E185 – The Four Day Week: Exploring The Evidence With Dr. Charlotte Rae

 

It would seem like the benefits of the four day week are a no-brainer. After all, it makes total sense how spending less time on work would benefit the employee physically, mentally, and emotionally. But how much of an impact does it truly have? Here’s something to show your average naysayer: there is actually a lot of hard, scientific data supporting the positive benefits of the four day week. Today’s guest, Dr. Charlotte Rae, has devoted her time to studying these effects to come up with a reliable dataset that would help companies make the best decision with regards to their work arrangements. If you’re curious what’s behind all the hype around the catchphrase, then you better prepare yourself for a lot more than you expected! Tune in!

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The Four Day Week: Exploring The Evidence With Dr. Charlotte Rae

We have a super exciting topic and guest. We’re going to be speaking to Charlotte Rae. She’s a lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sussex here in the UK and she’s been doing a lot of research on a 4-Day Week, which is a subject we’re interested in exploring. We’re curious about its impacts on individual well-being and performance and to some extent its role in shaping the way of working in our societies. We think it’s a great thing to try and unpick. Charlotte, before we get into the show, could you say hi to the guests and introduce yourself to them, please?

It’s delighted to join you. I’m from the University of Sussex. I specialize in studying the Biology of well-being at work. When I first saw the media headlines on the 4-Day Week a few years ago, I thought, “I must do a study on that. I want to figure out what’s going on inside people’s heads when they undertake that switch.”

We picked up on some of this language about the 4-Day Week that shifted a popular mindset around that time. it’s great to speak to somebody who’s been doing real research, exploring the impacts of a 4-Day Week from multiple dimensional levels. That’s interesting. Maybe we can start at the beginning. Could you tell us a little bit about what a 4-Day Week is? What are we talking about? Is it just do we have four days off or Fridays off? What is it we’re talking about?

Unpacking The Catchphrase

“Four-day week,” is a great catchphrase. I think many people intuitively go towards the assumption of, “That means we are closed on Fridays.” Indeed that is the case for some organizations who choose to adopt a four-day working week. Honestly, there are many ways of doing a four-day week as there are organizations. The implementation looks different for everyone and sometimes it’s not even necessarily four days that you spend at work.

 

Some other flavors to this are, for example, a 9-day fortnight where you might have a 1-day extra day off every 2 weeks or perhaps 5 shorter days. If there are part-time staff who are currently working and paid for four days, then we might be talking about a proportionate reduction in time at work for them too. What all of these scenarios have in common is an overall reduction in the amount of time that staff spend at work across the length of the working week.

 

 

Generally, we are not talking about a four-day week of compressed hours where staff work the same number of hours over four very long days because there’s no overall reduction in the amount of time spent at work. The idea of reducing time at work is that you can bank some well-being benefits and have staff who are bad arrested so that then when they are at work, they’re firing on all cylinders and much better able to achieve.

Four-day week anchors in on a 20% reduction in time at work fundamentally is what we’re capturing, but it didn’t exactly that. It’s for reducing of time we spend in work or on work leading to benefits to wellbeing through that performance and I guess engagement and experience.

Many organizations will go for a 20% reduction, but some will go for slightly less. Let’s say, a 10% reduction under a 9-day fortnight model, or it might be somewhere between 10% and 20%. For example, we have one organization, an architect’s firm that went from 37.5 hours over 5 days down to 34 hours over 4 days. Each working day’s length is slight, but nevertheless, there’s still a slight reduction in the amount of hours spent at work.

We’ll talk about some of the benefits and impact of this in a little bit, but when we do, I’ll be curious to see whether that first hour saved leads to the biggest impact or how this translates. I think it’s such a rich and interesting topic. When I look through your CV and your background, one of the things I noticed is that you’ve moved and been drawn to this space coming from a background in Core Psychology and Neuroscience, which I think is interesting. Having come out of a neuroscience world, what was it about this idea of a four-day week that hooked you and drew you in? What’s that drive?

My background is I’m a neuroscientist by training. My background is in using MRI brain scanning to understand how the mind works, previously a lot of my neuroscience work has been in populations who have particular diagnoses, whether that’s a neurological diagnosis, let’s say a neurodegenerative condition like Parkinson’s disease, or maybe a mental health condition. That’s fantastic work, but lots of other people are tackling that in academic neuroscience.

Increasingly, I got interested in wellbeing in the general population because I do feel even if you don’t meet diagnostic criteria for say, clinical depression at a given moment in time, it doesn’t mean you’re not vulnerable. I think the way the world is now and the way the world of work is now with a lot of pressure for many people, if we think about us all lying along a spectrum, because at this point in time, clinically anxious or depressed, it doesn’t mean that you might be vulnerable to that.

Therefore I wanted to do a study more around risk and vulnerability, and that was relevant to everyone in the population rather than people who meet us at cut off on a questionnaire then I saw the media headlines on the four-day week and I thought, “That’s it. That’s what I want to figure out of the journey,” the psychological journey and even the biological physiological journey that staff are going on because even three years ago it was clear from the early trials that productivity was often going up and that staff reported feeling healthier and happier I think the well-being benefits are in many respects, pretty intuitive, pretty obvious, but I wanted to understand more about the brain basis behind those media headlines.

