Why companies switch to a four-day week for full pay

HostMost of us know that slow feeling on a Friday afternoon when the clock seems to stop and everyone is just waiting for the weekend to start. But lately, some companies are telling their staff to just stay home on Fridays, keep their full pay, and only work four days instead of five. Why are bosses suddenly okay with giving up a whole day of work without cutting anyone's check?

GuestIt sounds like a dream or maybe a mistake, right? But there's a very clear logic behind it that firms are calling the one hundred, eighty, one hundred rule. The idea is that workers get one hundred percent of their pay for eighty percent of their time, as long as they keep up one hundred percent of their output. They aren't asking people to do less work. They're betting that we can do five days of work in four if we just change how we spend our hours. It turns out that a lot of our eight-hour workday is actually just fluff. We spend so much time in meetings that could've been emails, or just chatting by the coffee machine because our brains are fried. When you tell someone they can have a three-day weekend every single week if they stay focused, they tend to find ways to cut that fluff out themselves.

HostI have to push back a bit there because that sounds like it could easily backfire. If I have to cram forty hours of work into thirty-two hours, won't I just be way more stressed out from Monday to Thursday?

GuestThat was the big fear when these trials started, but the results from a massive study in the UK actually showed the opposite. They followed sixty-one companies that tried this, and they found that levels of stress and being worn out actually went down for most people. Around seventy percent of the workers said they felt less tired. It seems that having that extra day to truly rest, run errands, or see a doctor means when they show up on Monday, they're actually ready to work. They aren't starting the week already behind on their personal lives. And for the bosses, the big win was that people stopped quitting. When you have a four-day week, you don't want to leave for a five-day week job even if the pay is slightly higher. It saves the company a ton of money on finding and training new staff.

HostBut this feels like it only works if you sit at a desk all day. You can't really tell a nurse or a person working in a shop to just be more efficient to make a whole day disappear. Does this only work for people who can skip a few meetings?

GuestYou hit on the toughest part of this whole movement. For a lot of jobs, time is the product. If a shop is open, someone has to be there. If a hospital is running, you need hands on deck. In those cases, a four-day week doesn't happen by working faster. It happens by hiring more people and changing the shifts. Some firms in the service world are trying it, but it costs them more because they have to grow their team to cover the gaps. That's why we see it mostly in tech, law, or offices first. But even there, it takes a lot of work to set up. You have to be ruthless. Some of these companies have banned internal meetings on certain days or told people they can only check email twice a day. It's a total shift in how we think about what a job even is. Is your job to sit in a chair for forty hours, or is your job to get a specific set of tasks done?

HostI still wonder about the long-term catch. If I'm a boss and I see you can get all your work done in four days, what's stopping me from saying, okay, now do even more work since you're so fast, and let's go back to five days?

GuestThat's the old way of thinking, but the market is changing. Right now, there's a huge trial going on in Germany with dozens of companies, and they're looking at this as a way to deal with the fact that they just don't have enough workers. If you're a boss and you can't find enough people to hire, making your job the best one in town is your only move. It's less about being nice and more about staying alive as a business. If people feel respected and they have time to live their lives, they do better work. In the UK trial, almost every single company that tried it decided to keep it. They didn't see the work drop off. In fact, on average, their money coming in went up slightly during the trial. It's hard to argue with those numbers.

HostIt's still hard to wrap my head around the idea that we have just been wasting twenty percent of our time for decades.

GuestWell, we used to work six days a week, and people thought the five-day week would ruin the world, too. The real hurdle now is for the places that can't just cut a meeting, like schools or clinics, where we have to decide if we're willing to pay more for more staff just so everyone can have a bit of their life back.

HostThose Friday afternoons might just be the start of a much bigger shift in how we spend our years.

GuestHospitals and shops are still trying to find a way to make the numbers add up without leaving people short-handed.

HostThat Friday feeling might just become the Thursday feeling, as we figure out what a full week of work actually looks like.