Will we get a 4-day working week?
Yes, and it'll be great. But 5 bad things will happen first.
Recently, when people find out I write about work, they’ve asked me the same question: “will we get a 4-day working week in our lifetime?”. My answer is always “yes”, and then “quite soon actually” in response to the follow-up question of “when”, but with a lot of caveats.
I think we are edging closer to the 4-day working week becoming not just accepted for some people, but the norm. If you look at the rate of progress so far, the future looks promising. Just a few years back, working from home was a rarity. Then the Covid pandemic hit and now many people expect hybrid working as a condition for whether they’ll take a job. Similarly, pre-pandemic the 4-day working week was widely considered a wild, radical idea. Now, we’re on the other side of multiple successful trials, the concept is frequently in mainstream newspapers (albeit often in negative discussions), and businesses around the world are giving it a go.
It’s been a rocky road, though, and we’re still in that tricky period where the 4-day week is getting a lot of pushback. Amid positive results from 4-day week trials, the concept is used over and over again as a blunt weapon in generational culture wars. Right-wing types declare that woke youngsters who cry out to work less are lazy destroyers of society, and that any move the Labour government makes towards more flexible working is bad news for business.
So yes, I do think that one day in the future the 4-day working week will become the norm, and it will be a wonderful thing. But on the way to that wonderful thing, there will be some bad bits. Here are a few I predict.
The compressed hours trap
One way individuals and businesses are trying to make the 4-day week work is by doing ‘compressed hours’. This means that people will still work the same number of hours, but squashed into four days rather than five. This is the system that the current government is proposing as an option, and, despite what headlines slamming the plans suggest, is not the actual 4-day work week that campaigners are pushing for. What 4-day work week proponents actually want is not to cram five days’ worth of work into four, but to reduce the time we spend working overall. So it’s four days working, three days off, fewer total hours, same pay, no catch.
I believe that compressed hours are a very bad thing. Offering this structure up as an option allows a workplace to appear ahead of the curve and a lovely place to be, because they get to use the 4-day week phrasing. And yes, technically, if you do compressed hours you do indeed get an additional day tacked on to your weekend. But it’s not a gift bestowed upon you by kindly overlords - it’s a trade, and what you give in exchange is your weekday evenings or mornings. The eight-hour workday is already a lot. Making it longer is a recipe for stress and exhaustion. Already many of us delay our living for the weekend, getting all our non-work time during the week sucked up by commuting, errands, and admin. Making our start times earlier and our end times later worsens this under the guise of ‘flexibility’. Ever worked late, got home, ordered takeaway because you were too tired to cook, went to bed late because you had to wash up, woken up wiped out as a result, and generally felt absolutely shit? Imagine doing that four times a week. Compressed hours suck.
Overworking
Compressed hours are a form of overworking, but they’re not the only way people will put in excess time and energy into work as part of the transition to a 4-day week. As the 4-day week rolls out, businesses and workers will struggle to adjust. Workplaces will be rigid about the amount of work that needs to be completed each week, and while people will be more productive when working less (so say the results of trials), we do also have to have flexible expectations about what’s possible. Similarly, workers will find it tough to switch into a mindset that enables them to get through tasks in less time. The 4-day week requires optimisation of time; it needs us to get rid of unnecessary meetings and poor attempts at multi-tasking. While we try to get into that flow, many of us will panic and end up working late to try to ‘make up’ the time - and the pressure for us to show that the 4-day week can work will push people to furiously overwork behind the scenes. We’ll be so excited about the 4-day week that we’ll be terrified of it being snatched away, so will work ourselves to the bone holding on as tightly as we can.
The solution to this is to relax. Workplaces need to lessen the load but also to trust that the work can and will get done. Workers need to be able to trust that expectations are reasonable and that they won’t be punished for working less.
Negativity
The path to a 4-day work week will be paved with snipes. I don’t expect to stop reading negative headlines about flexible working any time soon. Even the non-news* about the government’s plans to allow people to ask for compressed hours has been couched in negative language. In The MailOnline, The Telegraph, The Sun, and on Metro’s Instagram, for example, the news brands stated that UK workers will be allowed to “demand” a four day week - insinuating that to ask to do compressed hours is somehow demanding.