I love that phrase, “The biological journey that we’re going on.” I think that’s an interesting phrase to bring into this and a very interesting thing to think about here. You’ve been working with a ranch of different businesses and there have been media headlines on this for a long time. One of the first ones I remember was Microsoft in Japan came out with some research many years ago. That’s when I first started to look at some of the evidence behind this. What organizations do you see adopting this type of work? One of the questions is do you see a difference between the type of labor or types of work that different organizations do that draws them to focus on affordability?

There are definitely some very clear trends here whereby if you look at the national trial, which ran in 2022, this included 61 employers employing nearly 3000 people, there are some clear trends in the knowledge economy sectors tend to be the most popular currently to trial a four-day working week that mirrors exactly what we are seeing in our own study on the biology of the four-day week as well. The kinds of companies doing work like digital marketing agencies, and professional services.

 

This is currently the most popular sector for organizations to trial a four-day week because on the surface it’s a little easier to identify how we can make small tweaks, small adaptations to people’s working routines and habits, essentially to psychology to find the efficiencies that will bank up over the course of the week to enable people to have that time off.

A lot of the common adaptations for knowledge economy work will be around looking at meetings, how long do you have meetings for? How many people are they with? Workplace habits around switching off email and minimizing distractions when you need to concentrate on a particular task and your most important outputs. Having said that, although there’s a clear trend whereby the knowledge economy sector is the most popular area to trial a 40-working week, there are plenty of other sectors giving this a try. In the national trial, there were some healthcare organizations and we have also worked with a residential care company here.

The implications are slightly different, both in terms of the adaptations to the structure of the work and the working week, but also in terms of the outcomes that organizations are seeking. With our residential care company, in order to cover the rotor, they did have to hire an extra member of staff. There are significant financial implications for that, but they were very worried about retention and recruitment I’m sure it won’t be a surprise to any of your audience that certainly in the UK at least the care sector is struggling with retention and recruitment.

Over the course of the trial, no one left. The nature of the particular care work that this organization was doing was with young adults with autism, where building up close relationships and retaining staff was important. They felt that it led to a much higher service in terms of provision of care. Some of the human stories that we heard were fantastic around the staff feeling that they weren’t snapping at each other so much because they were better rested than filtered through to the experience of the people receiving the care. There are different financial implications and different adaptations to the working week that need to be made, but slightly different facets of the outcomes that are being sought across these different sectors.

The Four Day Week And Wellbeing

I perceive or get the sense that there are different levels or types of effort required in different roles that benefit in different ways from some of the benefits we achieve through a reduced working week. We’ve got physical labor, emotional labor, some of that care type work that you speak about is effortful in a big way or creativity from an agency perspective. There are lots of different types of things that benefit in different ways, presumably to different extents I would speculate as well.

The phrases that we’ve talked about a few times as you’ve been talking about is we’ve talked about the adaptations and the changes to work and, and we’ll come onto to those in a minute that enable this. What we’ve also talked about some of the impacts that lead to benefits being impacts related to well-being and impacts related to performance. When we’re talking about well-being and we’re trying to pin down what some of the benefits are for well-being, what are the things that you’re looking at? What are those markers of well-being that you’re trying to focus on?

In our particular research study, we’ve been taking a very long list of the measures of well-being. To start off with some of our headline findings, we’ve been looking at mental health and that goes for depression, anxiety, and stress. That goes for work-related burnout. We’ve also been looking at lifestyles, sleep, diet and exercise. Often these are assessed with questionnaires, but we’ve also been getting some more objective measurements using actigraphy, and wearables, many of your readers might have a Fitbit or a Garmin watch. Some of our participants have kindly been wearing research-grade watches for us. From that, we can objectively determine what’s happening to someone’s sleep in terms of sleep duration, efficiency, and quality alongside what they tell us they’re experiencing in the questionnaires.

From that, we can also get some measures of people’s physical activity levels to complement their subjective perception of how that aspect of lifestyle is changing for them from the questionnaires. For those employees who are up for it and up for visiting us on the University of Sussex campus for some more detailed well-being tests, we’ve been running MRI brain scans to look at brain function and how that might change when people are better rested and less stressed.

We are taking a blood sample to look at the immune system and how active the immune system is because there’s a marker of this circulating in people’s bloodstreams that we can pick up with quite a simple blood test. These markers are called inflammatory cytokines. We know from lots of other occupational research. These start spiking in your bloodstream if you’re doing shift work, if you’re not sleeping well and if you’re experiencing a lot of stress.

Unfortunately, we know that these molecules are risk factors for depression and also for dementia because they can cross the blood-brain barrier and physically get into the brain and cause inflammation. Those aspects of the study are still very much ongoing and we’re looking to get some larger sample sizes, but already we can see from the questionnaires that mood is improving. People experience more frequent positive emotions and less frequent negative emotions. We can see that burnout is going down.

We take this on a weekly basis, over 12 weeks as they’re shifting to the 4-day week and engaging in all these fantastic new work habits. You can see literally week-by-week burnout going down and sleep problems going down. The longer people have been on the four-day week and the more time they’ve banked the better and better they’re feeling across multiple dimensions of well-being and lifestyle.

 

The longer people have been on the four day week, the better their feeling across multiple dimensions of wellbeing and lifestyle.

 

Could you pick for us burnout a little bit more? We referred to it a few times. Could you break down a little bit what you’re speaking about here?

