Latest news with #4DayWeek
CNBC
2 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
The real reason a 4-day workweek makes people happier in their jobs—it's not just more free time
It's not exactly surprising that workers support moving to a four-day workweek. In the last five years, hundreds of companies have piloted a four-day, 32-hour workweek with no pay cuts to some 8,700 workers around the world. People experienced less burnout, stress and anxiety, and better mental and physical health. Employees rated their work-life balance higher, and even business profits grew. There are two major factors for the boost in workers' happiness, says Juliet Schor, an author, economist, sociologist and lead researcher of the 4 Day Week experiments. One, of course, is that people have more time for their families, friends, sleep, hobbies, health and communities, Schor writes in her latest book, "Four Days a Week." The second factor, however, is that workers are happier even while they're on the clock. Simply put: The four-day week makes people feel much more effective at work, and that makes them happier in general. Trial participants self-reported that they were more productive than ever after moving to a shortened week. When faced with the task of getting their usual amount of work done in less time, workers and teams found ways to cut out busywork, streamline processes and determine what work was actually most important, Schor writes. Some said they felt more stress trying to cram everything in, though those situations were the exception, Schor writes. Beyond maintaining productivity, "people just feel so much better," Schor tells CNBC Make It. "They feel on top of their work and their life, and they're not stressed out. They feel recovered when they come to work on Monday morning. They feel more eager to do work. They feel like they can get it done." When workers feel like they're good at their job, they feel good overall, and that spills into their personal lives. "That productivity bump they get, of feeling so good about their work quality, that has a big positive impact on their overall well-being, which we never expected," Schor says. The four-day workweek could also make people feel better about their jobs because it signals a new contract between themselves and their employer. The typical five-day, 40-hour workweek has been the national standard by law since the 1940s. When companies introduce a shorter workweek without a pay cut, the flexibility can be seen as an exclusive benefit or reward. It signals that management is willing to give up some control over how people structure their time, Schor says, especially if part of the goal is to explicitly improve employee well-being. The move can additionally strengthen teams when colleagues band together to work smarter in less time. The four-day week "makes everyone super motivated to implement [process] changes, which aren't easy," said Jon Leland, who previously helped Kickstarter through a four-day workweek pilot. "It makes the stakes really high, because you're not only gaining these efficiency gains just for yourself, but you're doing it for everyone else around you," Leland told Schor in her book. "This accountability to co-workers is an important part of why people are willing to make the extra effort to find efficiencies, forgo goofing off, and do the hard work," Schor writes. "They develop more team spirit."
Time of India
5 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
A 4-day workweek could boost productivity and wellbeing, says economist. But why won't we try it?
In a world still recovering from the psychological whiplash of the pandemic, the dream of a better work-life balance no longer feels like a utopia — it feels necessary. Juliet Schor , a Boston College economist and sociologist, has been advocating this shift for decades. Her latest work as lead researcher with 4 Day Week, a global initiative studying the impact of reduced working hours , suggests the idea may finally be catching on. Speaking to CNBC Make It, Schor recounted how her 1992 bestseller The Overworked American first sparked debate about overemployment. But it wasn't until COVID-19 forced a radical reevaluation of daily life that serious momentum began building. 'People realized it was more important to be living the life they wanted… not one of overworking, stress, and burnout,' she said. Explore courses from Top Institutes in Please select course: Select a Course Category Data Science Digital Marketing Design Thinking Data Analytics Public Policy PGDM Technology MBA Data Science Healthcare others Product Management Leadership Cybersecurity healthcare Project Management Finance Operations Management CXO MCA Artificial Intelligence Others Management Skills you'll gain: Data Analysis & Interpretation Programming Proficiency Problem-Solving Skills Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Duration: 24 Months Vellore Institute of Technology VIT MSc in Data Science Starts on Aug 14, 2024 Get Details Skills you'll gain: Strategic Data-Analysis, including Data Mining & Preparation Predictive Modeling & Advanced Clustering Techniques Machine Learning Concepts & Regression Analysis Cutting-edge applications of AI, like NLP & Generative AI Duration: 8 Months IIM Kozhikode Professional Certificate in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Starts on Jun 26, 2024 Get Details The 4-Day Formula: Less Stress, More Success So what happens when companies trim the workweek to four days — without slashing pay? According to Schor's latest book Four Days a Week, which compiles insights from pilots across 245 organizations and 8,700+ employees globally, the results are not just promising — they're transformational. Participants in the pilot reported better work-life balance, less stress, and improved mental and physical health. 