New Study Bolsters Public Health Case for a Four-Day Work Week

For many of us, Monday is the start of yet another dreary and long work routine. But new trial research out today might highlight a healthier approach to performing our jobs: a permanent four-day workweek.

Scientists at Boston College led the study, published Monday in Nature Human Behavior. For six months, the researchers tracked the outcomes of nearly 3,000 workers at 141 businesses after they switched to a four-day workweek with no pay reduction; they also compared them to similar workers at jobs that stuck to a typical schedule. Ultimately, they found that four-day workers reported greater job satisfaction and experienced less burnout than they did before the switch, as well as when compared to people working a five-day week. These improvements were especially apparent in people who reduced their work time by eight or more hours.

Gizmodo reached out to study authors Wen Fan and Juliet Schor to discuss the findings in depth, along with the implications they may hold for the future of work. Fan is an associate professor of sociology at Boston College, while Schor is an economist and sociologist at Boston College. The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

Ed Cara, Gizmodo: The concept of a four-day workweek has gotten a lot of attention lately, from both workers and scientists. What made your team interested in studying this topic?

Schor: We have long histories studying worktime and worker well-being.

I wrote a book called The Overworked American many years ago but didn’t get the opportunity to study worktime reductions (without pay cuts). Wen has a long history of studying many dimensions of workers’ health and well-being, including stress, mental health, etc. She has also studied the impact of disruptive events on health and labor market outcomes. The pandemic was one of those and has been key to creating momentum for the four-day workweek.

Fen: I just wanted to add that Juliet was incredibly generous in inviting me to collaborate on this project. Her earlier research on work hours has consistently inspired countless scholars in the field. I think the paper nicely reflects both of our research interests. It has truly been a collaborative effort between the two of us and Orla Kelly, as well as our wonderful research assistant, Guolin Gu, who has run more analyses than we can count!

Gizmodo: What were the major takeaways from this latest study?

Fen: There are two main findings in this study. First, we find that the four-day workweek improves workers’ well-being. This conclusion comes from comparing changes in four well-being indicators between trial companies and control companies. The control companies were those that initially expressed interest in participating but ultimately did not, for various reasons. We found that employees in the trial companies experienced significant reductions in burnout, along with notable improvements in job satisfaction, mental health, and physical health. In contrast, none of these changes were observed among workers in the control companies.

The second major finding is about what explains these improvements. We examined various work experiences and health behaviors. We found that three factors played particularly significant roles: work ability (a proxy for workers’ self-assessed productivity), sleep problems, and fatigue. In other words, after moving to a four-day workweek, workers saw themselves as more capable, and they experienced fewer sleep problems and lower levels of fatigue, all of which contributed to improved well-being.

Gizmodo: What are some of the possible implications of this work? Should more companies offer this option to their employees, for instance? Are there still important questions left to resolve about its benefits and risks, including how widely scalable it can be?

Schor: There are many implications of this work—some for workers, others for the organizations and society.

This is a rare kind of intervention that can make employees much better off without undermining the viability of the organizations they work for. Our research shows that both the companies and the employees benefit. (This paper is just about the employees, but we also have work showing success for employers.) So yes, we believe many more companies can offer this benefit, and they will do well with it. Their employees will be happier, more loyal, more productive, and less likely to quit. At the same time, the intervention itself is a “forcing function” that induces improvements for the companies.

There are important questions to resolve. One is how it will work at very large companies. We have organizations of up to 5,000 people that are adopting it, but we don’t have a very big company in our research. We think it is scalable in that direction, however. We also would like more robust productivity and performance data from the companies. We have some metrics, but they are not complete.

We don’t think every company can do this right now, but many can. The more challenging ones will be places that have optimized their processes already without resulting in burned-out workers. And we think that some manufacturing companies that are highly exposed to international competition may find it challenging.

However, the large majority of workers in our economy are in services/white collar, etc., which are the kinds of companies in our sample. We also think there is great scope for this in healthcare, where burnout is a serious problem.

Gizmodo: Do you plan to follow up on the findings? If so, how? And what are some interesting directions that you might want other researchers to explore?

Fen: Yes, we have already conducted a follow-up. While the main results in the paper are based on data collected at the six-month mark, we also continued tracking participants six months after the trial ended. We found that all major effects persisted, with well-being indicators remaining significantly higher than their baseline levels. This suggests that the benefits are not just the result of initial enthusiasm or a novelty effect but rather reflect genuine and sustainable change.

There are many promising directions for future research. These include testing additional mechanisms that might underlie the well-being benefits, such as workers’ perceptions of changes in organizational culture, and exploring how these interventions reshape daily work life. We also encourage researchers to take advantage of similar opportunities to conduct in-depth ethnographic research, which would allow for direct observation of organizational change as it unfolds. This line of work could inform new theories and policy interventions aimed at reimagining the structure of work, with the ultimate goal of enhancing workers’ well-being while maintaining organizational performance.