A 4-Day Work Week is the Future of Work

The 4-day work week is about working smarter and changing how we behave in a new economy of automation, remote work and work-life balance. Productivity means more time with family, less commuting and focusing on what really matters in life.

What this is about is personalizing work to the employee and our situation in our career. While there’s some debate about China’s 996, more progressive countries in Scandinavia and New Zealand are strongly considering working less, that increases productivity and improves engagement in staff.

Working less would have a range of benefits for workers and employers and the world should embrace the four-day working week. In a world where we are consuming more, have more limited attention spans, struggle with burn-out and life-work balance and taking care of both parents and children in a sandwich generation, the 4-day work week is likely somewhat inevitable.

Let’s face it, the future of work is colliding with machine learning, AI, robotics and a human-AI hybrid data economy. Here the rationale is that people will be able to do what they are good at: socialize, be creative, take care of each other, help regulate the planet for social good. Reduce wealth inequality, improve well being and mental health, foster technological progress with more heart.

Benefits of the 4-day Work Week on Organizations

Economics and analysts have a verdict on the 4-day work week. Here’s their consensus in a nutshell:

While certain aspects of working from home or freelancing could be seen as a neo-liberal trap, the 4-day work week is more humane on so many levels. What if Monday became the new Sunday? The world would not stop, we’d just waste less time at work to keep our real jobs.

Work-life balance has always been a struggle and while some companies and industries would resist such a trend, it’s inevitable that in the end we put people first.

Let’s face it, we’re already half way there. For instance, certain industries don’t require as many working hours anymore, and the global trend-–especially in Europe–-leans toward a four-day workweek already as it is. This contrasts with some Asian countries where they work themselves to death in the name of upholding the collective or doing one’s duty.

Research from job search site FlexJobs suggests that a wide range of industries, from finance to recruitment, are opening up to the idea of a shorter workweek.

Based on an analysis of more than 50,000 U.S. companies’ job postings, FlexJobs found that over the past years the following 10 industries were the most likely to hire for flexible positions, including those with four-day weeks:

That’s a pretty broad base of industries strongly considering pilots in a 4-Day Workweek program. As technological automation impacts the workforce more over the next few decades, employers personalizing work arrangements to employees will become the norm. I think many will end up choosing a 4-Day work week including a day of working from home.

In 1930, during the Great Depression, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that we’d all have a 15-hour workweek “within 100 years.”

Fans of the four-day week have been espousing its benefits from a productivity and cost-cutting perspective since the 1970s. Indeed, in 1974, when the British government introduced a three-day workweek following an energy shortage, a national survey reported a 5 percent increase in productivity levels. Everything that’s good returns again.

For decades, all the major economists, philosophers, sociologists, they all believed, up until the 1970s, that we would be working less and less.

In the 1920s and 1930s, there were actually major capitalist entrepreneurs who discovered that if you shorten the working week, employees become more productive. Instead of following China’s ‘996' model it’s likely the developed world will actually trend the other way as more liberal and democratic socialist values mean more work-life balance.

From New Zealand to Colorado to Sweden, the 4-day work week is likely having a renaissance of late and over the decades ahead this will only increase. As a futurist, I feel it’s somewhat inevitable.

As an attractive fantasy to beleaguered workers throughout the century, the idea of basic incomes and services and working smarter is not an illusion, it’s how AI also impacts humanity.

Savvy employers are catching on to the fact that employees are increasingly demanding better work-life balance and the opportunity to get work done at non-traditional places and times so a new culture of work is coming more clearly into focus in 2021.