'The big jump in self-reported productivity is striking,' Schor told CNBC Make It. 'People feel more on top of their work and their lives. They're not coming into Mondays drained — they're eager, focused, and satisfied.' Even employers had reasons to cheer: productivity stayed stable or even rose, profits ticked upward, and employee turnover practically vanished. You Might Also Like: Bill Gates predicts 2-day work week as AI set to replace humans for most jobs within a decade — TEDTalks (@TEDTalks) So Why Isn't Everyone Doing It? Despite the evidence, the five-day workweek remains stubbornly intact in most companies. Schor attributes this resistance to one key issue: control. 'Giving people more time back feels like a loss of control to some managements,' she explains. 'It's not about performance — it's about power.' Add to that the fear of being seen as radical or deviating from the norm, and many businesses choose to stick with the status quo. However, Fridays, once sacrosanct, are already evolving. As Schor notes, most companies informally allow for 'Summer Fridays' or shorter hours at week's end. The four-day shift may simply be formalizing what's already happening. Will AI Do What Policy Can't? Enter Bill Gates — tech visionary and co-founder of Microsoft — who recently made waves on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon by predicting a two-day workweek within a decade, driven by the explosive rise of artificial intelligence. You Might Also Like: It is not just Narayana Murthy: UK venture capitalist says a 7-day workweek is the price to 'win' amid China's '996' culture Gates believes AI will soon be able to perform the bulk of tasks currently handled by humans. 'It's kind of profound,' he said. 'It brings so much change.' That change, he imagines, could free up time for creativity, caregiving, and rest — if managed ethically. Schor echoes this possibility, suggesting that AI-induced productivity gains could justify shorter hours without sacrificing pay. 'We can either lay off people en masse or reduce hours per job,' she says. 'Giving people more free time, while preserving income, is the smarter path.' Between burnout metrics that remain stubbornly high and rapid technological shifts, the traditional workweek may be on its last legs. But what replaces it — and who benefits — remains the central debate. The vision is tantalizing: a world where AI supports rather than supplants, where a four-day week is the norm, not the exception, and where people work to live, not live to work. As Juliet Schor reminds us, 'We're already on this path. The question now is, how fast can we walk it?'
CNBC
5 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
The most surprising benefits of a 4-day workweek, from a researcher who's studied thousands of cases: 'We never expected' it
Juliet Schor has been studying the benefits of working less for decades. She published her first book on the topic, "The Overworked American," in 1992. It hit a nerve: The book landed her on the The New York Times' bestseller list, into rooms with big-name CEOs and on the phone with policymakers in Washington, D.C. Then, the issue died; plans to experiment with shorter workdays and workweeks didn't pan out. The events of 2020 change everything. The Covid-19 pandemic and widespread loss of life, combined with a reimagining of how people live and work, led many to realize "it was more important to be living the life they they wanted to lead, and that was not a life of overworking stress and burnout," Schor tells CNBC Make It. In recent years, Schor, an economist and sociology professor at Boston College, has been a lead researcher with 4 Day Week, a global group of business leaders and experts studying the impacts of a shortened workweek on companies and their employees. By the summer of 2024, 245 organizations and more than 8,700 employees across the U.S., Canada, Ireland, the U.K., Australia and more had piloted 4 Day Week experiments, which primarily uses a four-day, 32-hour week model with no reduction in pay. Employees rated their work-life balance higher after shortening their weeks; they experienced less burnout, stress and anxiety, and better mental and physical health. Business profits grew and turnover disappeared. Schor compiled these findings in her latest book, "Four Days a Week," and spoke with CNBC Make It about her research. Here, she covers the experiments' biggest surprises, why more companies won't try the shortened week, whether it could lead to pay cuts and how AI advancements fit in the picture. CNBC Make It: What are the most surprising results you've seen from four-day workweek trials? Schor: The big jump in self-reported productivity is pretty striking. Beyond maintaining productivity, people just feel so much better. They feel on top of their work and their life, and they're not stressed out. They feel recovered when they come to work on Monday morning. They feel more eager to do work. They feel like they can get it done. That productivity bump they get, of feeling so good about their work quality, that has a big positive impact on their overall well-being, which we never expected. I thought that second job-holding would go up. It doesn't. In