Four days’ work for five days’ pay: what the experts say

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Four days’ work for five days’ pay — what the experts say’

Banks Benitez
Maybe you’ve read this book. It’s a British author named Oliver Burkeman. It’s called Four Thousand Weeks. It’s a meditation on time and our relationship to time. What’s interesting about the book, in the ways that it’s compatible with a four-day work week is it says we have 4,000 weeks in our life on average, and that’s a finite number of weeks. And once we begin to let go and shed this idea that we can do infinite things, that we can achieve it all, that we can do it all, that every hour must be filled with significance because we are going to live a perfectly remarkable life and we’re gonna do everything. It’s important to recognise that there is a finitude to our time that actually is what makes time special. So it means that when you go on vacation, it’s really special because you don’t get to go on vacation all the time. And I think this is a fundamental flaw at the heart of so many organisations is they say we can do it all, everything. We don’t have to prioritise. Even the vocabulary we have around time is use time, spend time, invest time. Very much this idea of time as a resource to be used up.

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Isabel Berwick
This week on Working It with me, Isabel Berwick, we’re doing something different. For the past six months Emma Jacobs, FT feature writer and columnist and friend of Working It, has been following four companies as they take on a radical experiment, a four-day working week. So in this special four-part mini-series, which we are of course running daily over the course of a four-day week, you’ll hear from Emma as she talks to business owners and employees at the companies taking part in the trial. In the first two episodes, we heard from business leaders and their employees. Who we’re hearing from today, Emma?

Emma Jacobs
So today we’re hearing from experts, people that have done this before, professors studying four-day week and the creators of the four-day week global organisation. First you’ll hear from Banks Benitez. He’s the CEO of Uncharted, which is hired by large corporations such as Facebook and Chipotle to support entrepreneurs. And he started his own pilot project in April 2020 after seeing team burnout at the start of the pandemic. And this is his main finding.

Banks Benitez
I think the real ability to switch to a four-day work week comes in prioritising and deprioritising. It comes in getting better at directing the focus, the attention, the energy of the organisation towards the fewer priorities that really matter. And so my focus as a leader in the organisation was, yes, people can optimise their work weeks and making it more productive and they might be able to sort of cook the data in that respect. But if we as an organisation adopt different principles around how we prioritise and deprioritise, around the standards of things that we say yes to, are being super selective and also interrogating disproportionality in our work. I think one of the ways to not cook the data is simply to make organisational structural changes to the business, as opposed to just relying on individuals to get faster or more productive.

Emma Jacobs
So this is how Banks worked out what needed prioritising.

Banks Benitez
Four-day work week is a fitness, and I really had to revisit my relationship to completeness, and to incompleteness and to say, “OK, when I close my computer at the end of Thursday, starting the weekend because our day off was on Friday, there were many things that I did not get done that week”. And if I look at my emails, my inbox hygiene was not very good. There were still a lot of emails that were left unanswered. But being able to close my computer and say, “OK, I didn’t get all done, but I got the most important work done.” And in fact, the work that still remains, the emails that I did not respond to were actually not as essential. Not as important. But I think in some ways we have this dopamine hit of getting all this busy work off of our plate that actually doesn’t move the organisation forward. And so over the last two years, I’ve been trying to sort of rewire my mind, rewire my brain into saying, “OK, I can declare a week of success when I really have accomplished and completed the most important work.”

Emma Jacobs
It turns out the four-day work week can be especially hard for perfectionists.

Banks Benitez
They had a hard time with a four-day work week, and it was not because their boss was making them work extra hours. In some ways, their boss was coaching them to say, “What are the things that you must get A’s in and what are the things you can get B’s and C’s in?” And what I’ve learned has been that when you just try to do it all, your muscle of prioritising gets quite weak. And I think for perfectionists that’s also true. They just say, “We’re gonna do it all.” And then their ability to discern between important and unimportant suffers as well. The four-day work week is not a panacea. It’s not gonna solve all of your problems. Actually, the real essence of the four-day work week is around doing things differently. It’s not for everybody, but for leaders that want to do that, it’s important to remind their team and ground their team in the benefits of this long term and say, “Look, we’re not just gonna flip the switch, we’re gonna improve the ways we prioritise. And I’ll tell you what, that’s gonna be uncomfortable. But on the other side of that, there’s the opportunity to reclaim the work week.” Switching to a four-day work week is going to reveal the inefficiencies in your business. It’s gonna reveal the blind spots that you have as leaders. It’s gonna reveal these subterranean beliefs in your culture that you can do it all. That there are no trade-offs. And so in some ways, this is actually going to surface the things that are not working in your company.

