Will the four-day week become the norm?

The four-day week’s garnered a lot of good press, but just how likely is it to become the norm?

Lib Dem councillor Bridget Smith will be feeling smug this week, after the results of her four-day week experiment showed largely glittering results in South Cambridgeshire – despite protests from local Tory government minister Lee Rowley, who had instructed her to “end the experiment immediately”!

The programme, the largest public sector trial of its type in Britain, saw a 39 per cent fall in staff turnover (the equivalent of £371,500 in savings per year), the completion of 15 per cent more major planning application decisions and quicker call answering times. A 2022 UK pilot involving 61 companies was also overwhelmingly positive, with a second pilot scheme announced for this autumn.

So will the four-day week become the new norm?

Well, not everywhere. Many (employers) are naturally resistant to the idea, which they fear will cut into productivity, while Greece has notably just gone the other way, adopting a six day week to drive growth.

But the dream of the three-day weekend shouldn’t feel like a fantasy. After all, it was only in 1930 when the 5:2 week ratio became the norm. Before that, the weekend started on Saturday afternoons in Britain (originally pushed by the Church who hoped it would boost attendance at Sunday morning mass and quickly cemented by the decision to stage football matches on Saturday afternoons in the 1890s), before that certain sectors took their weekends Sunday-to-Monday (the Saint Monday holiday), and before that the six-day week was standardised.

Go further back and chaos ensues, with not even the seven-day week taken for granted. The Aztecs chopped up the year into five-day weeks, and worked four of them; in ancient Rome, weeks were eight days long, with only one designated for rest.

So who’s really to say what the ‘week’ should be? Turns out, time’s a construct. So work as little as you can and call it a day.