The Four-Day Workweek Experiment

The idea of working four days a week for the same pay once sounded like a fantasy. In the past few years, however, a growing number of companies in countries including the United Kingdom, Iceland, and Japan have experimented with it, and the results have attracted considerable attention.

In many trials, productivity held steady or even improved, while employees reported less stress and burnout. Companies found that when time was limited, staff cut unnecessary meetings and focused on essential tasks. Several also said the policy helped them attract and retain talented workers in a competitive labor market.

Skeptics caution that the model does not suit every industry. Hospitals, factories, and shops that must be staffed every day cannot simply close for an extra day, and compressing the same workload into fewer days can increase fatigue rather than reduce it. Participants in trials were also volunteers, which may have made the results look better than they would be across the economy.

Rather than a single universal solution, the four-day week may be best seen as one option among many flexible arrangements. Its broader lesson may be that the number of hours worked is not always the best measure of how much gets done.