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There has been a lot of buzz in recent years about reimagining the work day and work week, but not everyone agrees on how it should change. As my colleague Kathleen Davis noted in a recent article, simply offering a 4-day workweek “fails to solve some of the most fundamental problems with many people’s working hours. What about parents with work schedules that are misaligned with their kids’ school day? Or sleep-deprived medical staff who work more than 12-hour shifts, or service workers dealing with unpredictable schedules?”

History of the 40-hour week

“Working 9 to 5” isn’t just a hit tune warbled from the throat of Dolly Parton, the companion film poked fun at decades of 8-hour office days. You’d be forgiven if you thought that things were always this way. But the fact is, the genesis of the 40-hour workweek was the factory floor in the early days of the 20th century. That’s when Henry Ford, in 1926, offered his factory workers a couple days off to rest, ushering in the weekend. This was followed 14 years later by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which capped the workweek at 40 hours nationwide.

Moving toward a 32-hour week

Flash forward nearly a century and you’ll see that the 40-hour standard has begun to be disrupted. Experiments abound in countries such as New Zealand and Australia making the case for reducing the workweek by a day. The supporting data was all geared toward measuring output rather than hours spent in the workplace. 

The nonprofit 4 Day Week Global was founded in 2019, as an advocate and guide to businesses that wanted to try shortened work schedules. It turned out to be prescient as the pandemic hit and many companies used the challenge of lockdown to rethink the way they worked. By 2023,  4 Day Week Global had partnered with 190 companies.

Other companies running trials included Amazon and Microsoft, Kickstarter, and Buffer. Additional research finds that of the 61 companies that switched to a four-day workweek as part of a major pilot study in the U..K last year, 90% chose to make the change permanent. Among them, children’s clothing company Primary started in April 2020 with two Fridays off and left the commitment open in case it didn’t work. Two years later they were sticking with it.

Strategies to make it work 

Fast Company contributor Amantha Imber says that after three years of implementing a four-day week at her company Inventium, they’ve learned to use objectives and key results (OKRs) as a goal-setting framework. “This means that every team member knows specifically (and objectively) what they need to achieve over the course of a year. They then break this down into quarterly and weekly goals,” she wrote. “Using this method helps everyone know whether they have indeed completed their job in four days, or whether they need to spend a bit of time working on Friday.”

Coaching company Exos partnered with the Wharton School of Business to analyze their four-day workweek pilot program. Putting in “intentional scheduling, meeting auditing, daily microbreaks, and other tactics aimed at maintaining business effectiveness while adding recovery and flexibility into each employee’s day,” was essential to the success of the program, according to the company.

Ed Jennings, the CEO of Quickbase, offered this advice for implementing a shorter workweek: “Eliminate redundant processes and replace them with company-standard approaches, and employees will have time to tackle more strategic activities.”

Client services professionals Alex Daly and Ally Bruschi customized their experiment with “newly offline time,” which they dubbed Slow Down Time (includes Monday mornings, Friday afternoons, and the last 30 mins of the day Monday through Thursday). “This adjustment provides a gentler entry and exit point to the weekend, and gives our full team more time at the end of the day to ease into post-work personal time, while still providing full-week coverage for our clients,” they said. 

The future of the four-day workweek

Legislators are beginning to look more carefully at the 40-hour workweek (it only took 80-some years). As Robert Boersma of Talent.com wrote, “Conversations surrounding the four-day workweek have even entered the American political sector. Massachusetts lawmakers have proposed legislation that would offer businesses tax credits should they offer employees a four-day workweek with no reduced pay. And California lawmakers have proposed reducing the standard workweek from 40 hours to 32.”

If you’re contemplating jumping on this trend, Taylor Rosenbauer, founder and CEO of RocketAir, points to several strategies, such as making sure to focus on value for external partners. But above all, Rosenbauer stressed that it won’t work if leaders aren’t abiding by a short week, too. “It can be incredibly tempting to catch up on work on your day off. However, when leaders and people managers do this, it undermines the culture you’re working hard to create.”