fact, on average, it falls. People really are taking that day for themselves. The pace of work didn't speed up. You'd think everybody just works really hard on those four days to get everything in. But it's a company-wide work reorganization. If the four-day workweek is so good for businesses and employees, why don't more places do it? I think the answer to that is the same answer to: Why is it that so many companies are trying so hard to get people back in the office when they don't want to go back, and when the companies have been really successful with work from home? I think there are two things: One is there's a sense in which the companies have to give up control if they're giving people more time back. Management doesn't like that. For some of these return-to-office mandates, they're really more about control than they are about performance. Second, it feels radical and risky. That's why it helps for these companies to go through a six-month or year-long pilot and see how it goes. The five-day week is very ingrained. On the other hand, Friday is kind of organically evolving in a way that is pretty clear. There's less and less work being done on Friday. Most companies don't reorganize things for Summer Fridays, they just give people that time. You're not losing a whole day's worth of productivity, because it's already a less productive day. We are evolving away from the full Friday workday. I think we need to accelerate that process. Could the four-day workweek lead companies to pay their employees less? To be in our trials, you cannot reduce pay at all. That's a requirement. I don't think cutting pay would work. People hate pay reductions that are not voluntary. Some people may ask for a trade-off of working less for less money. But for the most part, people have commitments for the money they have at any current time. Many people in our economy aren't earning enough, and so they're struggling to meet their needs. I think management would be very foolish to just try and take money away from people, because they will hate it. The standard payment model says people should get whatever their productivity is. So with this four-day week where you're not seeing a reduction in productivity, you shouldn't have a change in pay. We also see people stop quitting four-day-week jobs. The resignation rates just pretty much go to zero in many of these companies. That's where management could maybe take advantage and decide to give lower wage increases over time. I think that's possible as more companies do it. But the countervailing trend to that is they're adopting AI that makes people a lot more productive. And so the standard models say they should get wage increases as a result. Could AI speed up the four-day workweek? Could it eliminates jobs? It's really hard to keep everyone in jobs if you're displacing labor with technology. And increasingly, economists are finding that the job-killing potential of AI is really high. We're faced with two possibilities. One is: We lay off huge numbers of people, and I don't think we're going to be able to re-employ them all in a timely fashion. Then we have an economic catastrophe on our hands. Or: We gradually reduce hours per job so that as people get more productive, we're not cutting employment, we're just having people spend less time at work. If you have that productivity increase from AI, it can go to give people more free time, in which case their income stays more or less the same. Or it can go toward more work and more money. But if you have so much productivity growth, the companies can't necessarily expand that much. So what if you can suddenly produce twice as much? Is there somebody there who's going to buy that twice as much? Where's all that demand going to come from? The labor market doesn't seem favorable to workers right now. Does the four-day workweek really have momentum in the current environment? It's a very mixed picture in the job market right now. For some occupations, for AI reasons or others, it's hard to get a job. But there are others where employers are having difficulty filling positions, and they're not getting people back into the office. The latest data around hours worked at home are really steady. They are just not going down. Of course, if we have a big recession, then lots of things change. But I think we're still on a path toward moving in that direction. If you look at the numbers on stress, burnout, disengagement, people struggling in their jobs and so forth — they were at record levels during the pandemic, and they have come down since then, but not by that much. And I think that creates ongoing momentum to normalize a four-day week. Is the goal of these experiments ultimately to make the four-day workweek the national standard by law? I reached out to the head of a manufacturing company that was in our trials about possibly testifying on Senator Bernie Sanders' bill to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to set the statutory workweek at 32 hours. This person's response was: I believe very much in this. It's been really great for my company. But I don't believe in legislating it. Typically you need more momentum to get a big change like this in labor law, where you're seeing more of that practice across the economy. Like with Family and Medical Leave Act, many companies already had instituted it before it became a national standard. So we need more big companies to show how viable it is. And then my personal view is that you need legislation to pull the laggards along.
