Four-day work week boosts employee satisfaction, new study finds
A four-day work week makes employees happier and healthier without hurting productivity. That is the finding of the largest study so far, which surveyed nearly 3,000 people at 141 companies in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, Ireland and the UK, Kazinform News Agency correspondent reports, citing Nature.
The six-month trial found that moving to a shorter work week without cutting pay reduced burnout, boosted job satisfaction and improved both mental and physical health.
Researchers initially feared that compressing the work schedule might create extra stress, as employees could be forced to work faster to maintain the same output. But that did not happen. On the contrary, lead author Wen Fan from Boston College said workers actually experienced lower stress levels.
“When people are more well rested, they make fewer mistakes and work more intensely,” says Pedro Gomes, an economist at Birkbeck University of London.
Before the trial began, companies were given about two months to restructure their workflows. They were asked to cut down on unproductive meetings and tasks to maintain at least 80 percent of their previous output during the four-day week. Two weeks before the start, employees completed a survey assessing their well-being, job satisfaction and mental health, and took the same survey again six months later.
The results showed that people felt more satisfied with their jobs and mental health than they did before the change. Moreover, data collected a year after the trial began confirmed that these positive effects persisted.
However, researchers cautioned that since participation was voluntary and all outcomes were self-reported, the benefits of the four-day week might be overstated, as employees could have hoped to keep their extra day off. The authors called for randomized trials to test the approach on a wider scale.
Despite this, more than 90 percent of the companies chose to continue with the four-day work week after the experiment ended.
Where four-day weeks are already being tried
In Iceland, a large-scale trial from 2015 to 2019 covered 2,500 workers. About 86 percent of employees now work fewer hours for the same pay, with studies showing sustained productivity and lower stress.
Belgium introduced a law in November 2022 allowing employees to choose a four-day week without loss of pay, although total working hours remain the same.
In the UAE, Dubai has launched a “Flexible Summer” initiative from July to September 2025. Public sector employees can choose to work four eight-hour days or four seven-hour days with a half day on Friday to improve work-life balance.
Earlier, Kazinform News Agency reported that two hundred companies in the UK, with over 5 employees, had introduced a four-day working week with no pay cuts.
