Does the four-day week work?

Three years today after the first Covid shutdown, the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, said that we may only leave the house for exercise or shopping because of the Covid-19 virus.?

Throughout that period, the way many of us work has drastically altered and while lockdown may feel like a distant past, some of our routines have remained.

Can a four-day week work properly?

An eye-catching survey found that companies that introduced a four-day working week - with no loss of pay - saw their revenues?increase?by an average of 1.4 per cent.

There were also huge gains in well-being for employees, with participants reporting lower levels of stress and anxiety, and improved work-life balance.

The vast majority of the organisations that took part in the trial - 92 per cent - said they intended to continue the arrangements, with 18 confirming they had already been made permanent.

The research, which covered 2,900 employees, was carried out by social scientists from 英国剑桥大学 and Boston College in the US, as well as the think tank Autonomy.

The study is of great interest: if employers really can introduce a four-day week with no loss of revenue - or even slight gains in productivity - the potential gains are enormous.

A better work-life balance might employment a more attractive option - especially to those older adults who have proven hard to tempt back.

It would have clear mental health benefits at a time when the number of people seeking help for anxiety, depression and other disorders continues to rise. This is an economic as well as a social and moral concern: around 17 million working days are lost to self-reported mental health problems, accounting for nearly half of all self-reported medical absences.?

And it isn’t just mental health that can suffer through over-work. Our physical health can suffer, too. The new study found a four-day working week led to a 65 per cent reduction in sick days overall.

Then there are the environmental gains which come with cutting commuting levels. Experts calculate a 10 per cent reduction in hours is associated with an 8.6 per cent fall carbon footprint. During the trial - which included employers in various industries - time spent commuting dropped from 3.5 hours a week to 3.15 hours a week. A similar trial in the US saw an even bigger fall, of 27 per cent.

The findings of the research on the four-day week comes after it was revealed that more than a third of British workers (34%) would leave their jobs if their employer demanded they return to work full-time according to a survey carried out by the professional networking site, LinkedIn .

But there are reasons to be sceptical about the study, which was organised by 4 Day Week - Global , a group themselves pushing for the reform.

It was a relatively small-scale, short-term study, running for just sixth months, and with self-selecting organisations who knew what was being tested and presumably went into the experiment with positive expectations.?

It is one thing when a small cohort manages to achieve their predefined goal of maintaining productivity over a short period of time; it is quite another to assume all employers in all industries would be able to do the same indefinitely, particularly if a four-day week became compulsory rather than optional. Goals motivate behavioural change.

The 61 employers involved in the study were skewed towards industries where a four-day week is more plausible - for example, 18 per cent were in advertising or marketing, compared to only 7 per cent in construction and 4 per cent in manufacturing. Construction and manufacturing are much more likely to require routine attendance to satisfy routine output deadlines. They are not the kind of jobs where you can do necessary “top up” work from home, or where productivity can be maintained by working “better” rather than more.?

Does working four days rather than five really mean a 20 per cent cut in hours??

Not in this study.

On average, working hours fell by just four hours (from 38 hours to 34 hours), and 15% of employees actually reported an?increase?in working hours.?

In the long run - in terms of our mental and physical health, and our ability to have fulfilling social lives - working longer hours from Monday to Thursday in order to have Friday off might be a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul.?

Then there is the question of whether some of the reported gains might have been better achieved through other means. For example, the authors of the report said four-day-a-week workers were “much less inclined to kill time, and actively sought out technologies that improved their productivity”.?

But are these problems caused by a five-day working week, or problems caused by poor management and workplace practices?

Might those problems not be better solved by giving people more rewarding work, better training, better access to technology and resources?

Might mental and physical health be better preserved through offering more flexible work, more remote and hybrid working, and better in-work benefits?

The idea that reducing working hours by 20 per cent can be done with no loss in productivity, in the long term and across industries, is highly counter-intuitive.

That intuition might be wrong, but we should demand strong evidence before we abandon it. (It is worth noting that the average increased revenue of 1.4 per cent in this study was compared to an early post-Covid recovery when the economy was still flickering back to life.)

This matters: the UK has had anaemic growth for nearly a decade and a half now. And there are large parts of our city-centre economies - from transport networks to coffee shops and restaurants - whose income is predicated on people turning up for work.?

Campaigners for the four-day week also highlight that the four-day week would help to create more jobs and lower unemployment. However, as a nation which last year had a record high of 1.3m job vacancies (and is still recording more than 1.1m job vacancies according to the latest data) this would create a fresh challenge rather than a new solution for Britain.

One of the big breakthroughs in management theory over recent decades has been an understanding that happy workers are productive workers.?

Better working conditions - those that allow us to have fulfilling lives outside the factory or office - are vital to this. Four-day working might well be part of the solution.?

But it is surely only one part of the solution, and perhaps not the most important: it isn’t just the total time we spend at work that determines our well-being, but the?quality?of our work, and how rewarding we find it.?

Neither is four-day working a one-size-fits-all-solution - it will surely work better for some industries, employers or employees than others.

We should welcome those working to create a better worklife balance for people.

However, we also need to recognise that those campaigning for the four-day week have more work to do and larger trials to run if they are to convince more employers and the Government that is a viable alternative to the five day working week which has now been widely adopted around the world.