List of 200 UK companies that moved to 4-day working week (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

Lunio.ai also 4 day week but didn't find them on the list.

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

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.

Rather cynically I see this as "Companies who continue to operate at 100% but with 20% less staff wages"

Interesting quite how many of them are third sector organisations rather than for-profit businesses.

Speaking as a worker this seems like a positive move.

Stepping outside that though - how is this going to impact the wider economy? The UK is in a tough spot. Partially self-inflicted, partially political, partially just the way things are now.

Will this improve things? Will it help or hinder?

I guess companies were you already worked 30 hours (6 hours per day of effective work as in many "mental work" jobs). I'm not from UK, are any manufacturing companies on the list?

I think the UK Government should start first as trial and have 5 days working hours compressed into 4 days taking Monday off.

I recently saw a company that uses the 4-day week with 9 hours a day. Skipped right there.

4 days week sounds great, if you hate your job and you already earn less than you deserve. If you feel like you are underpaid, 4 days for the same money may actually sound like a win, until after a while you realise you are still underpaid and extra day is probably not enough to do proper moonlighting.

Depend of work, 3 days break often means a lot of effort to catch up and refresh memory on Monday, that could lead to staying late anyways and probably create false economy.

Almost like being smacked with a carrot.