Inside the 4-day workweek experiment

LONDON — On a recent Wednesday morning, Matt Kimber did not sign into his job as a senior engineer at a software company. Instead, he went for a walk around his London neighborhood, picked up lunch at a cafe, and played with his two greyhounds.

His employer, BrandPipe, was pleased to hear it. The company is one of several British businesses testing a four-day workweek with no reduction in pay, part of a six-month trial involving about 1,000 workers organized by the advocacy group 4 Day Week.

After a previous pilot in 2022, 56 of 61 participating companies, or 92%, said they would continue with the four-day week, the group said. It is hoping to pave the way for a 32-hour, four-day week to be enshrined under British legislation, reducing the maximum number of hours currently allowed by law. Similar efforts have taken hold in Iceland, New Zealand, Scotland and the United States.

“It’s sound business sense,” said Geoff Slaughter, a co-founder of BrandPipe. “If you’ve got a team that’s happy, you’re less likely to lose them.”

“Having looked at the research, frankly it seemed like a no-brainer,” said Anne-Marie Irwin, a partner at Rook Irwin Sweeney, a British law firm specializing in public law and human rights that is also participating in the trial.

Both were optimistic that their businesses could maintain or even increase their output. Still, they found the transition to a shorter workweek requires some rethinking around the office.

‘Fresher minds for longer’

About two weeks into the current experiment, which began in November, Kimber started his workday in his home office after a midweek day off. He checked his messages, read through a client spec and caught up with a client as his two rescue greyhounds lounged near him.

“It feels very good coming back that first day,” he said, adding that he had noticed that he felt less pressure to make the most of his weekends because of the extra day off. “I’m more in the work mindset on my working days.”

To prepare for the trial, BrandPipe, which is fully remote, went through six weeks of workshops run by the 4 Day Week Campaign to help work out the logistics. The company collectively decided on a flexible arrangement in which employees take different days off, to ensure that clients are covered through the week. Most companies in the pilot are giving employees an extra day off each week, while some opted for a day off every other week.

Everyone at BrandPipe attends a weekly team meeting, and key tasks have “surrogates” so that one employee can handle them if another is off, Slaughter said. The firm emailed clients explaining its participation in the pilot, he said, and reassured them that it would not cause disruptions.

“What we’re trying to achieve here is making sure that we’ve got fresher minds for longer,” he said. “Because that’s when we’re doing our best work.”

Since the trial began, Kimber said he had been more involved across several of the company’s projects. “It’s something the four-day workweek can give us a bit more preparation for: this idea that you have to hand over stuff when people are out,” he said.

But the logistics require plenty of communication, which the team discussed at one November meeting. One person reminded her colleagues that she would be off on Friday. Slaughter and his business partner realized they had too little overlap because of their chosen days off. This month, they switched to a different schedule.

Across the city, Rook Irwin Sweeney’s workers were also talking logistics at their Thursday team meeting. Since April, the firm has opted to give its employees every second Friday off, staggering the team to ensure half its employees were still on. The arrangement is flexible if anyone prefers another day because of court hearings or other deadlines.

The firm also installed other measures, along with the day off, to help with productivity. Meetings have a tight agenda, and two blocks of time during the day are set as focus hours, where everyone goes offline and the messaging stops. “That’s when we get our heads down and we work and we concentrate,” Irwin said.

She said she wanted the firm to challenge a culture in the legal industry that valorizes long hours, stress and exhaustion. “We just want to flip that narrative,” she said. “It’s not something to be proud of, it’s a cause of concern.”

Jennifer Wright, a lawyer who joined the firm in 2022, split her day off into half days on Friday afternoons for part of November.

The fall is a busy period for Wright, who works on many education-related cases, and she found some of the efficiency measures to be a significant adjustment at first.

“I think law is one of the hardest sectors to try and implement this, purely because we have very rigid court deadlines,” she said.

In December, after trying several months of the shortened schedule, she said she was proud that her company was leading the way. One Friday afternoon, she said, she went to visit a friend who had just given birth. On another, she met up with a friend visiting for the weekend. “It really lifts me,” she said before a long weekend. “I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”

The future of the 4-day week

After the first trial, from June to December in 2022, 70% of the nearly 3,000 employees involved said they felt a decrease in stress and burnout, while companies reported no negative impact to their revenue, according to a report by the program’s organizers.

After the current trial, the campaign is planning to present the results to British officials, who have signaled an interest in reforming labor laws for British workers.

“We want to see the four-day week become the normal way of working in this country by the end of this decade,” said Joe Ryle, director of the 4 Day Week Campaign.

A month in, there were signs that the latest pilot was succeeding.

At BrandPipe, Slaughter said that although the commercial outcomes would take some time to measure, he had noticed a striking change in the mindset of his employees.

“We’ve got this new energy that we didn’t have before,” he said. Projects that had once taken perhaps two weeks were now wrapping up in just over a week, and clients had not noted any reduction in coverage, he said. Some had even sent in resumes.

“We are going to keep the four-day week,” he said, noting it could also give his company an edge in attracting talent.

Partners at Rook Irwin Sweeney, who began trialing the shorter week in April, said that they had seen an increase in the billable time that their firm had charged compared with the first months of the year.

“The data supports our impression, which is that we’re all working more efficiently,” said Alex Rook, a partner. Still, he said, it had taken effort: “Change is difficult.”

They were waiting before committing to the arrangement, but there was plenty of positivity so far. “At the moment, everybody is really enjoying it, really happy to be doing it,” Rook said. “The numbers look good.”

Kimber said that he had noticed more streamlined communication in the company. “There’s definitely a big push to succeed and make this our ‘new normal,’” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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