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Isabel Berwick
I think that was a really honest assessment. I mean, he uses quite a lot of jargon words, but actually at the heart of it, there’s this idea that something I found very compelling in the Oliver Burkeman book that was mentioned at the top is that people come into your email inbox and you have no obligation actually to answer them. And I found that very liberating because you can’t answer every email that comes in.

Emma Jacobs
Except for mine. (Laughter)

Isabel Berwick
Oh, always yours, Emma. But what did you take away from that?

Emma Jacobs
So I spoke to Banks in the middle of the pandemic when he’d finished, I think, his trial. And I found him really thoughtful about the kind of way that you approach going into an experiment like this. And he’s very reflective on his own personal productivity and email inbox. That’s something that we compared. He was worried about zero inbox when I said I’d let go of that one long time ago . . .

Isabel Berwick
I’ve got 400,000 unread emails . . .

Emma Jacobs
(Laughter) Tell you what, just like you I’ve got 300,000 unread emails. And I think that once you kind of get into that mentality, you don’t have to tick everything off by the end of the week. You get better at deciding what not to do in your four-day week.

Isabel Berwick
Exactly. So it’s a really brilliant tool for prioritising, actually.

Emma Jacobs
So, I mean, I think this process, even if you decide not to do a four-day week or even never think of doing it, it’s a really good way of looking at the workload and looking at work practices and what inefficiencies you’re going through every day. Like responding to every email.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah well, obviously, no inefficiency yet. What other experts did you speak to?

Emma Jacobs
So the other person that I spoke to was Brendan Burchell, who works at the University of Cambridge. He looks at work intensification and also the mental wellbeing that you get from work. He’s on the trial because he is gonna talk to employers about their participation in it.

Brendan Burchell
So my team from Cambridge, we’re looking at the employers, their experience of it. What the employers tell us, they’re very positive. People are talking about all the great benefits that they’ve had from it.

Emma Jacobs
Not all the companies Professor Burchell is studying are strictly on a four-day week.

Brendan Burchell
Often when we talk about it, they’re saying that working on Friday is optional, there’s no meetings on Friday, but people use time on Fridays to catch up on their emails, or sometimes they’ve only gone to a four-and-a-half-day week, so perhaps only one or two after the 25 or so organisations that we spoke to genuinely had really a situation where everybody’s working just four days a week.

Emma Jacobs
So looking at the employees taking part in the trial, Professor Burchell noted some issues.

Brendan Burchell
Some minor teething problems but of a minor nature, trying to work out exactly what they mean when their holiday entitlements are changing, those sorts of things. Like, for instance, in some organisations they mentioned that some employees weren’t well suited to the four-day week and they had to let go of some people. And this was something that was brushed over, but it seemed like they were expecting people to work more autonomously and to work harder during the time that they had, to cut out a lot of the, maybe, talking with colleagues or other things that people might have done in a more leisurely working day. So at times we may be getting a rose-tinted spectacle view of the changes that we’ve picked up in organisations.

Emma Jacobs
May be more than just teething problems then.

Brendan Burchell
Some of the early results from New Zealand, where lots of the enthusiasm for this movement started, all suggesting that there are negatives. We know that one of the things that’s particularly bad for people’s mental health in organisations is constant time pressure, always having to work to tight deadlines, working at high speed, often a feeling of sense you don’t have enough time to do things as well as you’d want to do them, and that can be increased if that’s how work is compressed. And so the shorter working week for some people, given the choice of a more leisurely five-day working week, all this pressure over four days where they can’t do those other activities as they come up, it will be a high price to pay.

