Businesses will follow the four-day workweek after evaluating its pros and cons for six months. Businesses from all throughout the UK participated in the initiative, which ran from June to December 2022. These companies included a brewery, a fish and chip shop, software developers, and recruiting firms. An evaluation of its effects found that it had “extensive benefits,” particularly for the well-being of the workers. According to its authors, it might represent a shift in thinking that finally leads to everyone accepting a midweek rest day or a three-day weekend as standard. In spite of this, just 18 of the 61 participating organizations indicated that the change was permanent. Meanwhile, 56 said they would continue to use a four-day workweek, at least temporarily.

To succeed across the economy, employers will need to see increases in productivity for a four-day workweek with full pay. Employees will need to generate the services and items they were producing in five days in four days in order to make enough money to cover a full week’s salary. That rate of productivity growth has proven to be a challenge for the UK economy. It has fallen behind a lot of other wealthy nations in recent years in terms of the amount of value created per worker, and numerous suggestions as to why and how this may be altered have been put out.