4-day work weeks allow employee flexibility, company globalization

With symptoms of low motivation, inability to focus and not being able to get out of bed in the morning — to name a few — 52 percent of employees feel burnout, a 2021 study by Indeed found.

“We know that the amount of work that we have been doing in the last couple of generations is killing us,” said Charlotte Lockhart, founder of 4 Day Week Global, a nonprofit that encourages business leaders to make more sustainable work environments — often by reducing the work week from five to four days.

“The place that work sits in our lives has gone too far,” she said. “[Overworking is] not sustainable for … a healthy society.”

Companies lose worker days when employees are burnt out, Lockhart said, but prioritizing mental health in the workplace yields social and economic benefits. One way Lockhart tries to put work in context is by reminding employers that “we borrow our people from their lives.”

Justin Mitchell “probably would work” at his software startup, Yac, if it didn’t run on the personal ownership model that it does. His end goal was a workplace without “guardrails” dictating how, where or when an employee works.

The first step to reaching that goal was reducing meetings. So Mitchell founded Yac, an asynchronous meeting substitute that uses voice recordings to discuss projects at times convenient for each teammate.

“We saw asynchronous meetings as the main reason why a lot of [flexible] policies were impossible to pull off,” Mitchell said. For example, if a mandatory meeting is set for 3 p.m., a parent is unable to pick their child up from school, meaning the workplace is not flexible.

“Once I get rid of meetings, then I can implement flexible time,” he said. “Then I can implement a four-day work week. And then I can implement a global hiring practice and all these other amazing things.”

Yac’s 12 employees work from six countries on four continents. They can spread their 32 hours of work however they like over seven days.

Thirty-two hours, not the typical 40 hours.

Successful implementations of the four-day work week model at companies across the globe have shown that productivity increases with shorter work days and weeks.

Longer hours leave employees fatigued and less productive. “In a vicious circle, this lower productivity ends up necessitating longer working days to ‘make up’ the lost output, lowering ‘per-hour productivity’ even further,” reads a report overviewing Iceland’s progress toward shorter work weeks.

“Eight hours is a silly number that we just picked arbitrarily from factory days,” Mitchell said. “Nobody works like that these days.”

The Wanderlust Group, the parent brand of three outdoor marketplaces, enforces a Monday-off, 32-hour work week for most of its 80 employees. Members of the support team — the exception — stagger their day off to ensure customers can be assisted each day of the week.

Meghan Keaney Anderson, chief marketing officer of The Wanderlust Group, said the company implemented its four-day work week in May 2020. Upon seeing the “immense strain” employees were under due to the pandemic, the company decided it was OK to sacrifice productivity to help its workers. But the results proved surprising.

“The team didn't take any hit to productivity,” Anderson said. “In fact, productivity stayed just as high, and what followed was one of the most productive and successful six months of the company's history.”

Anderson believes efficiency increases because workers have to be more disciplined with how they use their time. “It's really just about hygiene of your time during the week, and being really intentional [with it].”

Operating on a four-day work week has also boosted employee morale, Anderson said, and it fits with the company’s mission of promoting time spent outdoors.

At both Yac and The Wanderlust, employees use their day or days off to do errands, reset, spend time with family and friends, go on outdoor adventures, and to teach or take lessons.

Neither company pays employees less for working 32 hours as opposed to 40.

Meghan Orechia is a research nurse at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who works four 10-hour days each week. On her off-day, Thursday, she was feeling “exhausted.”

Orcheia entered this position in January after having been a part-time oncology and COVID-19 nurse at Spaulding Hospital Cambridge, where she worked a total of 30 hours, four days a week. She loved working 30-hour weeks, but the job didn’t come with benefits and didn’t pay enough, so Orcheia worked other jobs on evenings and days off.

She “can really feel” the added two hours per day in her new position, where she works four 10-hour days and “[doesn’t] really take breaks.”

“Ten hours is such a long time to be fully working,” Orechia said, adding that she often stays late and arrives early because she “can’t physically get all the stuff done that [she] need[s] to.”

Mitchell believes that “no good work is happening in that tenth hour.” He added, “You're not at your most creative, you're not at your sharpest. So there's no point to doing those two extra hours.”

But Orechia sees things differently. “When you’re working 30 hours, you don’t really have that much of a purpose,” she said. “There’s a reason people work 40 hours.”

Her role isn’t offered as a part-time position because “there’s too much to do.” But even though her job is hard, Orechia said she loves it and finds developing relationships with patients to be rewarding.

“Working a 40-hour week with four days has actually been incredible,” she said. “I still can have three days off, whereas before I was picking up all of these shifts. I was way more tired working 30 hours per diem than 40 hours at the same place.”

Orcehia identified two barriers to flexible schedules in the medical field that go hand-in-hand: the staffing shortage and that patients may still call with symptoms on a day off.

“When people need your help, they need it,” she said. “And there’s not always the coverage when you’re not working all five days.”

A study at a hospital in Sweden reduced some nurses’ working hours from eight to six hours per day over a two-year period. Results showed higher job satisfaction, better staff performance and quality of care, and improved work-life balance. The study concluded that sustainable work environments could improve nurses’ willingness to stay in the job.

Lockhart said it’s important for workplaces to at least be open to the idea and to explore running a pilot program.

“The people who have a negative response [to this model] often have an overinflated opinion about themselves,” Lockhart said. “There are companies in virtually every industry … that are doing some form of reduced-hour work week because their leader said, ‘I can do this.’”

Lockhart’s advice for employers is to “understand what productivity truly is in your business and … help your employees shift away from busyness.”

And to young people, she says, “We have a moment in time when the employees have the power. It's important to use it and set a standard for everyone.”