Four day weeks increase productivity

The argument

The case for the four-day week rests on measured outcomes from employers who have actually tried it. In August 2019 Microsoft tested a four-day working week and reported that productivity jumped by 40%. In New Zealand, the firm Perpetual Guardian ran its own trial and found workers 20% more productive and 7% less stressed, alongside a 27% increase in reported work-life balance. These are not projections but results from live businesses that shortened the week and then measured what happened. The mechanism proponents point to is the difference between hours worked and work done. Workers themselves report that they could complete their work in five to seven hours a day if they were not interrupted — which implies that much of a conventional working day is absorbed by meetings, interruptions and the low-value filling of time. Compressing the week attacks exactly that slack. It forces the elimination of the least productive hours rather than the most productive ones, so total output can hold or rise even as total hours fall. The pattern holds beyond individual firms. A third of UK businesses that adopted four-day working weeks saw productivity increase, with estimated savings for businesses of around £92 billion a year. Staff in those workplaces were happier, were less stressed, and took less time off ill — and the last of these matters financially as well as humanly, because absence is itself a productivity cost that a shorter, less exhausting week reduces. Taken together, the evidence proponents cite runs in one direction: firms that reduce the working week do not lose output, and in several documented cases gain it, while their employees are measurably better off. On that basis, four-day weeks should be implemented.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Although some companies have found four day weeks to be successful in productivity levels, other companies have found that a four day week has a negative impact. Treehouse, a company that offers virtual coding classes, found that there was a drop in work ethic and therefore discontinued the policy. Some business leaders, such as Amy Finlay, of Edinburgh IFA, suggest that a four day week is unrealistic. Where businesses have small teams, they already struggle to get things done within the five working days, the four working day week would overwhelm many. Ryan Arrindell of Animate Designs argues that it would be hard to have shorter working hours work with the demands for longer opening hours. Bigger companies may be able to cope with this due to their workforce, but smaller ones would not be able to. It is also contended that people may feel more refreshed with an additional day off, but productivity may drop due to working a longer day in a four day week. Where you have a mixture of people working four days and five days, or people on alternate four day shifts, someone on their day off may feel more pressure to respond to e-mails or attend meetings, which may overall reduce productivity.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Both trials were run and reported by the organisations themselves, over short periods, on staff who knew they were being observed and had an interest in the arrangement continuing. The Microsoft figure comes from a Japanese trial that simultaneously closed offices and capped meeting lengths, and it compares sales per employee over one month against the same month a year earlier — an uncontrolled comparison in which those other changes cannot be separated from the shorter week. [Rejecting P2] The UK figures are survey responses about perceived productivity rather than measured output, and the savings estimate is an extrapolation from them rather than an observed sum. Selection runs through the whole premise: the businesses that adopted the policy are those whose work suited it, so their experience does not show what would follow from making the practice general — which is what 'should be implemented' proposes, and which the counter's examples of small teams and long opening hours put in doubt.