The 4-Day Workweek Could Be Here Sooner Than You Think

• The four-day work week has grown rapidly in recent years.
• The number of companies experimenting with variations of the flexible work week is increasing.
• Researchers predict that shorter weeks could be normalized within the next five to 10 years.

The coveted four-day workweek is back in the news this month after Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced new legislation. and held a congressional hearing calling for a 32-hour national work week.

The concept has gained momentum in recent years, spurred by a post-pandemic society grappling with its toxic relationship with work. Calls for a shorter work week are by no means new – former US President Richard Nixon was one at one point – but past attempts to implement it have failed.

This time, however, the situation could be different. Researchers who study and advocate for the four-day workweek say the world is poised to see flextime become normalized over the next five to 10 years.

Much of the knee-jerk resistance from CEOs and work enthusiasts has softened in recent years from outright objection to cautious curiosity about how a shorter workweek might work in the practical.

“We’re haggling over logistics over philosophy,” Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, the author of “Work Less Do More: Designing the Four Day Week,” told Business Insider. “When you get to this point you haven’t completely won, but you are now on a field where the four-day week can be taken seriously.”

A Brief History of the Four-Day Work Week

Promoting a four-day workweek first materialized in the 1960s and early 1970s, said Pang, director of research at 4-day Week Global, a nonprofit organization. lucrative that helps facilitate large-scale trials of shorter work weeks around the world.

Most early experiments were done in the manufacturing industry to reduce costs by reducing factory operating hours. But those efforts were ultimately undone by the oil crisis and subsequent economic downturn, as well as growing resistance from unions concerned about longer workdays, according to Pang.

The push for shorter work weeks remained largely dormant until around 2016 and 2017, when the movement began to gain momentum again, spurred by younger generations of workers.

“There are millennials who are hitting their 30s at this point, and they don’t want to do this like their parents did,” Pang said. “They feel like there’s an opportunity to fix what’s broken.”

The buzz around a shorter work week turned into a boom with the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift to remote work has forced people to start thinking about a professional future that might be different from the past, Pang said.

This changing worldview is what inspired Phil McParlane, a Scottish developer, to launch 4dayweek.io, a job site exclusively for flexible-hour positions, in 2020, he told BI. The site advertises vacancies with shorter hours around the world and highlights many study-proven benefits of a shorter work week, including increased productivity, reduced costs, increased employee retention and a reduction in the gender pay gap.

“When remote work became normal, people started questioning everything about the 9-to-5 schedule,” McParlane said.

The four-day work week has, in many ways, become shorthand for any shorter work week, encompassing a wide variety of flexible schedules.

The four-day week is already underway

The number of companies experimenting with variations of the flexible work week has increased in recent years, Pang said. Some employers eliminate Fridays, others work five six-hour days and still others benefit from a four-and-a-half day week.

Pang has worked with more than 300 companies during his career at 4-day Week Global and interviewed about 100 more for his book, he said. Meanwhile, McParlane’s job site has exploded in popularity since he launched it in 2020. Three hundred companies currently have profiles on the site, which attracts up to 200,000 job seekers each month , he told BI.

Among the biggest companies that have tested shorter work weeks are Kickstarter, Panasonic and Awin.

Flexible work weeks increasingly signal to potential employees that a company is a desirable place to work, McParlane said.

Attracting top-tier employees is just one reason Dimitri Cavathas, CEO of Lower Shore Clinic, began considering a four-day work week for his company. Maryland’s health care organization serves approximately 2,000 people in the state’s rural counties, providing services ranging from primary care to outpatient mental health services.

Cavathas, whose family is originally from Greece, said he was inspired by the European approach to work and had been dreaming of a shorter week for years when he decided to start researching what this might look like for his business.

“The rule here is if I want something, everyone gets it,” Cavathas said. “And since I wanted a four-day work week, we all got it.”

He first presented the idea to his 170 employees about two years ago and was surprised to find that many of them initially reacted with doubt and cynicism. People were concerned about not having enough time to do their jobs and going from eight to nine hours a day, Cavathas said.

Backlash is to be expected, especially in America’s work-oriented culture, according to Pang. But there has recently been a demand for a better work-life balance.

Cavathas employees welcomed the idea after having time to ask questions and learn more about the implementation, he said. The clinic launched its new program in January of this year and Cavathas said the results have been overwhelmingly positive.

The company met its first-quarter budget and only one department experienced a decline in revenue, which Cavathas said he anticipated. But more importantly, staff engagement is up and people are happy to have more freedom in their personal lives, he said.

“Some people feel like it’s a vacation almost every weekend,” Cavathas said.

The Maryland clinic operates with two cohorts of staff: one group works four nine-hour days Monday through Thursday, while a second cohort works three ten-hour days Friday through Sunday. Everyone earns a full salary, regardless of their schedule.

Cavathas said he hopes other business leaders will follow his lead. And Pang thinks it would be wise to do so.

“It’s about having a visionary CEO who wants his legacy not to be a slightly better stock price for the fourth quarter of 2025, but to actually solve some of the lingering structural challenges around inequality, gender disparity and career advancement issues that have plagued businesses for decades,” Pang said.

The future of the four-day workweek is bright

The United Auto Workers union — the nation’s largest union — pushed for a shorter week during recent negotiations. The union acknowledged the request was lengthy, but it is not giving up and hopes to raise the issue again in the future.

Meanwhile, the arguments for why a four-day week doesn’t The work is weakening considerably as more and more studies come back to sing its praises. The legislators in several states have introduced legislation providing for testing or research programs over a four-day workweek, including California, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Hawaii, although none have yet been enacted.

Cavathas said he recently spoke with Maryland lawmakers as part of his work with Work Four, a U.S.-based nonprofit that advocates for a shorter week.

Over the next five years, Pang predicts that at least one Fortune 500 company in every industry will experiment with a shorter workweek. By 2029, several states will also likely be testing flexible work weeks, he said.

“This is definitely going to become the norm,” McParlane said. “I’m absolutely sure we’ll see it in the current generation.”

People who work four days a week ultimately gain back a year of their life over a five-year period, Pang said. His ultimate goal is to win back a million years of free time.

“Whether it’s one company with a million employees or 100,000 companies with 10 employees, if I can get a million years of free time, I will consider that a huge victory,” he said. he declared.