Could the four-day workweek be the key to not only happier employees but also a thoughtful path through the age of AI?

Economist and Boston College sociology professor Juliet Schor has the data to back up the first point and urges leaders to take the second one seriously. In 2022, Schor became the lead researcher at 4 Day Week Global (4DWG), a nonprofit helping organizations pilot 20% shorter workweeks without cutting employees’ full-time pay. Her research, which spans 245 companies across six countries and over 8,700 employees, is eye-opening.

For employees, she has found less burnout, improved mental and physical health, and higher job satisfaction. And—crucially—for employers, no loss in productivity. Many companies even report productivity gains, according to Schor, who details her findings in a new book, Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter.

In a labor market plagued by burnout, attrition, millions of unfilled positions, and high employee turnover in many industries, the four-day workweek offers an increasingly attractive solution. However, as work is rapidly reshaped by all forms of artificial intelligence (AI), especially its generative and agentic forms—the conversation gets more complex. For organizations that are investing in AI to augment human workers, the promise of a four-day week can be a powerful talent magnet and a way to prevent burnout. For those treating AI primarily as a cost-cutting tool—replacing employees rather than enhancing them—the four-day workweek may soon be moot. After all, AI tools do not need an extra day off—or any.

SAP Insights: What are some of the most surprising anecdotes you heard from employees about the four-day workweek and how it changed their lives?

Juliet Schor: There were a few things I had never thought about—women saying they could now get pregnant, either because a four-day week solved chronic health issues, or they had been so busy and stressed it just didn't feel possible before. Then there was a guy who said he wouldn't have gone to the doctor without the day off, and he was diagnosed with cancer. He felt the four-day week may have saved his life.

Some of the things I knew we would hear were spending more time with family and friends, or “me” time. That’s a huge thing, particularly for women, and especially for parents, who just don't have any time for themselves. Many people talked about how they are now eager to go back to work on Monday, where they previously felt anxious on Sundays that they wouldn't be able to get through the week because they had too much work to do. What happens in a four-day company is that nobody quits.

Q: What have you heard from employers?

Schor: Many of the employers involved in our project had already done some research. They already had a sense it would work for them in terms of greater employee loyalty, engagement, and retention.

But something that surprised me came from our employer surveys. We surveyed staff at the start, then at 3, 6, 12, and 24 months. We asked about things like workload, work intensity, and working to deadlines. The model is to reorganize work to get rid of low-value activities and make people more productive through organizational change. We saw productivity increase by about 13%, with virtually no increase in work intensity, including a measure of working to deadlines, at most companies.

Q: In the book, you characterize the four-day week in the study as following a “100–80–100” model. Tell us about that.

Schor: Yes, that means 100% of the money, 80% of the time, 100% of the productivity. This is not the same as part-timers working 80% of the time for 80% of the pay. When companies with 80% part-timers go to the four-day week, typically the part-timers’ pay goes up to 100% because everybody else is at four days now.

There are a couple of reasons we wanted to study firms that offered full pay for one less day. One is that there's tremendous resistance by people to nonvoluntary income loss. People need their incomes. So, if an employer forces a 20% income cut, people will leave. But the other thing is, if they can maintain their productivity, which was the assumption of the trial, why should they be paid less?

Many companies have spent years trying to think about how they could do payment by results rather than payment by time. Very few have gone to it, but our model gets you some of the way there, which is to maintain the results and give employees some time back. The other question is why these companies don't just try to increase productivity in the five days? What I heard from managers was that you are asking for something that's not that simple to do, and making a demand without giving something back isn't necessarily going to work.

The four-day week creates a tremendous increase in the value of jobs to people, and that buys you loyalty. It buys you productivity and engagement. If you look at the statistics on people struggling with stress and disengagement and quiet quitting and loud quitting, this solves a lot of those problems.

Q: What role do senior managers have in bringing the four-day week to the organization? How do they set the right tone and get things off to a good start? One can assume that maintaining productivity does not happen magically.

Schor: In almost all these cases, the president, CEO, or the senior leadership team is the initiator of the pilot projects we're studying. Before a company switches to the four-day week, the organization goes through two months of onboarding, with peer mentorship, webinars, and coaching about how to do it. The main thing when it comes to reorganizing work is to have a bottom-up process in which the teams figure out how to save time. The key is to involve everybody in the project. Performance and productivity must be maintained, along with revenue.

Q: What can you say about best practices? Did you see companies go down one path, stop, and then try another?

