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CNBC
29-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
3 ways companies successfully shift to a 4-day workweek, from a researcher who's studied hundreds of cases
The four-day workweek is no longer a pipe dream: In the last five years, hundreds of companies have piloted a four-day, 32-hour workweeks with no pay cuts to some 8,700 workers around the world. The results have been overwhelmingly positive: Workers love it (they're less burned out and more engaged) while businesses have reaped the rewards, too (with boosted profits and less turnover). Companies who successfully made the shift used three key strategies to get as much work done in less time, says Juliet Schor, an economist, sociologist and lead researcher on the experiments. Schor recently detailed the trial results in her latest book, "Four Days a Week," and told CNBC Make It about the companies' keys to success: The first is implementing productivity hacks, especially shortening or deleting meetings, making meetings more efficient, and adding protected focused time. During a typical 9-to-5, employees are interrupted every two minutes by meetings, emails and other pings, according to recent Microsoft data. The businesses Schor studied had a lot of ways to cut down on meetings. Some did a calendar audit to determine if recurring check-ins were really necessary, could be done less frequently or could be shorter. Some meetings were deleted and replaced with written status updates. Meetings that remained had to include advanced reading and an agenda so participants spent their time together discussing solutions rather than going over summaries. Finally, many businesses set meeting-free days or calendar blocks to help workers protect their schedules and get focused work done in peace. While more effective meetings and communication help white-collar offices cut down their work schedules, those who work in factories did so through process engineering, Schor says. For example, at Pressure Drop, a U.K.-based brewery that Schor studied, leaders encouraged employees to "own" the process of making their work tasks more efficient. Brewing involves a lot of tasks, but one person can do a few of them at a time if they set themselves up well. For example, it takes hours to clean machinery, but there are 30- to 45-minute periods where the operator is waiting around. Instead of letting that dead time go to waste, workers learned to start setting up the next packaging run, lining up kegs, and getting cans ready for the feed line. At Advanced RV, a motorhome manufacturer near Cleveland, Ohio, the company figured out which people were best at certain tasks, and then changed their division of labor accordingly to let people do the job they were best (and faster) at. When workers feel like they have ownership about how they get their work done, it helps them feel more capable, Schor says. This, in turn, helps them feel more satisfied in their jobs and in their lives overall, she says. Finally, many businesses went deeper to question the tasks and projects they focused their time on, and whether they lined up with their company mission and overall strategy. One company re-evaluated the purpose of one of their newsletters, Schor says. "They spent a lot of time on the newsletter and realized it just wasn't really giving them anything, but it was extremely time-consuming." The team realized they were only creating and sending out the newsletter as often as they did because they'd always done it, Schor says, though it wasn't delivering the results they wanted. So, they ended up sending it less often, thereby freeing up the time for the newsletter team to work on more high-impact projects. This level of intentionality, plus the reward of more time off work, leads employees to value their jobs more, boosts their motivation and yields company success, Schor says.
