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The World’s Biggest Four-Day Work Week Experiment is Happening Now

Maya Kosoff
3 min readJun 13, 2022

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Workers in the U.K. are about to have slightly more time on their hands.

From June until December, 3,300 workers at more than 70 U.K. organizations will receive 100% of their regular paychecks in exchange for just 80% of their usual time spent working. In exchange, they’ll maintain 100% of their productivity. This is the latest iteration of the advocacy group 4 Day Week Global’s experiment in giving workers a four-day work week with a three-day weekend.

4 Day Week Global partnered with the think tank Autonomy, the 4 Day Week Campaign, and researchers at Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College to produce the trial, which the researchers are using to measure the sociological impact of giving workers a longer weekend. Among the factors the researchers will observe: how a four-day work week schedule impacts employee stress levels, energy use, travel and sleep patterns.

The charities and businesses involved in the experiment include a number of different sectors, ranging from the London-based brewing company Pressure Drop, to the Royal Society of Biology, to a Norfolk-based fish-and-chip shop.

“As we emerge from the pandemic, more and more companies are recognizing that the new frontier for competition is quality of life, and that reduced-hour, output-focused working is the vehicle to give them a competitive edge,” Joe O’Connor, chief executive of 4 Day Week Global, said in a statement.

Government-supported four-day work week trials are also set to start later this year in Spain and Scotland.

Some U.S.-based companies, driven by concern for burnout and wanting to empower workers in a tight labor market in the pandemic, have turned to a shorter work week for different reasons, offering meeting-free Fridays or half-day Fridays to employees. Shake Shack and Kickstarter, for example, have both toyed with the idea of a four-day work week, and online children’s clothes retailer Primary has been using a four-day work week model since May 2020.

Some companies, including Unilever, Panasonic and Microsoft, have also tried out the four-day work week during the pandemic. Unilever’s trial is ongoing, Panasonic has decided to make the four-day work week optional for Japanese employees, and Microsoft said it saw worker productivity shoot up 40% during its trial. Chelsea Fagan, the CEO of the media company The Financial Diet, has…

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Maya Kosoff
Maya Kosoff

Written by Maya Kosoff

i’m a freelance writer and editor. you can also read me in places like the new york times and vanity fair.

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