The most surprising benefits of a 4-day workweek, from a researcher who's studied thousands of cases: 'We never expected' it

CNBC

24-07-2025

Juliet Schor has been studying the benefits of working less for decades. She published her first book on the topic, "The Overworked American," in 1992.
It hit a nerve: The book landed her on the The New York Times' bestseller list, into rooms with big-name CEOs and on the phone with policymakers in Washington, D.C. Then, the issue died; plans to experiment with shorter workdays and workweeks didn't pan out.
The events of 2020 change everything. The Covid-19 pandemic and widespread loss of life, combined with a reimagining of how people live and work, led many to realize "it was more important to be living the life they they wanted to lead, and that was not a life of overworking stress and burnout," Schor tells CNBC Make It.
In recent years, Schor, an economist and sociology professor at Boston College, has been a lead researcher with 4 Day Week, a global group of business leaders and experts studying the impacts of a shortened workweek on companies and their employees.
By the summer of 2024, 245 organizations and more than 8,700 employees across the U.S., Canada, Ireland, the U.K., Australia and more had piloted 4 Day Week experiments, which primarily uses a four-day, 32-hour week model with no reduction in pay.
Employees rated their work-life balance higher after shortening their weeks; they experienced less burnout, stress and anxiety, and better mental and physical health. Business profits grew and turnover disappeared.
Schor compiled these findings in her latest book, "Four Days a Week," and spoke with CNBC Make It about her research. Here, she covers the experiments' biggest surprises, why more companies won't try the shortened week, whether it could lead to pay cuts and how AI advancements fit in the picture.
CNBC Make It: What are the most surprising results you've seen from four-day workweek trials?
Schor: The big jump in self-reported productivity is pretty striking.
Beyond maintaining productivity, people just feel so much better. They feel on top of their work and their life, and they're not stressed out. They feel recovered when they come to work on Monday morning. They feel more eager to do work. They feel like they can get it done.
That productivity bump they get, of feeling so good about their work quality, that has a big positive impact on their overall well-being, which we never expected.
I thought that second job-holding would go up. It doesn't. In fact, on average, it falls. People really are taking that day for themselves.
The pace of work didn't speed up. You'd think everybody just works really hard on those four days to get everything in. But it's a company-wide work reorganization.
If the four-day workweek is so good for businesses and employees, why don't more places do it?
I think the answer to that is the same answer to: Why is it that so many companies are trying so hard to get people back in the office when they don't want to go back, and when the companies have been really successful with work from home?
I think there are two things: One is there's a sense in which the companies have to give up control if they're giving people more time back. Management doesn't like that. For some of these return-to-office mandates, they're really more about control than they are about performance.
Second, it feels radical and risky. That's why it helps for these companies to go through a six-month or year-long pilot and see how it goes. The five-day week is very ingrained.
On the other hand, Friday is kind of organically evolving in a way that is pretty clear. There's less and less work being done on Friday. Most companies don't reorganize things for Summer Fridays, they just give people that time. You're not losing a whole day's worth of productivity, because it's already a less productive day. We are evolving away from the full Friday workday. I think we need to accelerate that process.
Could the four-day workweek lead companies to pay their employees less?
To be in our trials, you cannot reduce pay at all. That's a requirement.
I don't think cutting pay would work. People hate pay reductions that are not voluntary. Some people may ask for a trade-off of working less for less money. But for the most part, people have commitments for the money they have at any current time. Many people in our economy aren't earning enough, and so they're struggling to meet their needs. I think management would be very foolish to just try and take money away from people, because they will hate it.
The standard payment model says people should get whatever their productivity is. So with this four-day week where you're not seeing a reduction in productivity, you shouldn't have a change in pay.
We also see people stop quitting four-day-week jobs. The resignation rates just pretty much go to zero in many of these companies. That's where management could maybe take advantage and decide to give lower wage increases over time. I think that's possible as more companies do it. But the countervailing trend to that is they're adopting AI that makes people a lot more productive. And so the standard models say they should get wage increases as a result.
Could AI speed up the four-day workweek? Could it eliminates jobs?
It's really hard to keep everyone in jobs if you're displacing labor with technology. And increasingly, economists are finding that the job-killing potential of AI is really high.
We're faced with two possibilities. One is: We lay off huge numbers of people, and I don't think we're going to be able to re-employ them all in a timely fashion. Then we have an economic catastrophe on our hands.
Or: We gradually reduce hours per job so that as people get more productive, we're not cutting employment, we're just having people spend less time at work.
If you have that productivity increase from AI, it can go to give people more free time, in which case their income stays more or less the same. Or it can go toward more work and more money.
But if you have so much productivity growth, the companies can't necessarily expand that much. So what if you can suddenly produce twice as much? Is there somebody there who's going to buy that twice as much? Where's all that demand going to come from?
The labor market doesn't seem favorable to workers right now. Does the four-day workweek really have momentum in the current environment?
It's a very mixed picture in the job market right now. For some occupations, for AI reasons or others, it's hard to get a job. But there are others where employers are having difficulty filling positions, and they're not getting people back into the office. The latest data around hours worked at home are really steady. They are just not going down.
Of course, if we have a big recession, then lots of things change. But I think we're still on a path toward moving in that direction.
If you look at the numbers on stress, burnout, disengagement, people struggling in their jobs and so forth — they were at record levels during the pandemic, and they have come down since then, but not by that much. And I think that creates ongoing momentum to normalize a four-day week.
Is the goal of these experiments ultimately to make the four-day workweek the national standard by law?
I reached out to the head of a manufacturing company that was in our trials about possibly testifying on Senator Bernie Sanders' bill to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to set the statutory workweek at 32 hours. This person's response was: I believe very much in this. It's been really great for my company. But I don't believe in legislating it.
Typically you need more momentum to get a big change like this in labor law, where you're seeing more of that practice across the economy. Like with Family and Medical Leave Act, many companies already had instituted it before it became a national standard. So we need more big companies to show how viable it is. And then my personal view is that you need legislation to pull the laggards along.