List of 200 UK companies that moved to 4-day working week
95 comments
·February 1, 2025MortyWaves
scarab92
The “studies” surrounding this topic are laughably bad.
The authors almost always have conflicts of interest. The studies are often funded and/or staffed by proponents of the 4 day work week.
The outcomes are mostly subjective and self reported, which is problematic because employees clearly have a vested interest in claiming they are more productive than they really might be.
They’re also short term, and dont address the doubt every executive has which is whether employees eventually mean revert back to their historical hourly productivity levels.
Then there is the fact that they don’t bother controlling for how much work the employees were previously doing. Many white collar workers are underworked. If you cut their hours it won’t impact output, because they were bottlenecking on work availability not time. What employers want to know is not what happens in over resourced offices, but rather what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised.
tsimionescu
These studies are entirely irrelevant. No one will ever convince any corporation or private owner that they can get more work out of people working less, even if it were true (which I personally highly doubt).
And that is also entirely irrelevant. The relevant question is whether our society can maintain similar levels of good fortune if we all worked less. And the historical evidence is clear: there are many times more workers today, using tools that are monumentally more advanced, than in the 1930s or even 1950s. And yet, we are all required to work just as much as we used to 100+ years ago, while being paid less in real terms.
repelsteeltje
This?
> The productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, but instead to "bullshit jobs": "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case".
lukan
"What employers want to know is not what happens in poorly managed offices, but what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised."
What I want to know is, whether we can manage a society, where one part is not always overworked and the other part bored to death. But rather a healthy balance. 4 days workweek might help as a step in that direction, but I agree that there is way too much wishful thinking involved in those studies proposing them.
typewithrhythm
International competition is the interesting thing for me, if we can prove a 4 day week in any form would be similarly efficient, that could give a great incentive to hiring the top talent and convincing them to migrate to the nation's that standardized it. If it turns out that it's less efficient in the long run, then it would cause the whole nation to fall behind, reducing total comp possible, and leading to the most capable leaving.
teamonkey
This is a job listing site, not a lobbying site or even an information site. It’s low-effort SEO capture for people googling “jobs with 4 day week UK”
(Not that I’m against a 4-day week. My company moved to compressed hours and it’s been fantastic.)
robjan
If it's the former, it's been common to have "compressed hours" as a flexitime option in many big UK companies for decades.
Yeul
36 hours is the standard in my country- it's called progress. A century ago it was probably 80 hours for everyone over 12 lol.
eastbound
In France in 1851, a new law limited child labour to 10 hours per day between 8 and 14 years old. Then max 12hrs until 16 (Then you are conscripted at 18).
IshKebab
36 hours is 5 days a week, unless you work ridiculously long days.
anotherhue
9 hours is considered ridiculously wrong?
IshKebab
Plus lunch, yes. No way I could do anything that involves thinking for that long. Menial tasks maybe.
Cumpiler69
In which country?
amelius
However, the free market dictates that you will be outcompeted by anyone who is willing to work 40+ hours. So much for progress.
jokethrowaway
That's not necessarily true.
Maybe people can't produce more than 4 days of work per week or 5 hours per day; in that case the productivity would be the same and people working more are essentially wasting time.
My empirical evidence say otherwise (sample_size=1) I can be quite productive up to ~70hrs doing knowledge work (I've been on it for 8 months, hours are tracked and connected to tasks, no idling is counted), but that's pushing it and it might not be sustainable for longer period of time. My will to live is certainly at historical lows.
Lawyers in big law can also do 60-80 hours (while ruining their life) so I think it's reasonable.
I've heard people in other professions (eg. nurses) pushing 90-100hrs but they are not actively thinking all their working time.
nemomarx
would you be twice as productive working 80 hours a week as you are at 40?
surely there's diminishing returns, and it doesn't seem obvious that 40 is the sweet spot.
amelius
You can barely even have a single income household anymore these days, thanks to the free market.
If progress exists, it's going in the wrong direction.
scarab92
Diminishing returns doesn’t invalidate their point.
Working more hours will always produce more output, even if the marginal increase in output decreases.
oneshtein
If 4-day workers are 25% more productive than 5-day workers, or 5-day workers are 20% less productive than 4-day workers, then no.
