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Britain four-day workweek trial overview:
- Who: In a six-month pilot program, 70 companies are trying a four-day workweek.
- Why: The trial will test the productivity of scaling back workers’ hours while giving them the same amount of pay.
- Where: The program is nationwide.
Seventy companies in Britain began a four-day workweek trial that started June 13.
Thousands of employees are part of the six-month pilot program organized by nonprofit groups 4 Day Week Global and 4 Day Week UK Campaign and Autonomy, an organization that studies the impact of labor on well-being, the New York Times reports.
Researchers at Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College will assess the four-day workweek’s effect on productivity and quality of life and announce results in 2023, the organizers say.
“After the pandemic, people want a work-life balance”, Joe Ryle, campaign director for the 4 Day Week Campaign, tells the Times. “They want to be working less.”
The pilot will scale back workers’ hours while they earn the same amount of pay.
More than 3,300 workers in banks, marketing, health care, financial services, retail, hospitality and other industries in Britain are taking part in the pilot.
Ryle tells the New York Times the data will be collected through interviews, staff surveys and the measures each company uses to assess its productivity.
Working from home during pandemic helped drive momentum for shorter workweek, professor says
The program follows similar efforts in other countries, including Iceland, New Zealand, Scotland and the United States.
“We’ll be analyzing how employees respond to having an extra day off, in terms of stress and burnout, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy use, travel and many other aspects of life,” Juliet Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College and the lead researcher on the project, tells the Times.
Working from home during the pandemic has been the main factor driving the growing momentum for a shorter workweek, Schor says.
“It made employers realize they could trust their workers,” she says to the New York Times.
Companies are also being forced to restructure the way they work.
“The companies that are really successful in this take activities off the plates of people,” Schor tells the Times. “The most common work reorganization has to do with meetings — the excessive number of meetings, excessive length and lack of efficiency in meetings.
In Britain, the experiment began as employees trickled back to work after a four-day holiday honoring the 70-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
What are your thoughts on a 4-day work week? Let us know in the comments!
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