There has been a lot of buzz in recent years about reimagining the work day and work week, but not everyone agrees on how it should change. As my colleague Kathleen Davis noted in a recent article, simply offering a 4-day workweek “fails to solve some of the most fundamental problems with many people’s working hours. What about parents with work schedules that are misaligned with their kids’ school day? Or sleep-deprived medical staff who work more than 12-hour shifts, or service workers dealing with unpredictable schedules?”
History of the 40-hour week
“Working 9 to 5” isn’t just a hit tune warbled from the throat of Dolly Parton, the companion film poked fun at decades of 8-hour office days. You’d be forgiven if you thought that things were always this way. But the fact is, the genesis of the 40-hour workweek was the factory floor in the early days of the 20th century. That’s when Henry Ford, in 1926, offered his factory workers a couple days off to rest, ushering in the weekend. This was followed 14 years later by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which capped the workweek at 40 hours nationwide.
Moving toward a 32-hour week
Flash forward nearly a century and you’ll see that the 40-hour standard has begun to be disrupted. Experiments abound in countries such as New Zealand and Australia making the case for reducing the workweek by a day. The supporting data was all geared toward measuring *output* rather than hours spent in the workplace.
The nonprofit 4 Day Week Global was founded in 2019, as an advocate and guide to businesses that wanted to try shortened work schedules. It turned out to be prescient as the pandemic hit and many companies used the challenge of lockdown to rethink the way they worked. By 2023, 4 Day Week Global had partnered with 190 companies.
Other companies running trials included Amazon and Microsoft, Kickstarter, and Buffer. Additional research finds that of the 61 companies that switched to a four-day workweek as part of a major pilot study in the U..K last year, 90% chose to make the change permanent. Among them, children’s clothing company Primary started in April 2020 with two Fridays off and left the commitment open in case it didn’t work. Two years later they were sticking with it.