While it's hard to increase productivity by 25%, it's not a problem for workers to drop productivity by 20%. Owners can work as much as they want, of course.
malfist
Please provide a citation for that
isoprophlex
Lmao work 40+ for almost the same pay?! No thanks.
benjamoon
Do these companies close on a week day, like they just don’t open on a Monday. Or do the staff just do 4 out of the 5 days, but the company operates all week and the team need coordinating so they have coverage all week? I’d love to do this at my place, but would want to close the whole business and I don’t think our clients would be happy.
chgs
My company works 24/7. I don’t. Nobody does. Vast majority work “office hours”. Those working shifts tend to do 3 or 4x 12 hour days, those working flexible hours work when required. I might work on a Saturday morning to deliver a specific part of a project, or get a fault escalated at 11pm after the runbooks have run out, but then I will obviously be off for a day or two in the week in exchange.
barryvan
The company I work for, Wonde, allows staff to choose the day. There's negotiation with the manager to ensure appropriate coverage across the week, and a fair bit of flexibility around swapping days around as and when necessary too.
CapeTheory
Most of my consulting clients do barely any work on Fridays anyway and so wouldn't mind me reducing to 4 days at all.
IneffablePigeon
There’s a mix of both approaches. I suspect most are the latter at least for customer facing roles.
rsavage
I am co-founder of a 5 year old tech startup with 50 staff that introduced a 4dww / 32hr work week a little over 2 years ago.
Since are a lot of questions surrounding 4dww - Thought I might be able to offer some insights.
1. “four days but actually working longer” or “four days with reduced hours”.
-- We offer 32hrs work week, rather than the standard 40hrs in our home country. This is generally taken as 4 days, but some work 5 days with less ours (especially those with school aged children).
2. "What employers want to know is not what happens in poorly managed offices, but what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised."
-- I am going to be biased but we spent 3 year with standard work week, and I think we were highly productive as an organisation, our internal metrics, output and surveys agreed with this assessment. After 2 years, we haven't seen any noticeable / measurable decrease in output or performance compared to 5dww, or since we started.
3. "Do these companies close on a week day, like they just don’t open on a Monday." -- We generally allow people to choose any day off they want, put have them put it in ~4 weeks before hand. Most people take either Monday or Friday, which means we always have some staff covering the days others have off. In smaller teams that speak with customers (sales/cs) they agree among the team who takes what days, and can trade, as long as we always have coverage.
4. "4 days week sounds great, if you hate your job and you already earn less than you deserve." -- We pay top percentile as other startup/tech companies in our country's HQ. Anyone joining us shouldn't feel they are being paid any less than someone on 5dww -- and that is because we expect their output to match those of others working 5dww.
Overall we've found the move to be extremely successful at attracting and retaining talent with I believe helps us be significantly more productive than other startups I know doing 5dww.
We have a few things that I think help with our 4dww, include remote async with very flexible hours, hiring worldwide, transparent salaries and virtually no meetings in engineering.
One thing this flexibility allows us to do is ask our staff to be 'switched on' when they are working -- if for any reason they aren't being productive, we encourage them stop working, do something else, and come back later. We expect our staff aren't reading reddit, posting on hacker news, etc during work-time -- in return for the 32hrs we want to see it (almost) all productive.
I believe this, along with staff dropped the least important work gives us a similar/same output as 40hrs. With the benefit that we've been able to attract talent that otherwise may have gone elsewhere, with a turnover of virtually 0%.
Happy to answer any specifics about how we've implemented thing, or what I've seen as a co-founder leading a small (16 people) engineering team.
kranke155
Retaining those 2-10x engineers because they can’t even imagine leaving your company gives you far higher productivity gains than 1 extra work day a week.
scarab92
Professional salaries in NZ are less than half of those in the US.
I can see how this makes sense, if this perk is enough to stop your low cost labor from chasing greenbacks instead.
101008
Where can I apply? :)
mikhailfranco
Guessing https://www.runn.io/careers based on
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2024)
akdor1154
Which roles has it worked better for than others?
Do you track engineering hours worked?
rsavage
It's worked well with pretty role. However, for our Customer Success / Support team hours = hours out is more true than other roles. So for these roles its more about being able to attract people who are really good at their roles.
We don't track hours at all -- staff are expected to track their own hours and keep them to 32hrs. Occasionally something happens and people work longer hours in a week, however we then give them time off the following week.
crimsoneer
Just like remote work, this turns into a culture war issue every time (and the comments turn into a cesspit). I really wish people would stop arguing and let the market show us what's actually more effective.