Emma Jacobs
Another concern is what people are doing with their extra day.

Brendan Burchell
Speaking to some employers, they are concerned that when they reduce their employees’ hours, then they’ll think of doing other jobs the other three days. We know that particularly in the NHS, it’s been reported to me that some nurses will use those three days a week if they’re working shifts to work as maybe agency nurses in another hospital. And so instead of — as the employer is hoping that by reducing hours, people arrive on Monday morning, well-relaxed and ready to work — they haven’t got those benefits. There may be for some people more pressure to pick up a second job, something which we don’t see much of in the UK compared to many other European countries.

Emma Jacobs
I also spoke to him about the results of previous trials.

Brendan Burchell
In France we saw the pressure coming from government. The government trying to impose a 35-hour week in the 19th century. It was the great victory of the trade union movement to reduce down to something like an eight-hour day and a 40-hour week. And in Germany, for instance, in the big factories, we saw that pressure coming from trade unions again to reduce the working week for the Volkswagen workers and so on. In the 1990s, it is the trade unionist, you’re doing it because you think that’s your rights, and I think that’s probably makes it quite different from other working time reductions. So that there’s an expectation not only that people work harder, but there’s also an expectation of gratitude from the employees. It may be something that wears off after a while. It may be that people are recruited into organisations where they’re very clearly applying to those organisations because they’ve got a four-day week. They’re not gonna feel that same gratitude.

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Isabel Berwick
I’m really fascinated by this idea about gratitude because that’s something we’ve talked about before on the podcast, that employers expect staff to be grateful for given a fifth day off. But I think the point he makes there about new employees not feeling grateful — this could be a real culture shift.

Emma Jacobs
Well, I think as the trial ends and this becomes embedded, if companies agree to go forward with it, then that will shift. We had it recently when we had the free canteen meals. Suddenly, on Day 1, I thought it was brilliant. Day 2, I was expecting it. (Laughter) And so you kind of very quickly adapt to it. And also you don’t want a relationship with your employer where you’re daily grateful for the perks that they’re giving you. You do a job. They give you the money. And that’s the relationship.

Isabel Berwick
To be clear, I would be grateful if the FT introduces free lunches. (Laughter)

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Isabel Berwick
But widening this out a bit more globally, what’s the position in the States? Because there’s no culture of any sort of shorter or limited work week there and very little holiday.

Emma Jacobs
I think there is, although there’s not a kind of curbing of working hours, there has been a shift to people compressing their hours over four days or working part time. And so to find out how this is taking off in the US, I spoke to some experts.

Joe O’Connor
When I moved here from Ireland in September, a lot of friends and colleagues were observing how I was effectively moving to the capital of overwork to try and persuade them to work four days a week. And were quite amused by that idea.

Emma Jacobs
This is Joe O’Connor. He’s the global pilot programme manager for the 4 Day Week Global.

Joe O’Connor
My experience has been that there is significant interest here, even though there’s no question that in large parts of the US economy, this idea of working long hours, being the first into the office in the morning and the last to leave at night, is this kind of badge of honour. From our point of view, it’s actually in those countries that maybe have a greater distance to travel, where the momentum is greater because this feels like something that’s more revolutionary. This feels like something that’s a really radical departure that will make a really significant difference to people’s lives.

Isabel Berwick
That’s fascinating. And are there any academics in the States who are looking at this too?

Emma Jacobs
So I also spoke to Lindsey Cameron, assistant professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Lindsey Cameron
There’s always this close relationship between the US and the UK where one is seeing like, “Oh, what’s happening over here? Can it work here? Vice versa?” And we actually saw it in California. There was conversations in the state legislature about whether or not all companies that had more than 500 employees would actually institute a four-day, 32-hour work week. It didn’t end up passing, but there are conversations about it.

Emma Jacobs
She believes that the idea of shortening the working week might be less of a priority in the US.