To measure burnout that, there are many ways of of doing this, but a very well-used approach to measuring burnout in psychological studies, of the world of work is using the Maslach Burnout Inventory. This is a short questionnaire that asks specifically about burnout in the work context. We’re not talking about burnout relating to other aspects of people’s lives such as care responsibilities. There are three dimensions of burnout that this questionnaire taps into. The first is called emotional exhaustion. This is essentially how worn down you feel by work. I ask questions like at the end of the working day, I feel totally used up. It’s related to tiredness. The second dimension of burnout that this scale measures is called depersonalization. This is where you start to feel less positively inclined towards your colleagues.

This asks questions like, “I care less about how my colleagues feel nowadays. I’ve become insensitive to what my colleagues are feeling.” I think that dimension is particularly interesting in the context of care, work and emotional labor. The third dimension is called personal accomplishment. Ideally, on a four-week, you want to see emotional exhaustion coming down and depersonalization coming down, but on the flip side, you want to see personal accomplishment going up. This is feeling like you’re accomplishing worthwhile things while you’re at work. If you’re feeling low and burnout, you’ll have low emotional exhaustion, low depersonalization and typically high personal accomplishment.

That’s helpful. Thank you. That’s a lovely layer to bring more insight across this. How fabulous that this is being linked to a lot of the biological factors that you call out. It’s great to have that evidence base from a scientific perspective overlapping with what we’re doing. That’s interesting.

One comment that we hear quite a lot is that subjective self-report questionnaires are valuable because they capture how people are feeling, but on self-report questionnaires, there can be some pros and cons to this. One is that the employer is going to be seeing the results of the questionnaires which is what we do at the end of each trial. We write a custom report for the employer on what we’ve seen change for their staff.

Consciously or unconsciously you might be slightly motivated to report better scores after the switch to the four-day working week. We do try to tackle this even before we get to the biology of we take some control questionnaire measures that one wouldn’t expect a four-day week to change because there stable features of the organization or stable personality characteristics and reassuringly we’ve seen that the scores on those are very static, which suggests that the staff aren’t at least setting out to gain the questionnaires. Alongside the questionnaires, we feel it’s one reason why it’s valuable to take the biological data is in the words of one of our HR managers, you can’t fake a blood sample or an MRI scan.

The Four Day Week And Performance

At least not without a whole lot of effort. It’s not going to be worth it or something else. Moving on from those well-being factors, we’ve already talked about some of the factors of performance. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about that measurement of performance and what you’re focusing on?

In the national trial at at least anyway, there’s some useful performance data in terms of managers’ reports and perceptions of their team’s functions and not a massive boost, but a slight boost to performance as rated by managers. In the national trial, there was also a slight increase in revenue. When it comes to our data, where we’ve been taking quite a more detailed picture of what’s going on. The national trial was fantastic because it was mass scale. Ours is a smaller sample size usually working with SMEs. We’re taking a much deeper dive into the performance changes that take place. We take both subjective measures and some more objective measures of performance.

When it comes to the self-report, we’re getting staff to self-rate productivity. We do this on a weekly basis to tell us how well they feel they ticked off their to-do list in the week essentially. Interestingly, as soon as staff switches to the reduced hours, this jumps up about 5% to 10% and then they generally maintain that high level of performance throughout the rest of the trial period.

We can perhaps talk a little bit more about the reasons for that, but superficially, one reason is that we do a lot of preparatory work with organizations before they switch on what are behavioral habit changes going to need to be in order to get that productivity boost. Some other self-report measures we’ve been getting are job satisfaction, commitment to the organization and intention to stay with the company as well as productivity, for example with the care company, they were more interested in retention rates and interestingly this goes up around 10% or 15%.

These aren’t radical massive changes. In general, you’re coming from a place where there’s room and scope for improvement, but generally, it’s not a complete catastrophe. We’re able to get boosts of say 5%, 10% or sometimes up to 20% on more of the wellbeing measures. We don’t take people to complete perfection and score at the top of the range on all of the questionnaires. In some respects, that shows that this is quite a valid measure. If we perfected everything maybe people might be a bit suspicious.

Beyond the four-day week, there are many, many other aspects that influence job satisfaction and productivity. it’s not necessarily always a silver bullet, but we do see that it’s quite effective, at tapping into many dimensions, well-being and many dimensions of performance and workplace experience. We come onto some of the more objective measures, this tends to be on a little bit more of a custom basis between employers because everyone’s work is different.

Some of the nice things about self-report measures are you can cut across all these different types of work and job roles, but when you come to objective performance, even within an organization, there may need to be different metrics for different teams. Some of the common measures that we’ve worked with companies to identify their markers of success are things like if it’s a customer service team and they’re taking phone calls, how many phone calls are they answering? How long are they spending on the phone with each client? How many sales are made as a result of the phone calls? If it’s email support, how many IT support tickets have you closed that day or that week? There are many factors that influence revenue, the cost of living crisis and all the turmoil that’s happening. It’s nevertheless at least reassuring to see that your revenue isn’t markedly dropping off during a four-day week trial period.

That’s a great mix of things in there. You play down a bit that 5%, 15% to 20% impact. From a business perspective, that’s a huge impact. From a personal perspective, that’s quite a big impact.

When participants come into us for MRI scans and we get to have a little bit more of a chat with them about what life has been like, that’s where they start to use the words like transformative or that 5%, 10%, 20% nevertheless alter as people’s experience both inside and outside of work.

I wanted to unpick it a bit because it seems such a potentially huge impact. Based on the stuff that you’ve been doing, have you got anything that you want to call out as a particularly highlighted result? Anything that you’re particularly interested in? Anything that stood up for you that you were super excited to see or proud of vicariously for impact?