CNBC
27-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
The real reason a 4-day workweek makes people happier in their jobs—it's not just more free time
It's not exactly surprising that workers support moving to a four-day workweek. In the last five years, hundreds of companies have piloted a four-day, 32-hour workweek with no pay cuts to some 8,700 workers around the world. People experienced less burnout, stress and anxiety, and better mental and physical health. Employees rated their work-life balance higher, and even business profits grew. There are two major factors for the boost in workers' happiness, says Juliet Schor, an author, economist, sociologist and lead researcher of the 4 Day Week experiments. One, of course, is that people have more time for their families, friends, sleep, hobbies, health and communities, Schor writes in her latest book, "Four Days a Week." The second factor, however, is that workers are happier even while they're on the clock. Simply put: The four-day week makes people feel much more effective at work, and that makes them happier in general. Trial participants self-reported that they were more productive than ever after moving to a shortened week. When faced with the task of getting their usual amount of work done in less time, workers and teams found ways to cut out busywork, streamline processes and determine what work was actually most important, Schor writes. Some said they felt more stress trying to cram everything in, though those situations were the exception, Schor writes. Beyond maintaining productivity, "people just feel so much better," Schor tells CNBC Make It. "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." When workers feel like they're good at their job, they feel good overall, and that spills into their personal lives. "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," Schor says. The four-day workweek could also make people feel better about their jobs because it signals a new contract between themselves and their employer. The typical five-day, 40-hour workweek has been the national standard by law since the 1940s. When companies introduce a shorter workweek without a pay cut, the flexibility can be seen as an exclusive benefit or reward. It signals that management is willing to give up some control over how people structure their time, Schor says, especially if part of the goal is to explicitly improve employee well-being. The move can additionally strengthen teams when colleagues band together to work smarter in less time. The four-day week "makes everyone super motivated to implement [process] changes, which aren't easy," said Jon Leland, who previously helped Kickstarter through a four-day workweek pilot. "It makes the stakes really high, because you're not only gaining these efficiency gains just for yourself, but you're doing it for everyone else around you," Leland told Schor in her book. "This accountability to co-workers is an important part of why people are willing to make the extra effort to find efficiencies, forgo goofing off, and do the hard work," Schor writes. "They develop more team spirit."
CNBC
24-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
The most surprising benefits of a 4-day workweek, from a researcher who's studied thousands of cases: 'We never expected' it
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.
Axios
29-06-2025
- Business
- Axios
The four-day work week gets a new booster: AI
If you can get more done in less time using AI, why not work fewer hours? Why it matters: The idea is gaining traction among proponents of the four-day work week, and at least one software startup CEO tells Axios that he's moved his company to a 32-hour week — with no change in pay — because of AI. Where it stands: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) brought it up on the Joe Rogan podcast recently. "You're a worker, your productivity is increasing because we give you AI, right?" Sanders said. "Instead of throwing you out on the street, I'm going to reduce your workweek to 32 hours." Sanders is a four-day work week booster, having introduced a 32-hour workweek bill last year, though such a proposal is unlikely to get far in Congress. How it works: Instead of firing people, proponents argue that firms share the gains of improved technology by giving workers some of their time back. Instead of fearing AI will replace them, workers welcome its advancements and figure out creative ways to leverage the tech. The four-day work week community, which took off in the post-pandemic pro-worker era, is buzzing about AI right now, says economist Juliet Schor, who has a new book out this month called " Four Days a Week." Schor is also lead researcher for 4DWG, a global nonprofit that's piloted shorter work weeks with 245 organizations in the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere. "The ability of large language models like ChatGPT to wipe out millions of good-paying positions means we need to be intentional about how we adjust to that technology," she writes in the book. "Reducing hours per job is a powerful way to keep more people employed." Reality check: Smaller firms can more easily implement a big change like a four-day week — larger companies are likely to have a harder time making it happen, experts say. Firms also have a strong preference for layoffs to appease investors. But reducing work hours to make sure a lot of people don't lose their jobs when technology advances isn't a new idea. Shortening work hours as a way to reduce unemployment was one of the arguments wielded by advocates for five-day work weeks back in the early 20th century. (That used to be a wild idea, too.) Earlier this month, Roger Kirkness, the CEO of a small software startup called Convictional moved the company to a four-day workweek — without reducing anyone's pay. "Look at Fridays like weekends," he wrote in an email announcing the change, to the delight of his 12 employees. (One must be on-call each week, on a rotating schedule.) "Oh my god, I was so happy," says Nick Wehner, a software engineer at the company. Wehner said he's been amazed at how much faster he can work using AI. Kirkness tells Axios that using AI accelerates writing code but it doesn't speed up everything — teams still need to be able to think creatively to solve problems and get real work done. The four-day work week is meant to keep everyone fresh, with enough time to recharge so they can do deep-thinking. "(Nearly) all that matters in work moving forward is the maximization of creativity, human judgment, emotional intelligence, prompting skills and deeply understanding a customer domain," he wrote in his all-staff email.