Lindsey Cameron
Particularly compared to our European counterparts, Americans really like to work. (Laughter) So imagining that we are going to agree to do a 32-hour work week and get as much chance as in a 40-hour work week, and that’s going to be able to happen consistently. Anyone can do a pilot. You have this intense scrutiny. People will focus and get the work done. I think the question is, is that really a long term viable solution? You could see one group of people saying, “Well, this is a perfect time to do the four-day a week work experiment because you’ve already done the remote work experiment and it’s gone reasonably well”. But I believe we’re not as easily gonna transition to a four-day work week as opposed to when we were, were forced to change to be more remote.

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Isabel Berwick
Well . . . I do think Europeans like to work as well, it’s not just Americans.

Emma Jacobs
I mean, I guess that lots of jobs like banking or law, there’s sort of similar cultures that US might have more of an aggressive, competitive reputation. But the UK, in the City, is also hard working. Billable hour doesn’t exactly make people likely to work fewer hours. I mean, that’s not changing anytime soon. So I guess in those cultures, the kind of long hours cultures, it’s hard to see where the impetus for a short working week will be. I mean, I guess the other problem with the US is that there are greater issues to fight. Maybe much more on, say, parental leave. There’s still a lot of workplace issues that need tackling.

Isabel Berwick
In those big globalised corporate cultures, I can see how the bureaucracy might allow a four-day week to happen. But do you think there’s a danger that this could become a sort of privilege thing for the elite classes?

Emma Jacobs
Oh, definitely. And we can see in the experiment it’s mainly office workers. So actually the fish-and-chip shop is quite an outlier. When we speak to them later, we’ll find that they feel a bit of an anomaly. On this issue, I spoke to Jana Javornik. She’s the associate professor of employment at the University of Leeds.

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So do you think there’s a danger that we’ll have a kind of professional class? Because it does seem to be white-collar workers that are mainly doing this experiment, supported by a five-day-a-week support class.

Jana Javornik
Not necessarily. I think employers who are smart and approaching that are actually taking this as a really good example to collectively rethink the way the work is organised.

Emma Jacobs
So what Jana has discovered is there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to working hours.

Jana Javornik
I think there’s a variety and diversity of ways people work and obviously over time we have seen that professional occupations, particularly those that are service-oriented like financial services, banking and things like that, could experiment slightly more. But if we look ... a very concrete example of trash being collected, they can have a relatively flexible way of working. It’s just that they start in the middle of the night. So when we are thinking about condensing work or thinking about reducing the amount of work that needs to be done, we have to keep that in mind, which is why I think it won’t be one recipe, one approach fits all. It’ll have to be a myriad of conversations within the main conversation, which needs to be: how do we start working better and smarter and not harder and longer?

Emma Jacobs
If the four-day week starts to become the norm, there’s a few things we need to consider. Firstly, the gender gap.

Jana Javornik
So one of the biggest question for me in terms of a four-day week is: are we talking changed kindergarten and childcare and nursery services? Are we talking about changes in school hours? And we need to be thinking about those as well because these are all support services and they are predominantly feminised. So it is women who are predominantly employed in those services. So if we are introducing a new pattern of work, then we have to rethink the entire support system. The entire infrastructure needs to follow the suit. Else, we won’t be destigmatising, we will only be reinforcing the existing gender gap.

Emma Jacobs
In that respect, Jana’s not so optimistic.

Jana Javornik
It does sound amazing. It surely does. I’m just not sure if this is the one ultimate solution that will fix all the problems.

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Emma Jacobs
So like Jana, Joe O’Connor from the 4 Day Week Global Organisation also believes that shortening the working week may not be a priority for all industries at the moment.

Joe O’Connor
When you’re talking about hourly wage workers, workers in the kind of employment where, you know, working additional hours or working a second job becomes necessary to put bread on the table. We’re not saying that the four-day work week or reduced work time is the number one priority issue in those industries right now. And actually, if we want to enable this to be something that can be delivered right across the economy, then we do need to address the fact that if you look at sectors like hospitality and retail, average salaries are just so low. That is the number one issue that needs to be addressed for workers in those parts of the economy before people would be even able to engage with the idea of a shorter work week. Could things like inflation, cost of living, a potential recession, could it slow it down? I think it could. I think it could certainly lead to some companies who otherwise would have taken the leap to maybe say, “OK, we’re gonna hold off for six months or 12 months before we do this”.

