[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Yes, it's Friday the last day of the workweek, but imagine for a moment, if Friday was actually the first day of the weekend. That the workweek was Monday through Thursday.

The 5-day workweek is not a natural phenomenon. There are 24 hours in a day, that's a natural phenomenon, or 365 days in a trip around the sun. The 5-day week is something manmade, it's a decision that human beings with the power to decide, have made. They tried an experiment recently, in the UK, 61 businesses of various kinds tried out a 4-day workweek.

According to The Wall Street Journal, no less, a large majority of the companies in the trial have decided to make it permanent. The headline in the journal reads, "After Testing 4-Day Week, Companies Don’t Want to Stop." Let's find out more and see how applicable this might be to workplaces you know, and on how big a scale.

We have two very relevant guests, Vanessa Fuhrmans The Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote the article I just cited, and Niamh Bridson Hubbard, a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Cambridge, one of the researchers who conducted the study in the UK. Niamh and Vanessa, thanks for coming on for this. Welcome to WNYC.

Vanessa Fuhrmans: Thanks so much for having us.

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: Real pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Niamh, what was the range of businesses that tried out a 4-day workweek? First of all, what kinds of sectors were they from?

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: It was a real variety of organizations. We had some professional service firms, marketing, advertising agencies, but also organizations that were charities in the hospitality sectors and education. There are also quite a range of business sizes, our largest one was over 1,000 people, and our smallest one was just 3.

Brian Lehrer: I see that you basically had only one requirement, maintain the pay of the workers at 100% of what they had been getting before. Other than that they could implement the 4-day week in different ways. Fridays off, staggered shifts, other models. Can you describe a few of the different styles of doing that?

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: Absolutely. As you say, the only thing that all of them had to do was implement a genuine working time reduction for no loss in pay. How they went about it was up to that organization. Some organizations that really valued collaboration, for example, wanted everyone in for the same 4-days. Monday through Thursday was the most common choice.

Whereas other organizations that needed to have a 5-day presence, for example, they were delivering client services would have their days off on a rotor. In some organizations, there was a really decentralized model where maybe the head office would work Monday through Thursday, but people in the warehouse might work five shorter days. It was really up to the business to choose what they thought would work best for them.

Brian Lehrer: Before we bring in Vanessa, with some perspective, do the number of hours per week get reduced at these companies in all cases, or was it the same number of hours fit into four longer days?

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: No, absolutely not. The real goal was a genuine time reduction, and based on the hours that were reported to us, all organizations did manage to achieve that.

Brian Lehrer: It was more or less a 32-hour week on average, rather than 40 more or less is that the usual comparison?

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: Around those numbers, yes. We didn't quite see a full eight-hour reduction, but it was close to that.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Vanessa, your article about this in The Wall Street Journal, as I mentioned is called After Testing 4-day Week, Companies Don’t Want to Stop, and that refers to the employers, not the employees. How many of these 61 companies have decided to continue the 4-day week now that the study is over?

Vanessa Fuhrmans: It looks like more than 90% want to continue it. Not all 90% said that they are going to make this permanent, but they want to keep trying it out for a while, but at least 18 of the companies say they do want to make it a permanent way that they work. That's a really interesting sign.

Brian Lehrer: That's 18 of the 61 going to make it permanent. Almost all the rest are going to at least keep the experiment going for a while to see if they want to make it permanent. What did they like most about it from the employer's perspective?

Vanessa Fuhrmans: First of all, they like the fact that for their employees, there was less stress among the majority of them there was less burnout to employees reported having more time to fit the rest of their lives into their week. There's a business incentive for the employers too, and that is they are interested, first of all, in terms of looking at what this could do for them in terms of productivity.

They're also interested in what this could mean as a recruiting and retention tool. Because we all know, we've been in a very hot labor market for a while now. Even with the potential of a recession looming, there are a lot of reasons to suggest that we are going to still see labor shortages in the market and employers are going to continue to have to compete for talent.

This might be a way some companies are looking to see whether they can compete on this front, too, just as a lot of employers are offering remote work as a way to entice prospective employees. Some are looking at this as well.

Brian Lehrer: Do the companies make any more or less money?

Vanessa Fuhrmans: I think, Niahm, could probably answer this a little bit more specifically, but they did measure revenue. From the beginning of the six-month trial to the end of it, there was an average 1% increase in revenue.

