After studying the costs and benefits of a four-day workweek for six months, businesses continue to operate on that schedule. Nearly all 61 of the companies involved in the trial‘s conclusion expressed a desire to maintain the new work pattern. The program, which ran from June to December 2022, included businesses from all around the UK, including a brewery, a fish and chip store, software developers, and recruiting agencies. It provided “extensive benefits,” particularly for the well-being of staff, according to an assessment evaluating its impact. Its authors contend that it may signal a change in mentality that may eventually cause everyone to accept a midweek break or a three-day weekend as usual. Yet, of the 61 participating organizations, 56 said they would maintain the four-day workweek, at least temporarily, and 18 said the change was permanent.

Employers will need to experience productivity increases for a four-day workweek with full compensation to be successful across the economy. To earn enough money to cover a full week’s salary, employees will need to produce the services and goods they were producing in five days in four days. For the UK economy, that level of productivity growth has proven to be an insurmountable problem. In recent years, it has lagged behind many other wealthy countries in the quantity of value produced per worker, and several theories as to why and how this may be changed have been put forth. While the majority of the participating organizations expressed satisfaction with productivity and performance results, only 23 of them submitted financial data about revenues, and those figures showed that revenues had mostly remained constant over the course of the trial’s six-month duration.