The Case For the Four-Day Workweek

When I was growing up in Roscommon, a community in rural Ireland, my family wasn’t particularly well off. My mom had some health challenges, which meant my dad was often the sole earner. He spent crazy hours on the road in his main job at a local seafood company. To supplement that income, he also managed a couple of pubs on weekends. For many people of his generation, long hours simply came with the territory. My dad is no longer with us, but, to be honest, I think he’d probably turn over in his grave at the idea of a four-day workweek. Funnily enough, helping others to work less is now my full-time job.

After earning my master’s in business strategy from Atlantic Technological University, I got a job as the director of campaigns for Fórsa, Ireland’s largest public-sector labour union. Based on the success of similar initiatives coming out of Scandinavia and New Zealand, I launched Ireland’s first-ever four-day workweek pilot during the pandemic. It was relatively small in scale—about 12 small and medium-sized businesses took part—but the trial showed such positive results that we later expanded it to hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of employees around the world.

In 2022, I came to Canada to start my current company, Work Time Reduction, which helps organizations transition to shorter workweeks. This usually involves some combination of reducing distractions (and meetings), streamlining decision-making processes and, sometimes, upgrading technology. In the end, workers aren’t simply doing the same number of tasks at a more intense pace; they’re achieving better outcomes more efficiently in less time, in exchange for the same pay and, ideally, more balanced lives.

The four-day workweek has been a hot topic for years, but even pre-COVID, it was still written off as a policy for lazy people—especially by older leaders who climbed the corporate ladder by putting in insane hours and, in a quasi-sadistic way, felt younger generations should be forced to do the same. In today’s work culture, we’ve reached crisis levels of busyness, but that hasn’t helped us get more quality work done: a recent study by Slack found that desk (or “knowledge”) workers spend roughly 40 per cent of their time on tasks they see as low-value, repetitive or relatively meaningless. We’re also terrible at measuring our productivity: another study by Deloitte found that just 17 per cent of organizations believe they’re accurately assessing the value created by their employees. Given that Canada is currently one of the least productive countries in the G7, these are huge problems.

Thanks to a few major social shifts, the four-day setup has never been more appealing. The rise of dual-income households means families are in desperate need of more time to keep up with domestic tasks. Generation Z has pushed back hard on the idea of grinding to get ahead, preferring to work efficiently so they can have lives outside of the office. In fact, since COVID’s great reckoning, flexibility has become a top priority among workers of all ages. Employers, too, seem to finally get that the long-hours-equals-success formula is a hangover from an industrial economy that no longer exists.

Recently, we’ve seen government-sponsored pilots proliferate in a number of European countries—Portugal, Scotland and Spain, to name a few. In Iceland, a four-year initiative cut many workers’ hours from 39 to as low as 35 a week; now, 86 per cent of the country’s workforce has permanently shortened schedules (or the right to negotiate for them). There are, of course, a huge variety of approaches to work-time reduction—Fridays off, five shorter days, alternating four- and five-day weeks and many more. But in almost every study, the benefits are clear: employees are happier and healthier. In data from recent large-scale global pilots, 64 per cent of organizations reported reduced burnout among workers, while 42 per cent reported fewer resignations. Workplaces also become way more innovative. I’ve witnessed this particularly among my ad agency clients—time away from our desks gets the creative juices flowing. The same goes for non-profits, manufacturers, law firms and tech companies. And many of them have the revenue increases to show for it.

Work-time reduction can also be a powerful recruiting aid. In 2022, for example, I worked with Sensei Labs, a software development company based in Toronto. They compete with much larger firms like Google and Meta for engineering talent. Implementing a truncated workweek was a novel way for them to attract new workers. The extra extracurricular time was a benefit unto itself.

Four-day workweeks will become even more feasible as workplaces continue to integrate AI. Industry titans like Bill Gates and Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, seem to think that AI could result in our weeks topping out at an even shorter three and a half days. A report by my own firm from earlier this year found that if large language models like ChatGPT are introduced, 91 per cent of workers in the Canadian labour market could have their working hours reduced by at least 10 per cent by 2034.

There’s no question that AI will lead to more productive workplaces, where most of our mundane tasks are automated. But right now, there’s a real backdrop of AI-related doom and gloom among workers, and employers are having trouble getting buy-in over fears of widespread job losses. In areas where AI could be especially disruptive, like data analysis and customer service, reducing work hours could smooth the transition by staving off immediate, deep staff cuts. Plus, if AI tools can create, say, eight hours’ worth of efficiencies, bosses should give some of this time back to their people.

In Canada, the adoption of reduced working hours seems to be mostly led by the private sector, rather than through structured, policy-level intervention—though, out in B.C., the Green Party has called for the province to kick off its own four-day pilot. I’m not saying we should legislate shorter weeks in the same way we did the 40-hour workweek in the decades after Henry Ford pioneered the moving assembly line. But there’s now more than enough international evidence for our governments to support early adopters—possibly in the form of tax incentives or subsidized support to redesign their work. They’re risk-takers in an economy where these arrangements aren’t yet the norm.

The big question is: what will we do with all that extra time? Some will use it on family-oriented activities, like caring for elderly relatives or spending more quality time with their kids (not to mention saving on childcare costs). Others might return to a lapsed hobby or develop a skill they never thought they’d get a chance to learn. For example, foreseeing a huge increase in leisure time, Steven Cohen, an American venture capitalist and the owner of the New York Mets, has reportedly invested heavily in golf. The ultimate goal is working to live—not the other way around.

Joe O’Connor is the co-founder and CEO of the Work Time Reduction Centre of Excellence in Toronto.