The five-day working week has been around since the early 20thcentury, and this is the norm for the UK and other European countries (the average Brit works 42.5 hours per week, above the European average of 41.2).
But as more people transition to less traditional setups like remote work, there’s also some debate going on about the effectiveness of the five-day workweek in the modern age, especially with the rise of automation making a lot of tasks and even entire jobs redundant for humans.
This has been a hot topic in the UK recently as politicians mulled over experimenting with a four-day workweek, which would require radical changes. Although large-scale implementation won’t be happening soon, it did catch the attention of a lot of business leaders and policy-makers.
The Four-Day Workweek
A four-day workweek isn’t exactly a new idea. Many businesses all over the world are already implementing it, and several countries have tried to cut back on working hours. In general, there are two ways to implement a four-day workweek.
The first is to continue maintaining a 40 hour(ish) working week but condense it into four days, meaning a longer stretch of 10 hours of work per day (which has all sorts of implications for productivity levels and workers rights, especially in the EU).
The other and more radical option is you stick with eight hours per day so the total amount of working time per week also decreases to 32 hours or less. While this may sound more appealing and reasonable to workers, it also requires a complete paradigm shift as adjustment to working hours get compressed while salary remains the same. Productivity and automation are essential to making this formula work.
As permanent as the five-day workweek might seem, it hadn’t always been like this. In fact, back in the 19thcentury, people worked sixty hours per week, and this only went down to the 40 hours per week that we’re used to because of the persistent lobbying of labour groups.
Fast forward to the present, and according to a YouGov Eurotrack survey, more than half of Brits—around 63%–are already in favour of a four-day workweek. Compared to six other countries surveyed in Europe, including Finland, France, and Germany, people in the UK wanted a four-day week the most. However, at the same time, there are also significant concerns about how practical it’ll be, with concerns that it might render the UK non-competitive or bring greater costs to businesses that need a 24/7 presence.
Is Working Longer Hours Productive?
The strongest reason for shifting to a four-day workweek would be the problem of overwork in the UK, which is hugely detrimental to productivity. As mentioned Brits already work the longest number of hours that spends the greatest number of hours working. 61% of workers in a OnePoll survey commissioned by TotallyMoney said that they didn’t have a good work-life balance. An independent review discovered that 300,000 people every year were struggling so much with their mental health problems that they had to quit their jobs, costing the UK an annual loss of up to £99 billion. Alarmingly, in 2017-2018, more than half of sick leaves were taken because of anxiety and stress from work.
Overwork and fatigue, especially when long-term, could lead to lack of concentration, creativity, and motivation, among other things. Even though it might seem counterintuitive that giving employees more free time would improve productivity, well-rested employees will be able to perform better. Research by Henley Business School found that businesses with a four-day week saved nearly 92 billion (or 2% of total turnover) each year. Dr. Miriam Mara, one of the researchers, mentioned, “The benefits of a four-day working week, without loss of pay, can outweigh the cons for both businesses and staff.”
In addition, a four-day workweek would force people to focus on what’s essential. There’s a tendency for time to get taken up by long-winded meetings, social media breaks, unproductive emails, and other disruptions, to the point that we might be at work for eight hours but only be productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes. Charlotte Lockhart, the chief executive of 4 Day Week Global, which encourages companies to adopt the four-day week, said: “When you make time the scarce resource, people look for ways to make the most of it in how they work.”
Concerns about Indulgence and Impracticality
On the other hand, not everyone is in favour of the four-day workweek yet because it’s difficult to implement and might not be feasible for all businesses. A four-day week would be a challenge for small businesses with fewer people on hand to cover work, along with businesses that have to be up and running all the time, such as those in retail or catering to international clients.
From a larger perspective, many are worried that they’d be able to achieve less with only a four-day week. An independent report by Robert Skidelsky said that a four-day workweek would be “unrealistic or even desirable,” and any attempt to reduce working hours would have to be adjusted and tested on different parts of the economy.
When business owners were asked about their opinion on the four-day week, Amy Finlay of Edinburgh IFFA said, “If anything, we need more days to be able to get everything done, and more hours in those days! …if one or more of our team were to be removed from their role for effectively a full working day, the system would no longer function.”Ryan Arrindell, a creative director at Animate Designs, also commented that it doesn’t complement the demand for “always available, on-demand, connected products and services.” Availability is a major issue. To get around this, businesses would have to hire more employees to cover different shifts, which would increase labour costs and cause more wrangling with work contracts.
Culturally, the four-day week does pose a challenge. Some employees are worried that they would seem undedicated, while business owners are wondering whether it might encourage leaveism instead.
The Only Way to Know is Through Testing
Whether a four-day week will be effective or not is a complex question. There are many corporate case studies about it, and a prominent one is Microsoft Japan, which tried a four-day workweek for a month. The results were positive: 92% of staff were happier, and sales skyrocketed by almost 40%. At the same time, nurses in Gothenburg, Sweden decreased their work hours per day from eight to six, but they eventually had to return to eight, mainly because of lack of funding. There are now a number of prominent UK businesses that have implemented a four-day working week, including Pursuit Marketing, Elektra Lighting, and Perq Studio.
This is a drop in the ocean though and a four-day workweek isn’t set to become a major trend anytime soon, so the wider social and economic effects have yet to be felt. Whilst it might sound like anatema to many businesses it’s clear that this isn’t any wide eyed utopian fantasy anymore; there is a genuine movement towards this. Whether it will be implemented on a wider scale will largely come down to the shade of future governments, as well as the rise of automation and the whims of business.
We are wedded to the idea of the five day working week and the two day weekend and the implications of uprooting this are widespread and go beyond the economic. Ultimately, for the four day working week to be adopted universally, nothing short of a cultural revolution is needed. Regardless of automation and productivity levels, it seems that working five days is embedded into our psyche.
Having an extra day off might seem like luxury but without a comprehensive vision of what this would look like, from policy makers it’s unlikely that this will take off in a big way anytime soon.
