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Always dreamed of a four-day work week? Same. Well, we’ve just uncovered the perfect ammunition to casually forward straight into your boss’s inbox. A new Australian trial has officially confirmed that a four-day work week has absolutely zero negative impact on overall company productivity. Instead, it’s a total lifestyle game-changer, leaving employees happier, healthier and way less burnt out. Win, win!
The research team at Deakin University spent two years conducting in-depth interviews with 15 Australian small-to-medium businesses that adopted the four-day work week model. The exact formula the researchers focused on was the '100:80:100' approach – employees receive 100 per cent of their normal pay, work 80 per cent of their previous hours and promise to keep productivity at 100 per cent.
At first glance, this might sound like a recipe for burnout – but the data proves this model actually encourages companies to work a whole lot smarter rather than harder. For instance, employees were forced to cut unnecessary meetings, redesign workflows, automate tasks and eliminate unnecessary admin. Therefore, they weren’t cramming five days of work into four, but were delivering four days of genuinely valuable, high-quality output.
The final verdict from the study couldn't be any clearer: not a single company reported a drop in productivity. Six of the 15 businesses claimed that their productivity even increased, while the remaining nine said it stayed roughly the same. And the results aren’t niche to one industry – the companies surveyed represent a range of fields, from publishing and property management to health technology. Each company was also given the freedom to define productivity by its own terms, whether that was measured by revenue and profit, or staff turnover rates and absenteeism.
The coolest outcome of the study? Every single company in the trial, except one, decided to continue with the four-day work week after the trial ended. Could your workplace be next? It’s officially time to give your boss a quiet nudge. Three-day weekends, here we come!
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