*It’s really not big news. UK workers already have the right to request flexible working from day one of their employment, as of April 2024… a call made by the previous Conservative government. The difference in Labour’s plans is that it’ll be harder for employers to refuse these requests. If the plans go ahead, bosses can only turn down flexible working requests where it is “not reasonably feasible”. How we’ll define “not reasonably feasible” remains to be seen. Also, again, these plans are not for a 4-day working week, but a facsimile of it. Labour’s talking about the right to ask for compressed hours. Meaning the same working hours as usual, just in four days instead of five.
I’ve written before about many people’s strange resistance to making work better. There’s an ongoing sense that things have to be done the way they always were, and that if I suffered everyone else has to as well. This rhetoric seems to be the ideal pairing for generation bashing, which is always going to be a thing (‘these young people and their silly ideas!’). The negativity will keep bubbling away until eventually, finally, individuals, businesses, and media brands will start to realise the tide is turning and those in favour of the 4-day week are no longer the minority. They’ll then start to consider that working less might actually be quite pleasant. It’ll take a loooong time for the negativity to go, but it will one day, apart from the few contrarians who shake their fists and write yet more columns about why our periods of overworking were a golden age.
Rubbish pay
On the way to the 4-day work week being the norm, we’ll have lots of people working less and getting paid less, too. Employers will say this is fair, because individuals are getting paid for four days of work rather than five - and this is currently the case for many people presently working reduced hours (most often because they’re mothers. Funny that.), despite the fact that few of these jobs are paid by the hour and that many of these individuals are delivering the same output as someone else would in five days a week. We’ll also see employers offering lower salaries but saying that their generous offer of flexible working makes up for less money.
This sucks! We need to move away from the idea that salary is money in exchange for time and towards money being paid for skill and care. If someone does great work in four days rather than five, they should be paid as much as someone would to do the same work in five days. This is not a crazy thing to suggest!
Rubbish working conditions
Similarly, there will be companies that use the 4-day work week to excuse all manner of workplace sins. They’ll have rampant presenteeism, toxic emotional environments, terrible opportunities for progression, all that jazz, but will try to distract you from all of that by pointing to the shiny 4-day week as though they’re doing you a huge favour. You’ll then be expected to be grateful for this. You might even stay in a shit job because hey, at least you get an extra day’s weekend, right? Ew.
Thankfully, as more workplaces offer the 4-day week and it becomes more normalised, it’ll be harder for the bad places to use this cover-up technique. Eventually, as workers wise up and move on to greener pastures, companies will realise they can’t get away with treating employees poorly and will be forced to be better.
In the meantime, stay aware of workplaces using the promise of flexibility to soothe the sting of toxicity. Don’t accept the belief that you have to put up with poor treatment just to get a slightly better work/life balance.
How do you feel about the work you do? What matters most to you; time, meaning, or money? If you’re up for answering these questions in my Working On Purpose survey, you will have my eternal gratitude. It doesn’t take long and is quite an interesting exercise, if I do say so myself. Do it here:
Work-related reading recs:
Experienced managers share 4 essential steps for giving negative feedback at work
I had a really great chat with Amy Edmondson last year as part of Eat Sleep Work Repeat, in which she talked about the power of awe-inspiring workplaces. I thought about that while looking at these very cool office spaces designed to offer mini retreats while working.
Finally, some bosses admit why they impose return-to-office mandates (yes, it’s to get people to quit)
Amy Beecham has written a great guide to the right to switch off
Spot on — I agree that this shift will happen sooner rather than later, but there are always going to be those bad actor companies that use it as a way to cover up other toxic practices.
One of the things that I’ve noticed is that as work planning has got ‘leaner’ (‘do more in the same amount of time!’), no one has any time left to do the ‘side of desk’ things that make work a nice place to be for everyone.