Then when the companies on the whole compared what their revenue looked like for the trial period to a comparable period in the last, say a year ago, the average was a 35% increase. Obviously, there's a lot that goes into revenue growth, and we are living in turbulent business times, but it's an interesting observation.

Brian Lehrer: Niamh, want to continue on that whether the company's made any more or less money?

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: I think, Vanessa, summarized the main point there, but there were also other really strong key business metrics that improved for companies during the trial. Including the reduction in the number of sick days, which fell by 65% relative to the previous comparison period for six months of 2021. The other thing that might play into the retention of revenue is the number of resignations in these organizations fell by 57%.

Rather than having to fund more recruitment, more training, organizations will be able to hold on to their staff and not having to expand on new employees.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who has ever worked at a company or run a company with a 4-day workweek for what we generally consider five days of pay help us report the story. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Help the researchers on this study, one of whom is here with some anecdotal evidence, we might call it from your workplace, that they might be able to go out and test who knows.

Or ask our guests from Cambridge University and The Wall Street Journal, a question about how this experiment with 61 businesses went or how you might experiment with it at your workplace. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Niamh, from the worker's perspective, presumably, they would overwhelmingly like the change as well. The numbers I'm seeing from your executive summary are a little more complicated than that.

Around 40% of the workers said they were less stressed than before, better mental health. That's a lot 40%, but 50% said no change. What does that result tell you?

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: I think it's a reflection of this change being a trial and only running for six months so far. Beginning the pilot, there was a big reorganization process within organizations. There was a lot of additional work done to make sure that this 40-week pilot was possible. I think perhaps some of the reasons why we haven't seen such a big shift towards people feeling less stressed is that firstly, over the six months, there hasn't really been a chance for that to set in.

Also, this is novel, this is new and changes always bring with them stresses and I think it will take a while for those to be smoothed out over time.

Brian Lehrer: Did you find differences for the workers along income or gender or other demographic lines? Like, if women do most of the childcare and other domestic work at home, still, in addition to their workforce jobs, did they report more mental health benefits than men? Did they just wind up doing more childcare, their other job, and their mental health was about the same or anything along those lines?

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: Yes, absolutely. We did all of this analysis to divide it along gender lines. One of the things that we saw was that the reporting around the share of domestic responsibilities wasn't changing between men and women that stayed equal. One of the interesting things was that in regards to who was doing more childcare, the amount of additional childcare that men were doing when they moved to the 4-Day week relative to women was almost double. We're seeing a bit of a shift in agenda division of standard household labor tasks. It's quite exciting.

Brian Lehrer: Quite exciting. Vanessa, do you want to continue on that? Did you look at that at all, for your article, and since you are deputy bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal's careers in workplaces team, if I've got your title right, this would have a lot of implications for the kinds of things you cover.

Vanessa Fuhrmans: Yes. I thought that was an extremely fascinating finding because I've covered for a while the role of women in the workplace. How the division of labor at home influences careers in the workplace.

It really struck me that we didn't see so much of a change in the division of household duties, which suggests to me that that's something that's probably much harder to change at home than [laughs] perhaps it is at work. Anything along income lines, Niamh? Lower-income workers versus higher-income workers because Vanessa's article does say-- Oh no, I think it was in a different article that I read, sorry, that did say that this might be easier to implement in lead sectors like tech and finance.

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: None of the analyses we did was broken down along income lines. Generally, people don't like reporting their income in these studies, particularly in the UK. It tends to be very patchy data. However, I would agree with your point, but in organizations where people are receiving sufficient income, time comes with more of a premium. I would imagine that, for some people that actually you see, perhaps some of the benefits you could see from the 4-Day week would come from an increase in salary. Whereas once you pass the salary threshold, actually, a lot of those benefits come from getting time back and being able to have a better work-life balance.

Brian Lehrer: We have a full board, of course, some people who've been involved in 4-Day workweeks at their own workplaces, some people with questions. Let's see what we got. Charles on Staten Island, you're on WNYC. Hi, Charles.

Charles: Hey, good morning. I've got some good news to report to everyone that's studying this. For over 30 years, I'm an attorney in Staten Island, I have a small practice, myself, and associate. We have had a 4-Day workweek all summer since the beginning.

I also have given all my co-workers because there's no boss in my firm, we're all working together, my co-workers get a choice of 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, or 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM because I wanted to take into account that they have children and lives and et cetera. I can tell you, my secretary has been with me for 30 plus years, two paralegals 25 plus years, and my associate 28 years.