Euronews
29-01-2025
- Business
- Euronews
Work less, save CO2: How a four day working week can benefit the planet
Everyone loves a three day weekend, but what if that could be the norm for every workplace, every week? That's the reality more than 5,000 British workers are enjoying, as increasing numbers of companies sign up to a four day working week. The latest update from the 4 Day Week Foundation, the UK's national campaign for a four day working week, shares that 200 UK companies have permanently adopted a four day working week, with no loss of pay for their staff. Businesses are spread across a variety of sectors, including creative arts, engineering, recruitment, entertainment and construction. Fifty-nine of the companies are based in London, with the rest spread over regions of England and Scotland. Studies have shown that working one day less a week can have far-reaching benefits for worker retention and health. But there's a climate benefit to working less too. Four day working week is good for our health and the planet's In a pilot conducted by 4 Day Week in 2022, 61 companies switched to a shorter working week, and the results were remarkable. Anxiety, fatigue and sleep issues decreased, measures of work-life balance improved, and there was a 65 per cent reduction in sick days. Almost all the companies (92 per cent) decided to continue with a four day working week following the pilot. The businesses suffered no detriment, with some reporting even higher levels of productivity and profitability during the pilot. But what of the environmental impact of making such a change? 'We know that we've got to throw everything at the fight to tackle climate change but the benefits of a reduced working week have so far been largely ignored,' Joe Ryle, campaign director for the 4 Day Week Foundation tells Euronews Green. 'Moving to a four-day week with no loss in pay for workers could reduce carbon-intensive commuting and give people the time to engage in more environmentally sustainable behaviours.' According to 4 Day Week, research has shown that the UK's carbon footprint could be reduced by 127 million tonnes a year through shorter working weeks. That, they say, is equivalent to taking 27 million cars off the road. The 4 Day Week kicked off a new pilot in November 2024, with more than 1,000 employees currently testing how a shorter working week could work for them. It says it plans to run at least three new pilots in 2025. What climate benefits could a four day work week bring? Although there has not been extensive research into the climate benefits of a four-day work week, the information available is encouraging. A 2012 paper concluded that a 10 per cent reduction in working hours could lead to declines in various environmental markers. Specifically, it said CO2 emissions would drop by 4.2 per cent, the person's carbon footprint would shrink by 14.6 per cent, and their ecological footprint would decline by 12.1 per cent. More recently, Henley Business School conducted research with hundreds of UK businesses and thousands of working adults to determine what the benefits of a four-day work week would be. They found this simple change would reduce the number of miles driven by commuters by 558 million each week. 'With a three-day weekend, there are more opportunities for workers to exercise, spend time outdoors or do other things that improve their physical and mental health,' says Henley Business School's Professor Anupam Nanda. 'This in turn means less demand for carbon-producing healthcare services.' Professor Nanda further noted that one day less in the workplace means one day less wear and tear on the things we use at work. That would mean computers, machinery, uniforms and other consumables would need replacing less often, bringing further climate benefits. However, Nanda notes that the benefits will all depend on how those people use the three-day weekend. If they used the day to fly off for a short break, sit at home with the heating cranked up or take their sports car for a pleasure drive, fewer working hours could prove to be worse for the environment. How does working a shorter week reduce our environmental impact? Some benefits of not going to work are easy to see. Eliminating 20 per cent of the weekly commute comes with direct carbon savings, whether from a private car, bus, or train. But other savings are less obvious. Pernille Garde Abildgaard, author of The Secret of the Four Day Week, shared an example of practical savings made through reduced working hours with Euronews Green. It involved a Danish company with around 100 employees, who drive around installing fibre networks at businesses. She explains that, while they switched to a four day week, the hours weren't drastically reduced. Rather than working 37 hours over five days, they began working 34 hours over four days. 'What they found was that the extra hours in the days allowed them to reach four customers per day, whereas with the 'old system' they reached only three,' Abildgaard explains. 'Now, everyone has Friday off, they save 20 per cent of their fuel and more customers are serviced overall.' In the workplace, energy consumption will be naturally reduced if the building is empty for an extra day a week. Data consumption drops too, with no unnecessary emails being sent, and as big data centres consume huge amounts of power, that's another win for the environment. Studies by Boston College in partnership with Four Day Week Global found that a shorter workweek could actually be linked to an increase in climate-friendly activities like cycling and walking. 'We get a climate benefit, and people get a well-being benefit,' says Dr Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College. 'I'd like to see work-time reduction in the climate discourse in a much bigger way than it has been.' Dr Schor says that other studies she's done suggest working less can actually reset our cultural drive to produce and consume as much as we do. She believes that, longer term, this could lead to much larger climate-positive effects. An example of that was seen during the 4 Day Week Foundation's 2022 pilot. Waterwise, a UK non-profit that participated in the research, noted that volunteering among employees increased. In a similar trial in the USA, Kickstarter noted that workers became more socially and civically engaged. So a four-day work week could have us feeling better, reducing our carbon footprints and generally being better people. Does that mean all businesses will eventually move to a four-day week? Probably not, but there are high hopes more will join this reshaping of the workplace to make it fit for the future. 'One of the easiest and most popular ways that we could tackle climate change is simply by working less,' says Ryle. 'Moving to a four-day week is not just good for the well-being of workers but also for the wellbeing of the planet.'
