that, to date:
Productivity has improved for nearly half of the companies (34% said that productivity has “improved slightly,” and 15% say it has “improved significantly”), while many think it has stayed the same (46% of respondents), despite everyone working one day per week less.
86% of respondents said that at this point in the trial, they would be “extremely likely” and/or “likely” to consider the idea of retaining a four-day week when the pilot ends.
This data is based on half of the companies taking part in the pilot, those that responded to the survey.
4 Day Week Global CEO Joe O’Connor said, “We are learning that for many it is a fairly smooth transition and for some there are some understandable hurdles—especially among those which have comparatively fixed or inflexible practices, systems, or cultures which date back well into the last century.”
The companies taking part span most sectors of the economy and encompass everything from a chip shop to large corporations.
The idea of a reduced workweek has been around for a very long time. The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 in a speech called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” that everyone would be working a 15-hour week because of the potential growth of wealth and technological advances.
Many people have talked about the idea of working less since then, notably then-Vice President Richard Nixon, when he predicted in 1956 a four-day work week in the “not too distant future.”
This U.K. project is just one of many taking place around the world, investigating how a four-day working week would look and feel in practice. There have been very public calls from one part of the French media for a 32-hour work week and there are large-scale trials taking place in the U.S., Scotland, New Zealand and Iceland. In Sweden, a recent trial found that employees completed the same amount of work in four days as they were doing before the pilot in five.
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