It's the Roach Motel you can check in but you can check out. Frankly, I am the happiest lawyer that I know. I hope other small businesses consider it because the work product is absolutely amazing. The trustworthiness is beyond reproach. You could never find co-workers like I have. That's my comment.

Brian Lehrer: Charles, if you're a lawyer and you have a practice with employees and you have 4-Day workweek parts of the year, what do you do when the judge says, "We're scheduling this hearing for Friday?"

Charles: That would be me. I really don't have any problem with that. That's my job. I have to drop everything for Friday, but I would try to work around depositions and other things that lawyers do and avoid Fridays, but if a judge ordered us in, not a problem because I have clients to serve.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Vanessa, you report in the journal that most of the companies in the experiment did not make their employees work more intensively during the 4-days like rushing, rushing to get the same amount of work done. Rather, they mostly found ways to make their whole operations more efficient. Can you give us some examples of how?

Vanessa Fuhrmans: Sure. I thought that was really interesting. As you said it wasn't about cramming in more hours into the four days that they worked but finding more effective ways to work. As you can imagine, meetings were a big target, a big scapegoat in all of this. It turns out not to the surprise of most of us, we spend a lot of time in meetings, and a lot of those meetings are probably unnecessary.

A lot of these companies looked at their meeting times. When they were having meetings, how long they were requiring employees to be in meetings? One company, I spoke to a digital marketing agency, they basically did what they call a detox diary, where they looked at the workflow and the work time of all of the employees at the agency and found right away that they were probably wasting about 20% of their time per week in unnecessary things like meetings or traveling to meetings. Right there, they knew that if we can cut that out, that's probably giving us the 4-Day workweek we're shooting for in the first place.

Another thing was--, for instance, this digital marketing agency company said that when meetings were absolutely essential, or they were having a marathon meeting with multiple presentations for clients, employees, instead of being there for the duration of the meeting, might drop in and out for the parts of the meeting that were essential for them, but not necessarily have to be tied up the entire afternoon or morning in a meeting.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Although Niamh an NPR story on your experiment did refer to another such study in New Zealand in 2021 that found, yes, there was more pressure around performance for the workers. Maybe the 4-Day workweek would bias hiring more toward only those employees or those applicants perceived to be the most efficient and productive or more toward robots. Did you look at the New Zealand results?

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: I've looked through them briefly, yes. I think one of the things that comes with the transition to the 4-Day workweek is businesses start looking at results rather than hours. On the whole, I think this is incredibly positive because it incentivizes people to work to do the tasks. A good week is one in which you complete all of your tasks, rather than one in which you log 40 hours for the sake of logging 40 hours.

I do think this, however, requires a good relationship between employers and employees to agree actually, what is an appropriate number of tasks to be achieving this week.

Brian Lehrer: So much for quiet quitting, as they call it.

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: To put a bull positive spin on it, I would hope so. Because what we've seen in a lot of our research is collective solidarity. We've heard descriptions of really positive work culture developing within these organizations because the 4-Day week, and getting that fifth day off is such a reward that people want to work really hard together for it.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Mendel in West Hartford, Connecticut, you're on WNYC. Is it Mendel or Mendell? Hi, there.

Mendel: It's Mendel. Hey, Brian. How are you doing tonight?

Brian Lehrer: Great. Thanks for your call. I see you work for a construction company.

Mendel: Yes, I'm a carpenter. In the winter, we work five days a week, because we do mostly indoor work, but in the summer, we do a lot of outdoor work like decks and outdoor construction, et cetera, and it's four-10. Then you have Friday, Saturday, Sunday off, and it's really special because you get to hang out with the kids and do long cooks, and just have that one day off.

Brian Lehrer: Four 10-hour days. As you've been hearing, if you're at the beginning of the segment, in the UK, this experiment was for eight-hour days. They did actually cut the number of hours work per week, not just compress them into four days. Could you do that in construction?

Mendel: It's a little bit more difficult because there's literally a little more heavy lifting, it's just not typing. Not to say that the intellectual commodity of typing is not something worthwhile, but we're lifting things we're digging we're-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: We'll take that as not an insult. Typing writ large, but go ahead. [chuckles]

Mendel: It's great in the summertime because then you have-- It just boils down to more time with the family.

