All companies involved in a four-day week trial in Ireland, part of a global project, have said they will continue with the arrangement.
The research project, backed by the trade union Fórsa and carried out in partnership by Four-Day Week Ireland, University College Dublin and Boston College, saw a six-month long four-day working week being trialled across 12 businesses.
Nine of the 12 companies that took part said they were committed to continuing with the four-day-week schedule, with the other three saying they would continue but undecided about keeping it in the long-term.
The businesses gave the trial a 9.2 rating on a scale of 1-10 from very negative to very positive.
Seven companies provided data on revenue and of those, six reported monthly revenue growth, with one seeing a decline. Two companies that tracked energy usage found reductions.
All the businesses said that productivity figures and overall experience were positive.
From the employees’ perspective, figures suggest that stress, burnout, fatigue and work-family conflict declined, and average sleep times increased. There were also improvements in environmental metrics with reduced waste being recorded. 100% of the employees involved in the trial said they would prefer a reduced work schedule.
Presenting the findings of what was Ireland’s first coordinated reduced work-time trial, University College Dublin’s Dr Orla Kelly, said: “Our findings hold important lessons for the future of work in this country.”
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“The trial was particularly successful for women who reported a significantly greater improvement in life satisfaction, larger gains in sleep time and feeling more secure in their employment,” she added.
She identified declines in stress as the most significant gain, with people using their free day to sort out household affairs and life admin, leaving the weekend more free for leisure.
General secretary of Fórsa, Kevin Callinan, said the trial had shown that a four-day week could provide “transformative social benefits without losing pay or productivity”.
One of the companies that took part in the trial, energy agency Codema, said its involvement in the trial had resulted in a more efficient, motivated and dedicated team.
Edel Giltenane, HR and operations manager at Codema said: “We believe this new way of working gives us the competitive edge when attracting new talent and retaining our valuable staff so that we can continue delivering the same high-quality service to our clients.”
Rent a Recruiter, said it had embarked on the four-day week experiment to help with the recruitment and retention of staff.
“As an SME, it was difficult for us to match the salaries paid to recruiters by large multinationals such as big tech, so we were looking for a non-monetary, transformative benefit to provide a solution,” said co-founder Barry Prost.
For Juliet Schor, an economist at Boston College and researcher on the trial, the current work schedule is outmoded. She said: “The two-day weekend is not working for people. In many countries, we have a workweek that was enshrined in 1938, and it doesn’t mesh with contemporary life. For the wellbeing of people who have jobs, it’s critical that we address the structure of the work week.”
The trial in Ireland is one of several being run concurrently in the UK, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand. But although many participants have expressed satisfaction with the trial’s results so far, many sceptics maintain a four-day week is irrelevant to the needs of businesses and employees.
Criticism
David Lewis, chief executive officer of the HR consulting firm OperationsInc, questioned whether employers that offered four-day schedules really wanted their employees offline. “If companies are really committed to this, they would demonstrate it by turning off network access on the days that [employees are] not scheduled to work, and asking people to leave their laptops in the office. But I just don’t see companies doing that.”
Founder of Europe-wide tech talent hub hackajob, Mark Chaffey, said a four-day week would lead to greater inequality, because it “is a luxury only possible for those who can compress their work in such a tidy fashion consistently, week in, week out. For example, anyone who cares for somebody – whether that’s a child or an elderly relative – doesn’t have the option to work longer days. Even among the most amicable of work teams, seeing colleagues having a three-day weekend while you’re still working, or holding the fort with a reduced team when they have the extra day off, could understandably become incredibly grating.”
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He conceded however, that “the desire to give workers a better work life balance is something we can all get behind – as well as the desire to improve the UK’s long standing productivity slump. The problem comes when trying to apply a ‘one size fits all’ approach, when everyone’s individual lives couldn’t be more different.”
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