IshKebab
The market is strongly influenced by the culture though. For example nothing now is actually different to before covid. The only thing that has changed is the culture - people like working from home and are less willing to give it up.
Working hours is simply a negotiation between employers (who obviously want more hours for the same price), and workers (who want the opposite). Again culture has a large influence on that - it's very difficult to persuade people to work 6 days a week (in the West) because culturally we no longer do that.
You can't ignore culture and just say "let the market decide" because culture is part of the market.
crimsoneer
Sure, but the point I'm making is that figuring out whether this stuff works is easy - you let companies decide, you let them fairly pay employees, and you see which companies turn out on top.
isthatafact
> "let the market show us what's actually more effective"
I am not sure what are the mechanisms for that. Would that simply be what maximizes short term profits?
It sort of sounds like a suggestion to remove all restrictions on the work week so that the free market can choose the winning system.
Why not decide instead to take a more human approach where people can work productively and still have enough workless time to rest and be healthy and also have time and energy for hobbies, family, exercise, etc.?
4ndrewl
It wasn't clear as to whether this also included companies that allow you to work 'compressed hours' - ie a normal 37.5 hour week but in 4 days (start earlier, finish later), which is increasingly common.
rednafi
Just give me five days of remote work—that’s all I ask. My job doesn’t require me to add to the traffic, yet there are middle managers rallying for RTO to maintain their relevance.
InfiniteRand
Unless your strictly monitored, 5 day work from home can become work when you feel like but respond quickly during office hours as long as you get things done, which is fine by me and my employer as long as the get things done and respond during office hours actually happens
wslh
Since 2003, my companies have always been structured to support a 5-day, 30-hour workweek, and most employees follow this model. I was fortunate to implement this approach long before it became a widely discussed topic. The reasoning was straightforward: many employees were also studying, and the complexity, and intense focus of our work, such as reverse engineering, made adding two extra artificial hours unnecessary. However, shifting to a four-day workweek would be challenging in our context due to synchronization issues.
That said, some employees do work full-time, particularly those in operations and other roles that require broader availability to communicate with external parties. There are also situations where someone needs to stay longer to complete a critical task, these exceptions are inevitable, but having clear guidelines helps ensure they remain just that: exceptions.
A related challenge, as highlighted by @rsavage, is the use of social media during work hours, especially in a remote setting. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to fully control, but what matters is cultivating a company culture that balances flexibility with accountability. The key is staying aware and making adjustments before things get out of hand.
djtango
Personally, I think some of the reality is that in a dual income household if both individuals work full time there's limited time to do life admin and some life admin can only be done during business hours. So in aggregate, many companies aren't getting 5 full days of work from their employees. Sure when you're in your twenties it's easy to give 6.5 days a week. But when you're two working parents with no help? Good luck getting 10 days of work consistently out of that family. I think parents in a 4 day work week probably have better focus because they know they have one day ring fenced for catching up on non-work things (when the weekend then becomes full time parenting)
varispeed
It always amazes me that, for example, shops are open when everyone is at work.
In my town, the shopping high street closes at 5pm. So when I finished work, I'd be back in my town at 6pm, where everything is dead. The only way to do any shopping is to drive to a supermarket that’s open until 10pm or shop online.
It's like everything is catered to people who don't work.
truckerbill
It never changed from the single-income household era. And people wonder why the high street is dying.
matwood
One of the complaints I hear about Italy is the shops aren't open all day in smaller towns. But, they are open in the morning and in the evening. Exactly the time you want them to be open. Until you internalize this clock it can sometimes be annoying, but makes a lot of sense.
barnabee
It's almost like rigidly enforced hours and a requirement to be in a specific building the whole (or most of) the time don't make sense…
Yeul
As they say in the Netherlands: Sunday is my fun day.
Something astonishing happened in 1994: the first time a government coalition was installed that excluded any Christian party. Capitalism prevailed.
janosch_123
Lunio.ai also 4 day week but didn't find them on the list.
nopelynopington
That link is giving me fake "file is ready for download" pop-ups and one scammy redirect the first time I visited.
I think it may have had a malware injection
penguin_booze
I'm personally indifferent to 4-day working week. If that works for people, and if that improves their lives, I'm here to root for you. What I root for even strongly, is for WFH to be written into law: what can be done from home, MUST be done from home. Treat people like adults. Office work for the sake of office work -- fuck that.
I’m starting to believe the obfuscation and lack of information regarding “four days but actually working longer” or “four days with reduced hours” models is deliberate.