Brian Lehrer: Mendel, thank you for your call. I appreciate it. Maybe it would be hard, Niamh in construction, like some other workplaces that come to mind that operate 24/7 like hospitals and fire departments, and all your radio stations. Did you test the shorter work weeks per employee at any places like those because you have to ultimately have the same number of firefighter hours or nursing hours let's say. If each nurse gets the same pay for a day less work, the hospitals would definitely have increased expenses because they still have to cover all those shifts, no?

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: I suppose that is one way to communicate it. In a lot of organizations, people work five days a week and provide a service for seven days, so why not the case that people who work four days and managed to do that for five or seven days as well? There are definitely industries where implementing a 4-day week tomorrow would be more challenging.

However, that isn't to say that it's not possible in the longer term, there just needs to be a more dramatic reorganization. I think perhaps some of the industries in which the 4-day week is put to us as unlikely to be successful, are ones that have difficulties in retention, and recruitment, which leads to staff shortages and employees in those roles having to work at very high intensity. Perhaps if they were 4-day week employers, they'd not only be able to attract really talented staff, but they'd have more resources available if they're not having to spend so much on recruitment and training or temporary staff. Which might mean they might be able to bolster their workforce and see everyone continue on four days a week.

Brian Lehrer: If I understand you correctly in my example of the hospitals where you need the nurse-per-patient ratio to be the same 24/7 through the week. You're saying they could be more efficient in other areas, and still have nurses work four days for the same pay as they do now?

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: Yes, absolutely. Using that example of nursing, there's nurses in the UK that still do everything in a paper-based system. If you could find that efficiency there of moving that over to a digital system, that might create then more time for them to be spending with patients and reduce the number of nurses you need over a fixed period.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. We're going to take another sector as an example when we come back for a break because John in New Hyde Park, I see you. He says he's the Chief People Officer for a large luxury retail brand. He's wondering about his sector, particularly stores retail. John, we're going to take you next as we continue on the 4-day workweek right after this.

[music]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're talking about the experiment recently conducted in the UK with 61 businesses of a 4-day workweek. That's fewer hours, not compressed, not 10 hours, 4 days a week, it's less hours, but the same pay that the employees had before and the way The Wall Street Journal wrote up the results; After Testing 4-day Week, Companies Don't Want to Stop. That's the headline from one of our guests Vanessa Fuhrmans, deputy bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal's careers and workplaces team.

Our other guest is one of the researchers on the study, Niamh Bridson Hubbard, a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Let's take a call from John in New Hyde Park. John, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

John: Hi, Brian. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good, thanks.

John: Thank you. I would say, in my organization and all past organizations, we've never worked a 4-day week, but I will say, as a head of HR, we are very consciously aware of the needs of the candidate right now and how flexibility and the ability for people to have that 4-day work week or the remote status thing. That was a challenge for me to get leaders to do that in the past.

The pandemic has actually really helped leaders give a little on that. The point I think actually heard you guys may have made it already, but to me, it always comes down to leaders leading. If I'm clear about the work and I am clear about the deadlines and the amount of work doesn't have to shift. I don't think corporations will go for that, but the concept of leaders making it clear about what's expected and when whether it's done in four days or from home on Fridays or whatever. That aspect is a part of the future I think that it will take for companies to attract and retain the best talent.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. As I said before the break, my screener identified you as you described yourself to them as Chief People Officer for a large luxury retail brand. You said obviously, the stores can't do that the 4 hour days. Sorry, the 4-day weeks with the same pay people are getting for 5-day weeks. Is it different? I don't know, if you want to mention the brand you work for, you can if you want to, you don't have to. Would it be different at the brand than at the stores?

John: It often very much is. I think the challenge is with the stores, and you have commission environments. It's almost I think that's one of the areas where I think the employee would feel it could almost challenge their ability to earn with the fewer days. That's the reason I said what I said around. It's harder, I'm not saying it's impossible, but they'd have to shift their thinking around how do I sell not through people who walk in, but build my client base and make sure I'm contacting those people within the window that I'm actually working.

The reason I said that is all things are always more challenging in the field because you are dealing with so many more people, and their customer-facing, and we have to have the coverage in the stores. In that way, maybe we're like hospitals where we think about employee-to-customer ratios, and so on. I think the same rules apply, though, if the leaders of the business can find that they can continue to earn and sell and perform and run their businesses in a store and keep the lights on, then they'd be open to it if it attracted better people.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask from your experience in your sector of the economy, if you think changes in people's mindsets during the pandemic, are affecting how much this kind of thing would be possible or how difficult it is for your company or companies you work with to retain people?

