ReadNOW

Cutting the work week down to four days could boost people’s health and lower their risk of burnout, according to the results of a pilot programme in six countries.

A growing number of countries, including Poland, Iceland, Germany, and Portugal, are experimenting with shorter work weeks as a possible answer to rising rates of depression, anxiety, and burnout among employees. In Belgium, meanwhile, workers have the right to request a four-day work week.

The new study, which was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, adds to a growing body of research that shows shorter work weeks could benefit both workers and employers.

The trial included about 2,900 workers from 141 organisations that shortened their work weeks without reducing pay in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Before launching the study, companies underwent two months of training and changes to their workflows to improve their efficiency and collaboration. They then implemented a four-day work week – or a 20 per cent reduction in working hours – for another six months.

After six months, employees with shortened work weeks reported less burnout and better mental and physical health, as well as greater job satisfaction.

Meanwhile, there were no changes for employees in 12 US companies that did not shorten their work weeks, serving as a comparison group.

“It just seems that the wellbeing effects are fairly uniform across companies, across nations, across employees,” Wen Fan, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor of sociology at Boston College, told Euronews Health.

The more people reduced their working hours, the better they felt about their jobs and burnout, and to some extent, their mental health, the study found.

But even workers who reduced their working time by only a few hours reported better health and job satisfaction than the comparison group.

Most companies were still operating on shorter work weeks one year after launching the project, and it doesn’t appear that the effects wore off over time as people adjusted to their new schedules.

“There’s no evidence of any falling back in terms of employee wellbeing or in terms of the performance,” said Brendan Burchell, a sociologist at the University of Cambridge who has analysed four-day work week projects in the UK but was not involved with the latest study.

‘Game changer’

The benefits of a shorter work week came down largely to three factors: employees’ perceived work ability, fewer sleep problems, and less fatigue, underscoring how important sleep is to people’s health.

“The link between getting good sleep and all sorts of health and wellbeing measures is really quite strong,” Burchell, who is also a fellow at Magdalene College, told Euronews Health.

Notably, employees in the latest study worked an average of 40 hours per week before the trial – meaning a 20 per cent reduction would bring them down to 32 hours. That’s already the average work week for people in the Netherlands, with the average across the European Union being 36 hours.

But the results could still be instructive for countries and organisations looking to relieve some pressure on their workers. Spain, for example, is now moving forward with plans to bring its work week down to 37.5 hours from 40 hours.

The pilot programme had a few limitations, for example, the fact that workers reported their own wellbeing in surveys – and they may have overreported how well they were doing “in the hope of maintaining the trial,” the researchers acknowledged.

Companies had to opt into the study, which means it may be comprised of organisations that are already supportive of flexibility and worker wellbeing, which could skew the results and make it harder for shorter work weeks to become mainstream.

“When you think about the still dominant organisational culture, which encourages longer work hours and in-office work… work time reduction in general is not compatible with that ideology,” Fan said.

The pilot also focused on high-income, English-speaking countries, so it is not clear how a four-day work week might translate to other countries or work cultures.

Even so, Burchell said the study is a “blockbuster” that offers the strongest evidence yet of how four-day work weeks play out in different types of organisations and countries.

“These four-day week studies have been taking off since the pandemic, where people had much more imagination about how things could be different,” he said.

“This is an absolutely key paper that’s… going to be a game-changer”.