The benefits of a four-day workweek, according to a proponent of the trend

Companies considering allowing employees to work four days a week hope to reduce burnout and retain talented employees looking for a better work-life balance, according to the CEO of the organization promoting the idea.

The trend is gaining traction in Australia and Europe, says Dale Whelehan, CEO of 4 Day Week Global, which coaches companies in a month-long process of reducing employee hours. Japan launched a campaign in August encouraging employers to shorten work schedules to four days.

American companies haven’t embraced the four-day workweek as widely, but that could be changing. Nearly a third of American CEOs surveyed by accounting firm KPMG in 2024 said they were considering alternative work schedules, such as a four-day or four-and-a-half-day week.

The Associated Press spoke with Whelehan about why companies might want to consider the change. His comments have been edited for length and clarity.

A: The bigger question is, why wouldn’t they? There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we need to do something fundamentally different in the way we work. We have burnout problems. We have recruitment and retention crises in many industries. We have increased stress in our workforce, which leads to health problems, work-life balance problems, work-life conflicts. We have people sitting in their cars for long periods of time, which contributes to the climate crisis. We have parts of the population that are able to work longer hours and are therefore rewarded for doing so, which creates further inequalities in our societies. Finally, let’s look at the implications that stress actually has for long-term health. We know that it’s linked to problems like cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes. So stress is not something to be taken for granted, and it’s only going to increase in our working world.

To understand where we are now, let’s go back to pre-industrial times. My grandfather was a farmer, he worked seven days a week and was required on site all the time. It was a lot of long hours, but he also had a lot of autonomy.

When my dad entered the workforce, he was a technician in a mechanical role. And he was expected to produce products on a large scale. As a result, he wasn’t getting paid for farming, but he was getting paid a salary. That change from my grandfather’s day to my dad’s day led to the birth of a discipline known as management. And management, led by Frederick Taylor, studied the relationship between fatigue and productivity. There was a lot of scientific research done to try to understand that relationship, which led to the need for the five-day workweek as opposed to the six-day workweek. When I entered the workforce, we no longer had a very physical, hard-working workforce. It’s highly cognitive and highly emotional.

The fundamental physiological difference is that our brain, as a muscle, cannot sustain the same number of hours of work that our muscles in the body can sustain. So it’s a mismatch between the old 40-hour work structure, rooted in very physical work, and what is now a highly cognitive workforce.

A: Reducing work hours brings productivity gains because people naturally have more time to rest and recharge, allowing them to return to the new week more engaged and refreshed. That’s one way you can see productivity gains. The other is the fundamental change that organizations go through as they transition to a four-day workweek.

When we work with organizations, we use the 100-80-100 rule. So 100% pay for 80% of the time for 100% of the results. We ask organizations to design their trials around this philosophy: How can you maintain your business or improve it by working less? The fundamental shift that we see is that we’re moving away from thinking about productivity as how long it takes to do something, and focusing on what results we know drive businesses forward.

A: A disproportionate number of part-time workers are women. As a result, women are typically paid less. This is despite the fact that, based on the evidence we have seen in the tests, part-time workers produce the same output as their five-day-a-week counterparts.

In the four-day weekly trials, everyone goes on a journey. So we see men taking on more household or parenting responsibilities.

The alternative is that women take part-time jobs, reducing their pay. Men have to work longer hours for higher salaries and do more stressful jobs to make up the deficit. … It just creates a vicious cycle.

A: Meetings. We are addicted to meetings. It’s gotten worse since the pandemic. I think a lot of that is due to the culture of indecision. There’s a sense of reluctance to make decisions and therefore delay the process or involve a lot of people in the process so that everyone has responsibility and therefore no one has responsibility. And that’s not good in terms of the broader issue of productivity.