John: The pandemic with all the many, many downsides, it was and is now a game changer. We absolutely need to talk about hours and flexibility and remote this and hybrid that, so much more than we ever did before. As I started the conversation, leaders that I would struggle to get them to budge at all like CEO-level people who would just say, "If you're not here, you're not working."

That whole mind shift has shifted, I think in a better way where I look at my own team, which happens to be largely made up of younger female leaders who have families and are managing their home and work life. They are people I would never want to lose, and I know that the flexibility and the work from home and the days off without micromanagement is life changing for them to continue to do the work that they want to do at home with their families, and the work is not suffering at least from my perspective.

Brian Lehrer: John, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it. Vanessa, for you on the careers and workplaces be it at The Wall Street Journal, how much change are we still seeing sort of workplace cultural change from the pandemic?

Vanessa Fuhrmans: First of all, I totally agree with the caller, the pandemic really blew up so much of our conventional wisdom about the way work gets done or should get done with our great remote work experiment that continues. What we also saw in the pandemic was a lot of burnout among workers. The pandemic and pandemic working conditions were incredibly stressful for a lot of people.

That also has galvanized a lot of employers to think about, what can we do to keep our workforce going to sustain our workforce and find new ways to appeal to prospective candidates. That is one reason why you're seeing this renewed interest in a 4-day workweek also here in the US. I'd also agree with the caller what he said about leaders, it's very much about the tone and the culture that the bosses set for workers at their companies.

I would say the biggest hurdle to implementing a 4-day workweek at a lot of companies is simply our culture in America where we still equate long working hours with successful careers and successful working.

Brian Lehrer: Jennifer in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Good morning, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. Along that trajectory, I just think this is a natural evolutionary process and the reevaluation of what constitutes good work. I think for those of us who've done consulting or freelance work, we recognize that quality work should be evaluated in terms of, do you get the work done on time? Again, is it quality work?

Does it have to be measured in terms of hours put in? Because actually efficiency should be a mark of good work, and we don't have to be in an office to do that, and we don't have to put in a certain number of hours. I think again the pandemic has underscored a reconfiguration of how we define quality work.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting, Jennifer, thank you. Niamh, I see your study was done in picking up on what Jennifer said. I see your study was done by people in academia and in advocacy group that supports a shorter work week. From the advocacy group perspective, and I realize I don't think you are in that, you're on the academic research end. What's the next step?

I don't see anything in the several articles I've read about this study that there's a policy discussion going on but is this to push the government to mandate a shorter workweek for some sectors like they already mandate some wage per-hour rules around 40 hours? Is this an area for policy debate as well as workplace voluntary cultural change?

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: I think this is starting to become an area for policy debate, but at the moment we're in a real phase of evidence collection, and actually it's businesses driving the expansion of the 4-day workweek at the moment. I think what we've seen from the trial is that how businesses have approached the 4-day workweek has been incredibly heterogeneous.

Actually, if there is going to be legislation, it is needing to be legislation that reflects those differences across organizations, differences in management styles. I think at the moment before that can be done, there needs to be more research.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a policy debate breaking out around this in the United States, Vanessa?

Vanessa Fuhrmans: There's definitely a policy experimentation. We saw last year a bill introduced in California that would've required employers to pay overtime for anyone working more than 32 hours a week. In essence, a bill to encourage a 4-day work week. The bill was shelved that didn't go anywhere. Some people argued certainly that that was perhaps a too rigid of a structure to incentivize a 4-day workweek.

In Maryland, you have a bill being proposed that would give employers a tax credit for implementing a 4-day workweek which I don't know the ins and outs of the bill, but on its face seems to encourage more experimentation with a 4-day workweek and different structures around a 4-day work week.

Brian Lehrer: We have so many callers calling in from different sectors. We are starting to run out of time though. Let's see if I can get another couple of calls on here at least. Ronnie, in Westchester who's a surgeon I see you hang in there for a minute. Roland, in Washington DC You're on WNYC now. Hi, Roland?

Roland: Hi. How are you doing? [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: All right.

Roland: I grew up in Baltimore. My father had [unintelligible 00:33:47] stores. He was a young Black veteran and came back bought some apartment houses in these [unintelligible 00:33:56] stores. Once he got to the point of hiring people, each store needed to have essentially two pressers, two seamstresses and two counter people on duty at all times, but he had the belief that when people were doing the work that's what you needed.