Schor: It's more of a tweaking process. The first thing to figure out is what kind of four-day week are you going to have? Are you going to have a Friday off? That's the most common: about 40% of the companies in our study doing it that way. Some will right away say, we can't do that; we need to have five days of operation for our customers. They might split their teams, half off on Monday, half off on Friday. The kinds of tweaks we saw had to do with increasing employees’ availability on the off day. One company has a policy where you can be called on the off day—and even asked to come into the office—if strictly necessary. One company has a policy that if employees have not finished their work by the end of the fourth day, they need to complete it on their off day.

What happens at the organizational level is very important. The whole organization has to participate, unless you are a very big company—and then it has to be a whole division. You need enough people working four days that it defines the norm, and there's no stigma. The one “failure” I cover in a lot of detail in the book was about a 200-person company, and they put 23 people on the four-day week. The management team had talked about “unlocking” the fifth day, making it a conditional benefit. That may have eroded trust. And then—with a growth rate of 20% annually, it became unworkable. That company will revisit the four-day week over time.

Q: Let's talk about AI. Why do you believe the four-day week could make a good fit for an AI-driven organization?

Schor: It's a basic economic dynamic. You introduce a labor-saving technology. One thing you can do is lay off a big chunk of your workforce because you no longer need them.

That creates a whole range of social problems. If you can't reemploy those people easily in your society, you have to pay to keep them alive. Historically, that’s not the way we have dealt with labor-saving technologies. Most economists believe these technologies of the past, such as mechanization and automation, have not resulted in widespread unemployment. On the other hand, many are now saying AI may change that.

Another path is that everybody could just work a little bit less. Instead of one group working the same amount and another group working zero, you give everybody a 20% reduction in work time, but with no net reduction in the cost of labor. It all depends on who is going to get the benefit of that higher productivity. Will it be shareholders? Employees who are not laid off? Everyone currently employed? The question is whether everyone can benefit, as they should.

Q: Big employers like Amazon and Microsoft have displaced workers in favor of AI or have said they plan to. Granted, some are backtracking a bit, but the trend appears to be less than rosy for employees.

Schor: I'm not saying all companies are going to adjust to AI in the most equitable way, but that's the conversation we have to have. What do we do with this productivity dividend? Economists believe that unless we get a handle on this process, we could be facing catastrophic levels of unemployment, and that will lead to a collapse of society.

Q: How big a barrier are cultural norms, such as those related to work ethic?

Schor: Many people think the United States is a workaholic country. But the U.S. led the world in work-time reduction for the first three-quarters of the 20th century.

Workaholism is not a deep cultural norm. The main thing with the four-day week is that norms change when practices change.

Q: What should we learn from companies that did the four-day week experiment but reverted to five days?

Schor: Only about 10% of the companies in our sample did this—it’s not an insignificant number, but it’s also not very large. What mattered were things like, they didn't get well-being improvements from their employees. Mainly, that happened because they didn’t reduce working hours enough. Those that got all the way down to eight hours reduced saw a big improvement. We also found that a few took the productivity benefits they saw and then put their employees back on a five-day week. We wonder if that will be sustainable for them.

Q: U.S. jobs numbers have been pretty robust recently. Have you studied the four-day week during a recession?

Schor: Yes. We've seen it work in good times and bad. We had our largest trial in Britain, and there were companies in Australia and New Zealand as well that did their trials in a very challenging time—both with big inflation and under government austerity policies. They were able to make it work even under those very trying conditions.

Q: What about regulations? Do we need new ones to support the four-day week?

Schor: I would like to see that. I have never been the biggest fan of the way we do it in the United States, which is to offer an overtime premium above the statutory 40-hour workweek. What happens is that companies reduce employees’ base pay, and then people need to work overtime to make enough money. I prefer the comp time system, where you have a set number of hours, a higher wage, and if people work overtime, they get time off.

However, the vast majority of companies find that going to the four-day week does not affect their regulatory obligations. They give it as a benefit, and that way, it doesn't trigger overtime pay if someone has to work a fifth day.

Q: If you were designing the world, what sort of regulatory or legislative support do you think would be helpful toward this movement?

Schor: First, I would like to see robust government-sponsored trials with representation across industries, like what we did, but with a financial incentive for participating, in return for sharing data.

The Spanish government is currently running a trial. The government provides a wage subsidy over the three years of its trial. They started with the government paying the fifth day's wages at 100% and then are reducing the subsidy to 50% and 25% over the next two years. Every year, the government is paying less, workers are presumably getting more productive, and it becomes more viable for the firm.

A subsidy takes out the risk for the companies at the beginning. This will be especially beneficial to entice companies that pay low wages and are not generally inclined to support worker-friendly policies. This might also include manufacturing firms that have already engineered out wasted time and are worried about international competition. Then you can legislate for a lower statutory workweek with a comp time system. That’s what I'd like to see.

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