The study is very much still ongoing. We’ll be collecting data on a rolling basis. We want to keep supporting as many employers as we can on the journey. Our most exciting results come from our questionnaires looking at the association between well-being and performance. What I did was calculate how much someone’s wellbeing improved when they switched to the four-day week. That’s across all the wellbeing measures that I’ve talked about how much did their workplace experience change when they switched to the four-day working week?

I tested for an association in scientific called a correlation between well-being and performance. What we saw is that the more someone’s sleep improved, the more their productivity went up, and then the more that someone’s burnout improved, the more their work motivation and enthusiasm went up. Very interestingly, those results were quite specific to those individual dimensions of well-being and performance because there was no association between sleep, workplace, enthusiasm and motivation and there was no association between burnout and productivity.

I’m excited about this because of the three important things that it tells us scientifically about the four-day week. The first is that well-being is inextricably linked to performance and workplace experience. Everyone reading this will intuitively know that, but here are the hard numbers and data to prove it. Secondly, it tells us that individual dimensions of well-being map onto individual dimensions of workplace experience.

 

If you improve one aspect of wellbeing, that’s great. You might well improve one aspect of workplace performance, but you won’t necessarily be able to improve multiple dimensions. If you want to improve multiple dimensions of workplace experience, then you probably need to improve multiple dimensions of well-being. The four-day week is a fantastic efficient intervention to simultaneously hit those multiple dimensions all in one go. Whereas, instead if you say put on a gym class for people, then you might improve exercise, but say not sleep or burnout or put in place or program around mental health. You might improve anxiety and depression symptoms, but not necessarily exercise. The four-day week can help you hit all of those things in one go.

Multi-Faceted Impact

I love the fact that it’s not a simple outcome. It’s not one-to-many in terms of the impact that it has and often when we look at organizations and speak to organizations that are creating intervention, they adopt an approach of doing one thing and focusing on the impact of one thing without considering that holistic approach. When we then talk about the fact that a four-day week brings multiple things and brings space for these multiple correlating factors that improve engagement, enthusiasm, experience, and productivity, what are the different aspects that you think the four-day week brings that let it have such a multifaceted impact?

It’s largely to do with rest but resting in quite a structured way. When we give people that extra time off, what it means is that they’re not trying to cram everything that isn’t worked into quite a small chunk of time. Staff tell us some quite personal stories about what they’re getting up to on their newly free fifth day, but also about how that’s changing their experience of life throughout the rest of the week as well, on the days that they are at work and weekend days or days that they would normally not be working. There’s a lot of shifting of life admin and chores from the weekend or from evenings to that fifth free day. Staff are telling us the weekend is freed up for rest and for looking after themselves and for spending time with friends and family.

There’s so much psychological evidence around mental health that sleep diet, exercise and spending time with friends and family are good for both physical health and mental health. We think that that then also filters through to sleep. We still need to analyze the sleep watch data, but we take it for a period of two weeks during the baseline before staff switch and then again towards the end of the trial because suspicion is that sleep is approving across the length of the working week because people are less stressed about trying to fit everything into a life that needs to be fitted in 2024.

They’re better able to sleep across the length of the whole week. We also have seen in our questionnaires that staff are reporting higher psychological detachment this is a bit of a jargon word, but essentially what we mean by that is how easy staff find it to switch off from work at the end of the working day. That largely applies to those 4 days that they are at work or 5  if it’s five shorter days and on. The fact that that’s happening on the days that they are at work, we then think that’s leading to an improvement in sleep following the working day as well.

With these multiple mechanisms, we think we’re able to improve sleep throughout the working week as well as on days that they would have otherwise not normally been at work. From what we know of all the neuroscience and psychology research on how sleep, affects the brain, what’s going on is when staff are better rested and sleeping better, their brain function is optimized. I think that that is what is ultimately behind these performance wins that we see. I’m hoping with our study, we’re going to be able to provide the scientific evidence. In those early weeks of the switch to the four-day week, there is a lot of behavioral change that needs to happen of these new habits to optimize productivity. Better sleep is helping people better adjust and embed those habits because the brain is in a more receptive state.

It sounds very systemic to me. If we can address these different factors, we improve somebody’s sleep and rest through that. We make it easier for them to self-regulate or yes, adopt new behaviors and do all these things together and presumably, this is a bit of a multiplier impact to some extent. It’s that virtuous cycle that comes with some of the things that we’re speaking about. Does that sound fair to you?

A virtuous cycle in terms of because we can see in the questionnaires people are feeling better and better week by week.

One of the things I’m curious about is how the feedback we get from the actions we take impacts us and the things that we do and how we feel. If we have people doing this and they feel like, “I’m doing this. I’m taking this action. My productivity and experience is improving.” It’s a nice positive piece of feedback that presumably reinforces some of this and helps people experience it. If people don’t feel that they’re getting an improved experience at work or don’t feel validated through their connections and community at work, does that impact the effectiveness, of this type of intervention?

Ultimately, any work outcome is driven by human behavior, and driven by human psychology because work is humans performing human behavior, even when you bring AI into the mix. That’s created by humans and humans are interacting with it. If you’re not excited about your work and you’re not motivated about your work, your brain is not going to put as much into the outputs. You probably don’t need a PhD in neuroscience to know that. Subjectively, we all know that from our own experiences of the world of work.