You didn't need them to be someplace eight hours a day, five days a week. We had seamstress that came in. She moved up to Baltimore from Alabama and she was pregnant when she came in, and my father said, "Are you sure you can do this work?" She said, "Yes." She, actually after the baby came worked from home, and we had a driver who would drop off all of her work in the morning, pick it up in the afternoon.

She rarely came into the stores at all, but we got to the industrial revolution and we got stuck because a seamstress does not have to be at my father's stores to sell clothes. She can do that at home. She was the best seamstress we ever had, but you have to get out of that mindset of, I need to see you someplace 35 hours because I've had employees. I went to law school, but I've had employees who with 35 hours did very little and had to be let go. Flexibility and managers who can see beyond that set piece is what we need. Otherwise, it doesn't work.

Brian Lehrer: Roland, thank you. Appreciate it. One more, Ronnie in Westchester. You're on WNYC. Hi there.

Ronnie: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I am a surgeon and I joined the private practice of surgeons and all the surgeons were working five days a week. I had stipulated that I wanted to work four days, so they had to accommodate that. I really feel like that's my sanity day, keeps my work-life balance. I have three kids and a husband who's also a doctor, so I really need that day to be more flexible, but it does incur a significant pay cut.

I would say I'm not available to see patients or work on a fifth day, and therefore there's a 20% pay cut, so I can't work more into that shorter work week, but it's worth it for me. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: The model that they tested in the UK was with no pay cut and 4 days, do you think your hospital could staff with enough surgeons to do that and not run its finances off the rails?

Ronnie: Yes. As a private practice what you bring in is what you eat, so it's not a salary like that. I think any person who's a freelancer or they work less, they make less, but there is also a sanity aspect in all of this, and sometimes a pay cut is worth it or if you can tolerate it, it's worth it. Some people can't afford to do that, but I do advocate it to others and I think that outside of New York City or State, it's much more accepted.

Brian Lehrer: Ronnie, thank you. Thank you for your call. Niamh to wrap up and Vanessa, I'll ask you the last question too. Is there a temptation here or would there be if this was endorsed in a widespread way, adopted in a widespread way to have fewer full-time employees and put more people on staff freelance. Therefore not have benefits and have it be to the detriment of the workers in some way? We know employers will compensate in any way they can [laughs] to not compensate.

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: I think it is worth reflecting on just how positive an experience the 4-day week has been for employers. That is the 4-day week in having employees work those four days and remunerate them with full salary. That has led to big benefits for the businesses, and I think it will be a foolish decision on their part to lean towards having more people on temporary contracts because you don't necessarily get the same buy-in from the staff.

People don't feel like they're part of a collective that's working hard to ensure that they get that extra day off. I think actually what we've seen here is something enormously positive and it needs to be protected rather than eroded. That's not just from employee perspective, but for employer too.

Brian Lehrer: Since it was conducted in the UK, is it getting more buzz over there? It's gotten a few articles here like Vanessa's, but is it getting more widespread buzz over there and more potential contagion for employers experimenting with it?

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: Oh, absolutely. In the last interview I did as part of the trial, the company that we spoke to their final reflection was that they had just had a deluge of other companies contacting them saying, "We never thought somebody could do a 4-day week within this industry. We really want to try it, please help us." I think there's going to be much more spread over the years to come.

Brian Lehrer: You may go from a PhD candidate and researcher to consultant. [laughs] What do you think Vanessa? Should The Wall Street Journal's laid-back weekend editions go to three days a week? Should our radio station air weekly feature programs three days per weekend and cut back shows like mine to four days?

Vanessa Fuhrmans: That would be an interesting experiment. I worked on my day off to write the story, so I don't know what the irony is [laughs] around that, but to your initial question there, I do think there is certainly the risk as there always is that you see companies try to if they really want to embrace this, use it as a way really more to improve productivity as opposed to improve employee wellbeing.

For now, the real interest among employers, and here in the US as well, is motivated by wanting to it much like remote work, use this as a tool, a perk that could attract workers. You see it especially among smaller employers. Larger employers, I think the jury is still out on whether this could work in a more complex organization, but say if a smaller company is able to offer this and compete on that basis versus a larger competitor, that could be really interesting.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting. Thank you both for a really interesting conversation, and maybe important. We'll see how this catches on. Thanks for this study. Niamh and Vanessa, thanks for your reporting in the journal.

Niamh Bridson Hubbard: Thanks. [crosstalk].

Vanessa Fuhrmans: Thank you very much.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.