The case for a shorter week

For most of the twentieth century, the five-day, forty-hour week seemed as fixed as the calendar itself. Yet it was never a law of nature. It was the product of long campaigns by trade unions and, famously, of Henry Ford's decision in 1926 to give his factory workers Saturdays off. Today, a growing number of employers are asking whether the time has come to take the next step and shorten the week to four days.

The idea is not as radical as it sounds. In most trials, employees keep their full salary but work around thirty-two hours instead of forty, on the condition that productivity does not fall. So far, the results have been encouraging. In a widely reported British trial in 2022, the vast majority of the roughly sixty participating companies chose to keep the shorter week after the experiment ended, citing lower stress, fewer sick days and little or no loss of output.

How can people achieve as much in less time? Part of the answer lies in how much of a typical working day is wasted. Long meetings, constant email and the pressure to look busy all eat into the hours we spend at our desks. Faced with a firm deadline on Thursday evening, workers tend to cut these distractions and concentrate on what genuinely matters. In other words, a shorter week does not so much reduce work as strip away the padding around it.

That said, the four-day week is no magic bullet, and it suits some jobs far better than others. A software team can compress its schedule relatively easily; a hospital, a school or a restaurant cannot simply close on Fridays. In such sectors, a shorter week would mean hiring more staff, which comes at a cost that many employers, especially small businesses, may be unable to bear. Moreover, critics warn that squeezing five days of work into four could leave some employees running on empty by Thursday afternoon.

These objections deserve to be taken seriously. Be that as it may, they are arguments for careful design rather than for rejecting the idea outright. Some organisations have experimented with staggered schedules, so that the office stays open five days a week while each employee works four. Others have opted for a nine-day fortnight as a kind of halfway house. Insofar as such compromises preserve the main benefit, namely more time to rest, they may prove more realistic than a sudden, universal switch.

Ultimately, the debate is less about Fridays than about what we want work to be. For decades, long hours have been treated as proof of commitment. The four-day week challenges that assumption by suggesting that results, not hours, are what really count. Whether or not it becomes the norm, that shift in thinking may well turn out to be its most lasting legacy.