The power of those beliefs, impacts and experiences we have is pretty. If we take it a bit more personally, has this changed your work? How do you work now? What’s your relationship before?

It has changed it 5%, 10% or 20%. It hasn’t completely altered my work experience, but in working with employers, even before we get to all the scientific measurements we’ve been doing. We’ve learned a huge amount about the journey they go on before they switch as well as what happens after they switch because there does need to be a fair amount of preparation to identify, no org no two organizations are the same. It looks different for each business. What are the adaptations going to need to be to make this happen and, and make it a success? Through a lot of that preparatory work and preparatory conversations, we’ve learned a lot about the tweaks and the efficiencies that businesses can make.

Through that, I started adopting a lot of that myself and we used the phrase virtuous cycle earlier. That’s become a virtuous cycle for me because then in implementing it myself, has given me the best possible insight into what it’s like for staff on the receiving end of the prescriptions that the doctor is giving for tweaks to habits. A lot of the common knowledge economy adaptations, and that’s the nature of the work that I do. Office-based, desk-based and a mixture of meetings and cognitively demanding, often creative work looking carefully about meetings.

An adaptation that I made was instead of on my Calendly meeting scheduler, having the default meeting length is half an hour instead of an hour also being very strict with myself about when I’m engaging in work communications and emails versus when I’m not so that I’m not constantly pinging back and forth. Before I started doing a four-day week myself, which I started doing in January, through these productivity efficiencies, I started to feel that I was getting 6 days of work done in 5.

As an academic, my time has been quite split between research and enjoying working with employers versus teaching, which was in incredibly rewarding.  I realized I’d like to do 5 days of work in 4. I made a structural change for myself to accommodate that. I got a research grant that is now paying my salary, which means all of my time is now focused on supporting employers and reception a four-day week because the university no longer has to pay my salary. That means I no longer am teaching.

For me it’s been a combination of the productivity wins, the good habits and the efficiencies combined with looking at in the wider context of my organization, how work was allocated. It’s work redesign on two levels the smaller day-to-day and then the larger day-to-day. Depending on the complexity of the organization, sometimes there’s a little bit more preparatory work needed on those longer-term organization shuffles, if it’s a smaller organization, sometimes it’s more about tips and tricks for the day-to-day efficiencies.

Do you have any thoughts on the importance of a belief in leadership and sponsorship, of these types of interventions and running it? If you have a cynic, does it lead to failure? Any incidental or anecdotal thoughts on that?

There are probably two things to unpack there. The first is around the modeling because we ask all the staff in the study, “How much work did you do on your leave at 3:50?” We see that most employees generally stick to it and report not doing any work. the more senior you are in the organization, we do see the more senior leaders, particularly the business owners, reporting, at least on some of the days, they’re doing a little bit of work. It’s still a lot less than they would otherwise have been doing, but they say they like having a quiet couple of hours and then they’ll go off and enjoy the rest of the day. It is harder for senior leaders when they’re passionate and motivated. Sometimes they’ll say, “It doesn’t feel too much like work.”

We do find them doing a little checking in a little bit. However, I do still think it’s important that they’re not working the whole day and their staff then when they come back to work see emails that have been sent throughout the working day because otherwise, it’s going to send some messaging around, “Have we given you a four-day week?” You had another part to that question around cynics. My experience has been when an employer trials a four-day week, sometimes it’s come from the staff and the staff have prompted it and saying an appraisal and the business owner has gone, “Let’s give it a try.” More often it’s been the business leader who’s decided, “I think this might be a good thing for us.”

Sometimes they want it for themselves and then feel, “If I’m going to have it, then the rest of the team should have it.” Generally, there tends to not be a lot of cynicism from the business owner because if they’ve got to the point of trialing a four-day week, they think in principle it’s probably going to be a good thing. When you look at the wide organization as a whole, because more often than not it, it has been the decision of the senior leader. There may be some pockets of staff within the organization who are not on board. We have seen this, certainly. It’s more a minority case, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. In fact those are the staff who we probably need to listen to the hardest, particularly in the preparatory phase. Sometimes this is worrying about how are we going to get all the work done.

I love the idea of it in principle, but I’m worried about getting the work done. Sometimes this is where it’s the middle management or a sub-team manager who worries that maybe the staff they’re supervising aren’t going to lean in so much and then it’s going to fall on their shoulders that the trial hasn’t been a success. I think the way to support these staff is to make sure you’re doing the preparatory work and having those early conversations on, “How are we going to adapt to the working week to accommodate this?”

A lot of the role that I play is facilitating those conversations. The ones who know their work the best have the solutions, they just don’t know it. Those early conversations can help draw that out. You’ve got another group of people who are a little bit more intractable whereby in terms of personal values and personal mindset, it doesn’t gel for them and it doesn’t feel natural.

Demographically, there’s a trend here that they tend to be older and tend to be men more than women. I think it’s partly a demographic and personality and characteristic mindset around, “My colleagues don’t work as hard as me. They’re not going to take work as seriously,” and/or they love work and they want to spend that time working. What I say to employers is what you’re doing with this intervention is you’re giving people the choice over whether to work or not.

If someone wants to work on that day, lots of employees don’t need to stop them from doing other than modeling. I do have one employer where there was a more senior member of staff who was affecting their mental health to take that time off. For them, the adaptation was, “You stick to your original hours then.” We come back to four-day weeks a handy catchphrase but flexibility of it is paramount flexibility across different organizations even within an organization and finding the solution that is right for that team.

