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Nearly 1,000 Britons Will Keep Four-Day Work Week After Trial (theguardian.com) 38

Posted by BeauHD from the work-life-balance dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Nearly 1,000 British workers will keep a shorter working week after the latest trial of a four-day week and similar changes to traditional working patterns. All 17 British businesses in a six-month trial of the four-day week said they would continue with an arrangement consisting of either four days a week or nine days a fortnight. All the employees remained on their full salary. The trial was organized by the 4 Day Week Foundation, a group campaigning for more businesses to take up shorter working weeks.

The latest test follows a larger six-month pilot in 2022, involving almost 3,000 employees, which ended in 56 of 61 companies cutting down their hours from a five-day working week. [...] Researchers at Boston College, a US university, said the findings from the latest trial were "extremely positive" for workers. They found that 62% of workers reported that they experienced less burnout during the trial, according to a poll of 89 people. Forty-five percent of those polled said they felt "more satisfied with life."

The 4 Day Week Foundation has run successive trials to gather data and demonstrate how companies can make the switch. In January, the foundation said more than 5,000 people from a previous wave had started the year permanently working a four-day week. Companies involved in the latest trial, which started in November, included charities and professional services firms, with the number of employees at each employer ranging between five and 400. They included the British Society for Immunology and Crate Brewery in Hackney, east London. [...] The small web software company BrandPipe said that the latest trial had been a success for the business, coinciding with increased sales. Geoff Slaughter, BrandPipe's chief executive, said: "The trial's been an overwhelming success because it has been the launchpad for us to consider what constitutes efficiency, and financial performance is double what it was before."

Slaughter added: "If we're going to see it rolled out more substantially across different sectors, there should be incentives for early adopters, because we're creating the blueprint for the future."
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Nearly 1,000 Britons Will Keep Four-Day Work Week After Trial More

Nearly 1,000 Britons Will Keep Four-Day Work Week After Trial

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  • We work more hours than the Japanese.
  • This is just some workers with lazy bosses admitting they get away with not working 20% of their workday.

    Guess what:
    Fewer workdays won't change that.

    • Re:Guess what (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @06:48PM (#65495194)

      It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime; so where's the motivation?

        This is why I believe companies should reserve a percentage of dividends to be given to employees. To encourage employees to work to make the company more profitable as they see a return on their work. If the company does not issue dividends, the employees do not receive them, but if they do they must receive them. The same should go for any other form of shareholder or executive compensation/remuneration because I know they'll just find a new way to avoid paying people.

        However this is somehow considered

        • When I run Amateslabooksoftx, this is precisely what I will do.

          It is surely worth diluting a company's owners' shares by, say 10%, in order to motivate *every single worker* that little bit more, to make them see themselves part of the whole, to highlight that slackers are costing THEM money ?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      But it DID. Better performance is a real and measurable result.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Human beings are not machines, they do not produce a constant stream of output while they are working. Outside of simple manual jobs, at least. They get tired, they have lives outside the office, stress and overworking make them sick.

      Turns out that 5 days a week is less efficient than 4 days a week for most people, i.e. they can get the same amount of work done in fewer hours if the duty cycle is reduced. It's a win-win - the employee has more free time and better quality of life, the employer loses nothing

      • I disagree. I know I do more in 4 days than 5. And I usually do more in the office than at home.

        BUT
        If the price of keeping me at my employer, on the wages they pay me, is a, say, 10% reduction in what they would have out of me at 5 days in the office, then I am happy that that is a price they are willing to pay.

        i.e. We are having the wrong debate.

    • Honestly, I suspect the debate about 4 day weeks versus 5 will be about as conclusive as the work from home versus return to office debate.

      Out of 3000 people, the commanders of about 1000 of them seem to think the 4 day week works well. The others don't agree. Elsewhere, the same seems to be true about working from home - some swear by it (myself included), yet numerous employers mandate return to office for the whole week.

      I wonder if there's any correlation between the two? ;-)

  • These stories on the supposedly shortened British working week are never specific as to whether they're working less hours per week for the same pay. If hours per week are the same, then the only thing workers may be gaining is some scheduling flexibility.

    Today's workers should be down to about a 30-hour work week based on productivity improvements since the '70s. Either that or about 40% more pay.

  • Move to At Will Employment (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Whateverthisis ( 7004192 ) on Thursday July 03, 2025 @07:55PM (#65495356)
    This is all fine, and there are situations where a 4-day work week can be beneficial to both the employee and the employer.

    The issue is not having at-will employment. Most of the US has at-will employment, meaning you can be fired for any reason at any time. In general that means that a company has a very bad reputation if they abuse this and it'll be difficult to hire, but if you want qualified talent you have to make your workplace an attractive place to work. Not so in the UK. While in theory you can fire an employee for poor performance, the level of documentation required to demonstrate poor performance is so onerous; it can take 3 to 5 months of constant HR work to demonstrate that the employee is a bad performer. And maybe they demosntrate they're performing ok, but if they are a toxic personality in the work environment that brings down the morale of the rest of the group, in general you have very little recourse as an employer.

    While maybe that sounds great from the employee side, from the employer side it makes hiring a significant risk. If you make a mistake in hiring a person, fixing that mistake is an enormously difficult prospect. This directly relates to why the UK has a comparatively small innovation economy; startups by their very definition are taking enormous risks, adding hiring risks on top of that is painful as hell; it makes you not want to hire people at all.

    The US is much more dynamic in this regard; while yes it gives fewer protections for workers, it also shows that toxic employees need to shape up or they'll never get hired, and it also leads to a more dynamic employment market. It causes short term pain when you have to let someone go, but I've been forced to layoff whole teams because our company was struggling in all respects, and I was able to help all of the people I laid off find better jobs that advanced their careers; the poor emotional state near-term when they were laid off was absolved by the fact that they ended up finding better jobs that were better fits because of the work they did at our company. In contrast our UK teams were always just a giant complex issue; we simply could not afford to get hiring wrong which means we were always reticent to hire at all in the UK.

    • In 2003, I was asked to accept a transfer of an OLD guy who was a mainframe COBOL programmer because his unit didn't need him anymore. I was skeptical, but was willing to do the favour to my boss. My unit was UNIX, JAVA and PERL and a few other things at the time, as far away from COBOL mainframe batch processing as you could get.

      I started this guy off SIMPLE. Basic PERL scripting. He just couldn't get it!!!! He got all the help in the world and we all may as well have been talking to a wall. It was ridicu

  • Blue collar work you get paid to show up.

    White collar work you get paid to produce a result.

    If you produce said result with your ass parked in an office chair on Wednesday afternoon or thinking about it while cutting the grass on Saturday morning, it still counts.

    The con here is asserting that this will work for blue collar work, which by definition is commodotized labor whose value is defined by process rather than by outcome.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      That depends on the work. For maintenance, you don't care if he labors like a madman for hours a day, or if he reads a magazine all day, then takes out his wand and says "REPAIRO" with a flourish. So long as shit works.

  • 8 hours x 4 = 32 hours and your short of normal paycheck, 10 hours = 40, 12 hours = 48 with OT.

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