This new study makes the case that you shouldn’t be at work today

Last April, Kickstarter became one of the latest companies to test a four-day workweek. Salaries stayed the same, but employees got Fridays off. (Monday through Thursday, they worked a regular eight-hour schedule.) Like other businesses that have made the shift, the crowdfunding giant saw counterintuitive results: Despite the drop in hours, productivity grew.

“We saw that we were doing a better job of hitting our goals after adopting a four-day workweek,” says Jon Leland, chief strategy officer at the crowdfunding company. Employees were more engaged and focused and better rested. And it was suddenly easier both to recruit new staff and retain existing workers, even in the midst of the Great Resignation.

The company was one of more than 30 in the U.S., Ireland, and Australia to take part in a group of six-month-long pilots coordinated by the nonprofit 4 Day Week Global. Researchers from Boston College, University College Dublin, and Cambridge University studied what happened and compared it to the company’s earlier performance. There was already anecdotal evidence of the benefits of the schedule, but this is the first large-scale research to show how well it works.

Two-thirds of employees said they were less burned out after the change. Job satisfaction rose. They reported that their mental and physical health had improved, and that there were fewer conflicts between work and family. Exercise increased by an average of 24 minutes a week. They were sleeping better. The majority of people said they’d have to be paid much more to switch to a job with a traditional five-day schedule. Eighteen of the companies in the pilot have already told the researchers that they definitely plan to continue with the new schedule, including Kickstarter.

Though the study didn’t measure productivity—in part because it looked at a range of different types of companies, and some can’t easily measure it—employees self-reported both that their productivity and performance had improved. Sick days also dropped. And though productivity grew, workers didn’t report that the intensity of work had changed.

“It’s not a ‘speed up,’ it’s a work reorganization model,” says lead researcher Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College. The companies that participated, which had two months of training and mentorship before the pilots began, looked for ways to cut unnecessary meetings and give employees more uninterrupted time to focus on projects.

“If you talk to anyone in most five-day-a-week jobs, they will tell you five ways that their current job wastes their time, right?” says Leland. “So it’s about having that conversation with everyone and getting everyone pulling in the same direction to resolve those issues. Because everyone’s motivated—it’s about just getting your time back, and not creating more time to do more work.”

The number of companies testing a four-day workweek was growing before the pandemic, but accelerated because of it. “We started rethinking what works look like during the pandemic, like most employers,” he says. “We went to fully remote, but we also saw how much of the structure of work was a little bit more flexible than I think that we assumed.”

The nonprofit 4 Day Week Global talks about a “100-80-100” model, where pay and output stay the same, but hours drop to 80%. Schor says that can work for many businesses. But for jobs that are especially prone to burnout, like healthcare—where workers already work nonstop—a “100-80-80” model might be better, where a doctor or nurse works four days, doesn’t try to maintain current productivity, and someone else is hired to cover the fifth day.

The four-day week is the future of work, Schor believes. It won’t happen immediately, she says, but will evolve as more businesses start to move from summer Fridays to every other Friday off, to every Friday off. And it will move from computer-based office jobs to a bigger diversity of companies. “I think we’re at the beginning of it,” she says. “We’re going to see increased momentum.”