Some Words Of Caution

Those are some interesting stuff. I think it would be fascinating at some point to explore the imposition of a four-day week on an organization and see what that led to in terms of impact. Some of your points there about maybe leading to some values conflict or perception of self-worth or social status. All those things are interesting and could be added stressors as you indicated for some of the individuals that you’ve spoken about. Pre-work does seem important to this. What do you think some of the risk factors are that organizations might have if they don’t think appropriately in advance plan structure? What are some of the precautionary things that you’d call out to stop people marching headlong into implementing whatever it’s a four-day week?

We’ve talked quite emphasized how preparatory work is important. I’ll give you some details on that. At the same time I do think that if the motivation is there from the senior staff and in informal chats with the boots on the ground as it were, there’s general curiosity and interest. Honestly, I think the risks are lower than many organizations think they are. In many organizations, the biggest hurdle is more around making the leap of we haven’t done this before and we don’t necessarily know anyone else who’s done it and we can’t work out what it would look like. We can’t quite put together how we would find the efficiencies to bank the time off. They don’t take the leap and they’re often worried about, “Do we tell our clients? What do we do about part-timers?”

The good news is there are answers to all of these questions because in the UK at least there are now literally hundreds of employers who have done this. Whatever the answer is, whatever the question is, there is an answer for it and we need to link you up with the right people to give you confidence that there are solutions to all of these conundrums. Once you’ve been given the confidence boost that there are those answers and solutions, I think that then de-risks it for people because it starts to become a bit more material.

You can envisage what this is going to look like, what it’s going to feel like, what the shape of the working week is going to be, but then to de-risk that that jump as much as possible preparatory work, whether that’s with me, whether it’s linking up with another similar organization who have done this and the four-day week campaign UK has a list of accredited employers on their websites. That’s FourDayWeek.co.uk.

From that, you can see all the different sectors that people are in and generally, once people have made the switch and they’ve gone public that they’ve made the switch they’re generally quite open and happy to chat about how they did that and what the impact has been. There will be someone out there similar to you who’s done it. If you can’t find that listed on FourDayWeek.co.uk, you can ask me or contact the Four-Day Week Campaign themselves because they have a fantastic overview of the UK landscape of who has been trialing a four-day week and making a success of it.

I’ve got a couple of things I’ve been thinking about that are a little bit more tangential to this, but I’d like to touch on a little bit and I’m sure there are things that are hard to answer. We’ll see what happens. It seems to me like part of the benefit of a four-day week is predicated on our sources of stress in our lives coming materially from work and being able to use our time outside of work as a recuperative time. My personal opinion or observation is that increasingly our private time is a stressful time. You talked about the state of the world at the moment. What do you think that relationship is between the broader environment or what do you think that balance is between sources of stress inside and outside of work and how does that play into the effectiveness of this intervention?

Balance is the keyword there. Life outside work is stressful. That has to do with the state of the world, but it also has to do with life admin. In 2024, most adults of working age are working and if we reflect back to the 1970s, much less of the working-age population were working because there were a lot of women not in employment or if they were in employment part-time working. When you look at the, the labor force survey is a fascinating collection of data and you can access all of this publicly. It is UK government data and you can see that the proportion of families or households where there are two adults in full-time employment, it’s now at 80% or something. Who on earth is doing all the domestic labor and when is it being done?

It’s being done outside of full-time work and that is not leaving enough time for rest and recuperation. I think the time outside of work is stressful because you have to do non-paid work. We’re doing paid work and non-paid work and there’s not enough time left for leisure and the restorative activities that humans biologically need. The four-day week is about balance because in giving people that time for life admin away from work, you then create the balance to have more recuperation time. On the flip side, sometimes people will say, “Why do we need to stop at a four-day week? How about a 3, 2 or 0-day week?”

I use your reflection on this by saying, “I think we’re looking for a sweet spot here whereby you have balance because there is so much psychological research showing that underemployment is harmful to mental health, physical health and in fact unemployment and significant underemployment is worse for you in terms of mental health and physical health than being in full-time employment.” I don’t think we should go too far in the other direction.

 

I think what the four-day week is about is finding what for me I come at this from a biological lens. I think humans have a biological sweet spot whereby you’re engaged in intellectually engaging work where you also get the social benefit of seeing colleagues. There are many benefits to working beyond the finances and that is why we see the harms that happen to people in unemployed. There is a biological sweet spot where everything is in balance where you’re getting all the fantastic benefits of being at work, but not so much work on top of non-paid work that you don’t get the recuperation time that the brain physically needs.

That’s helpful. We opened up lots of pathways into very many interesting conversations there. It leads me to ask another question that is related to this and you might give the same answer. How much of a benefit is associated with a change as opposed to the end state? Is this something that people would attenuate? Part of the reason I ask is our laws on labor over the last 150 years have shifted significantly as have the hours we spend in labor. There’s been a huge amount of change. How much of this benefit do you think is due to a percentage change? Maybe an addendum question, how much of this is due to a change that other people don’t have? Have you got thoughts on either of those?

I’ll speak a meta-level and then a soft-scale level. As we’ve said, there have been some historical changes here whereby, going back to Victorian times, it was quite normal to work 6 days a week in probably 10 plus hours. Over many decades there was a shift in social norms towards, at least for middle-class men through the 20th century of Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 5:00.