Emma Jacobs
He hopes that this is just a pause rather than a full stop.

Joe O’Connor
But I think it will only have the effect to slow it down. I do believe that we are in the early stages of a transition that’s not dissimilar to the shift to the five-day work week. The genie is out of the bottle to some extent after what we’ve collectively experienced in the pandemic. It takes a great disrupter to dislodge deeply embedded societal and cultural norms, like is the case with the eight-hour day, the five-day week and the weekends. Our view is that we already had the productive capacity and the technological tools to work shorter hours before the pandemic, in the same way that we could have embraced remote working before the pandemic. You know, Covid didn’t make that possible. It made it permissible. If you look at how the five-day work week came about, it didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t start with legislation. It was a 20- to 30-year cycle where it happened at different times in different countries, different times in different industries. And it was only when it was popularised that it was legislated for to fill in the gaps. That’s where we believe we’re at with the four-day work week.

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Isabel Berwick
So Joe’s presenting the four-day work there as something organic almost that has come from the work force up. You know, it wasn’t legislated for. These are things that we could have done a long time ago. Is it that the pandemic has opened our eyes to all of these different ways of working?

Emma Jacobs
The pandemic has been a massive impetus into this trial, and I think that if we hadn’t had the last two years where we’ve shown that we can work in different ways and that employers can trust some of their employees and are much clearer about what productivity might look like rather than presenteeism, then I think that this wouldn’t have had the groundswell of excitement about it. However, I think it shows right that the climate has changed a lot since the trials started. So as we came out of lockdowns, there was a lot of excitement and optimism. And now the climate has changed so dramatically that we’re worried about heating our homes so that we can work at home or how to offset commuting with the heating bill. So these are very different times, and people’s priorities are more about money rather than time, I guess.

Isabel Berwick
What would you say were your key takeaways from talking to these experts?

Emma Jacobs
I think it’s a really good exercise in making people think about working practices. We get very inert in the way that we do our jobs and the pandemic really moved that. All these companies that never tolerated homeworking suddenly found that everybody could do things at home. So we can change the way that we work. We just need a bit of thought and planning. And so even if you weren’t going to move to the four-day week, I think some of these exercises in how we work and what productivity looks like are really useful.

Isabel Berwick
I found this episode really interesting because these experts are looking at a very macro view of the four-day week, whereas we’ve really drilled down into what it means in practice. And this idea of whether it would work in the United States, which has a very different kind of working culture from the UK and Europe, is a really interesting one. You know, what does it mean to be in a really work first kind of country and deliberately only work four days a week? And the other big takeaway for me is this idea about prioritising and inefficiency. Working fewer hours really shows up the problems we have in our corporate structures or the problems we have in managing our own workloads. So I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s episode where we’re gonna get the big reveal about whether any or all of these companies are going to go ahead with the four-day week permanently.

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Isabel Berwick
With thanks to the FT’s Emma Jacobs and to Banks Benitez, Brendan Burchell, Joe O’Connor, Lindsey Cameron and Jana Javornik for this episode. And Jana also appeared on our long Covid episode, so do listen back to that. If you’re enjoying the podcast, we’d really appreciate it if you left us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and do get in touch with us. We want to hear from you, and we’re at workingit@ft.com, or I’m @IsabelBerwick and I’m still on Twitter. If you’re an FT subscriber, please sign up for our Working It newsletter. We’ve got behind-the-scenes extras from the podcast and exclusive stories you won’t see anywhere else. Sign up at ft.com/newsletters. Working It is produced by Novel for the Financial Times. With thanks to the producers Anna Sinfield and Flo de Schlichting. Executive producer Jo Wheeler, production assistance from Amalie Sortland and mix from Chris O’Shaughnessy. From the FT we have editorial direction from Manuela Saragosa. Thanks for listening.

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