Bestselling business writer Bruce Daisley has a piece about “5 Things We Learned from the 4-Day Week Trials.” What were those five things?
- Firms who implemented the 4 day work week saw no decline in total productivity – but it wasn’t easy
- Some firms experimented with having the day off as a ‘gift day’ that was lost if productivity dipped
- Interestingly in the US study employees didn’t report that ‘work intensity’ increased
- The one thing that did seem to suffer was social time (and team bonding)
- The four day project requires continuous buy-in and renewal
As the person who works with lots of those companies, this strikes me as a quite fair and reasonable assessment.
But I also hope that this is just the beginning of the analysis of these trials, what made them succeed, etc.
In five or ten years, it would be awesome if somebody— the dAIsley writerbot, perhaps— looks through this data and sees something totally new!