Certainly, that’s an improvement. through the latter half of the 20th century and in the last few decades there’s been another societal shift whereby, as we said earlier most adults are working most of the time now and that was not the case 70 years ago. We’ve had some efficiencies in technology like dishwashers. Nevertheless, the fact that we still need to do some unpaid domestic labor and the fact that there is no longer an untapped market of domestic labor means that we’re ripe for another social norm shift.

As a psychologist, my perception of how much time people spend at work is entirely socially constructed. There is no god given decree that 37.5, 40, 50 hours or 32 hours is “the correct” amount of time to work. The fact that we’ve seen that historical shift over many decades from Victorian times to the 20th century shows that social norms can shift.  I think our social norm and how much time we spend in paid work in 2024 have not kept pace with the demographic societal shifts in gender equality. To speak on a more micro level and look towards the future, there’s this question of, “When do we attenuate to the benefits?” Employers were asking me this, “You’re seeing a slight boost of productivity. You’re seeing better sleep burnout.”

Once you’ve had the four-day week for a year, you normalize to that. You get accustomed to it and then maybe your good habits go out the window. That productivity win that we got unfortunately now has been lost because people are now taking this for granted. We’ve started doing some follow-up analysis. We’ve been finding out what happened six months down the line from the original trial period ending. Our data far are suggesting that if anything it gets better. Burnout and sleep problems have gone down further and productivity has gone up a little bit as well. We’re still gathering data on the six-month follow-ups because we still have employers working their way through the timeline. That’s the smaller sample size at the moment.

I can’t say with 100% certainty yet, but that looks like the direction that our data are heading. In the national trial that was done in the UK in 2022, they did an 18-month follow-up. I don’t know if you saw in the media a couple of weeks ago that the news was released that 89% of the employers who entered the trial are still doing a 4-day week 18 months on. The large majority have kept going with it, suggesting that it’s still doing what they want it to do.

That’s super helpful. It’s fascinating that you see sustained or increased benefits so far. That’s interesting.

We should flag the 10% and 11% who haven’t continued to have full transparency and help people understand the nuances of it. There’s some early data from my colleagues in the national trial on what was it about those people who ultimately chose not to continue. It turns out they were a subgroup that had high burnout scores to begin with.

We need to dig down to this in a lot more detail, but we’ve been speculating amongst ourselves that this might be a subset who perhaps either didn’t have much preparatory work or the workload was high to begin with the four day week, they couldn’t find the adaptations to make it work perhaps they were continuing to do lots of overtime. As we’ve touched on, there are the efficiency tips and tricks, small tweaks and whims, but sometimes unfortunately, there’s a bit of a wider issue around workload that the four-day week is not necessarily going to resolve by itself as a silver bullet. It might be useful for people to have at the back of their minds going into it. Occasionally it doesn’t work out, but our suspicion is that’s because there’s something else going on.

 

The four day week is not necessarily going to resolve by itself as a silver bullet.

 

The Four Day Week And National Productivity

Something structural in terms of work design or shaping or my guess is that there are certain industries where there would be a negative view on this anyway. That makes it a little bit harder. A couple of other questions come to my mind, again, in this slightly broader space. You spoke about things like labor market participation earlier, and we covered some of the shifting gender contributions to labor market participation. One of the things we know is very much a case of a minute is there’s a reasonable level of health-related absence from working-age populations, particularly in the UK. It’s increasing from a trend perspective that seems to be the case. What do you think the role of something like a four-day week is in shaping contribution to something like national productivity if you want to take it that far or more broadly, the labor market participation across the world?

It’s huge because if you look at labor force survey data of how many working days are lost to poor health, 50% of working days lost are due to mental health rather than physical health. There’s an epidemic here, not just of physical health leading to lower market participation, but mental health too. I reflect back again to the biology of this. There’s only hard and fast you can push a human brain without letting it rest. That’s our biology there are many strengths to this. There are many things we can do that machines cannot do. AI is such a hot topic at the moment. I firmly believe it’s never going to replace us because biologically there’s creativity that the human mind can do that a machine cannot replicate.

For the human brain to function at that optimum, we need to pay attention to human biology. It may be that there are some of us who talked earlier about a spectrum, it might be that for certain demographics that sub cynic group who want to work 40 hours a week, maybe that’s their biological optimum and working less is stressful for them due to the nature of psychological and biological makeup. There’ll be another group of people for whom 40 hours is too much because it makes you tired. If the option is to work 40 hours and not manage it, you’d be mentally and physically ill because of it, or to work 32 hours, it’s better to work 32 hours than not at all.

For that reason, a four-day week could be hugely valuable in increasing market participation for those groups. Secondly, even leaving aside the underparticipation of those groups in who switch, they tend to see better performance and revenue tends to go up. Even if you were being cynical about the lovely fluffy well-being benefits, why would you not do this given the potential economic benefits that are on offer? That can apply at the single organization level, but if we add all of that up across the economy, why would we not do this? This is going to be a terribly controversial point, depending on where you personally sit on a political value spectrum. There’s this interesting example of the four-day week trial that South Cambridge District Council has been running. Have you heard of this?

I’ve seen some of the headlines about it. Central government mandate shift and despite benefits and on.

Headlines have been flowing. They tried this initially in a sub-team where they had a real retention issue and they were very reliant on agency bank staff, and they were spending a lot, and it worked well. It solved their retention issue over that time period, apparently, they saved 300,000 pounds. They thought, “This has been effective. We’re now going to consider rolling this out to another sub-team where we’ve got a bit of a retention issue. The original team was planning or something like that where there was a knock-on impact on customer service where if you’ve got planning application underway and then the consultant leaves, there were then all these delays happening because of the loss of expertise and internal in-house knowledge of that particular application.

This is an essential service. We all need Binmen but they have to work hard on sociable hours. Are we surprised there’s a retention issue here? At this point, the Central government got wind of it. Despite the fact that the council had saved money, I think this shows how ideology can play in. They said taxpayers expect value for money and you are not giving taxpayers value for money, stop your experiment. The council wrote back and said, “We’ve saved money and we think we’re going to save more.” Even if you leave aside the fluffy benefits, like, “Economically, why would we not do this?” There’s now this constant pushback which is being covered by the media where it’s become a bit intractable.

You’ve said a few times, “Why would we not do this?” I was going to come back and ask you, “Why would we not?” you’ve hit on some of this here. In my personal view, there’s something in the competitive nature of humanity that values an ability to persevere despite adversity. There’s a weakness in not doing this. There’s language like that that comes out anecdotally. I observe a shift in I guess social conversations across a range of things, including things like ESG investment or other aspects, global warming and so on, all these things that make it harder and harder for people to do this we have.

We Elon Musk saying work only gets hard at 80 hours or we get somebody with their daily plan that they share as a successful person, which involves going for a very 6-mile run at 4:00 in the morning before 3 hours of meditation before getting to school. These things are hard, but they’re true. As a competitive species, how do we create that shift to make it permissible and acceptable and celebrated to be that different person? There’s some real challenge in there. That’s not a question to I guess answer now because it’s fairly hard, but I think there is something interesting in that.

I can give a brief reflection. At the moment, this is largely being led by SMEs in the private sector who are generally led by someone who thinks, “I’ve seen the data and I think this could be a good thing for a number of reasons.” They’re open to experimentation. Until there’s wider movement in the landscape in the public sector and a role for legislation, it’s not going to move very far beyond those private sector experimentally positive mindsets-minded employers. This is a very feal time for politics as the South Cambridge District Council trial shows.

That’s one reason why it’s all the more important experiments are done in those other settings. No way could this happen overnight, but if there’s a role for legislation in doing a few more pilots in wider sectors and settings, then we can start to better handle the data of, “These are the benefits that happen. They’re slightly different to the private sector.” The benefits aren’t there that we thought they were.  I don’t think that would happen. As a scientist, I want to be data-led. I think we need to start gathering data from a wider set of sectors and for that, there is going to need to be a role for legislators like the district council.

I’d be interested to see things looking more broadly across different countries. You hear a lot of stories about productivity in the US and there’s considerably less time for holidays. People don’t take holidays. Working hours are different. There are interesting narratives that come out of that division of workplace legislation between different parts of the world that I think are interesting. I’d be curious about the impact of autonomy on all of this as well. As we were speaking, I was wondering, it feels like if we’re doing labor in the three days that we’re not at work, but we’re doing it fully under our own terms versus maybe having less autonomy in the workplace. I wonder if there is something to do with the amount of autonomy we’re giving in the workplace or if it might be another factor that contributes to this.

It’s something we’ve been measuring and it’s something the national trials have looked to measure because we think it might be a moderator. That’s a bit of a scientific jargon word, but essentially that might have a consequence on the magnitude of the outcome. There are potentially different consequences for the knowledge economy type workers like you and I where other than meetings, we have quite high autonomy over task selection versus being on a production line versus and in the care sector. Neither I nor my colleagues on the national trial have gotten stuck into that aspect of the data yet. We hope over the next few years to be able to give a little bit more insight into that.

Let’s watch for space. I think we’re out of time, but to wrap up, is there anything people can do to find out more about you, your work, anything else you’re doing and how to get in touch? It’s super exciting times.

Our website is www.Sussex4DayWeek.co.uk. It has lots of information about our results so far, quotes from those who’ve given it a try and what their experiences were and our contact details. You are very welcome to get in touch with us and if you would like any advice. We are very happy to chat with people on a completely informal answering FAQs basis. You don’t have to be at the point of thinking, “I want to do a trial.” If you’re at that point, then we can help you with that too. we support employers from very early FAQs, through to the preparatory work, through to doing a lot of detailed measurement and assessment so that you’ve then got an evidence base of some hard numbers to make a decision on how is the trial done and what you wanted it to do.

At the University of Sussex, we support employers up and down the country, but as well as myself, there’s the 4-Day Week Campaign UK, which we very much recommend for a great set of FAQs, some of which we’ve touched on and answered around, “Does a four-day week mean everyone’s off on Friday?” No, often not. If you are an employee, a member of staff rather than a business owner and you like the idea of this and you want to bring it to your boss, I’m very happy to help advise you on that.

The 4-day Week Campaign has a fantastic advice page for if you’re an employee, here are the sorts of things that you can do to raise it with your line manager or a business owner. Finally, the 4-Day Week global foundation has another fantastic set of resources. If you want to take a deep dive, you can go and find a 60-page report from the national trial to download from their website as well as reports from their other cohorts because they’re global. They have been supporting national trials. Now nearly 30 countries around the world. You can go and look at all of their insights and data. That’s FourDayWeek.co.uk.

Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.

Thanks.

 

Important Links

• 4-Day Week
• Four Day Week
• 4dayweek.com/
• C.Rae@sussex