What to Consider Before Implementing a 4-Day Workweek

In April 2025, the metropolitan government of Tokyo, Japan, launched a radical experiment.

Faced by declining birth rates and a population worn thin by overwork, one of the country’s largest employers rolled out a four-day workweek for employees working in the non-stop metropolis. Its goal? To make its employees just… stop.

Tokyo’s governing body wasn’t the first to the four-day week party. But the quest to end the five-day workweek and mandate less time at work frames an important question for the future of work: What happens when we rebuild work around life, and not the other way around?

The rising demand for the four-day workweek flies in the face of everything we know about working in modern organizations. It’s a gauntlet toss to the rhythms, rituals, and metrics we use to define what makes a team — or an organization — successful.

Getting it right requires organizations to rethink the processes and structures that govern productivity, performance, and how work actually gets done.

What is a 4-day workweek?

The four-day workweek is built on a simple idea: that none of us really need to work a five-day week to perform at our best. It builds on the growing demand for remote work and flexible work schedules by offering a shorter, more focused work schedule — one that creates more space for rest and better work-life balance without sacrificing on performance or productivity. 

But it’s not just about changing work schedules or sliding gently into a three-day weekend. According to a 2022 four-day week pilot study from the United Kingdom, there are a few different models for how it actually works in practice:

• Scheduled day off: This is the most common application of the four-day workweek. The company shuts down operations for one full day each week. All employees, regardless of role or seniority, take the same day off at the same time. 
• Staggered: Employees take different days off based on service coverage needs, ensuring the organization stays fully operational throughout the week. This approach supports flexible work, and works well for service-based organizations that need their tech and customer support staff on-hand 24/7.
• Decentralized: When the staggered model isn’t practical, the decentralized model gives departments or teams greater autonomy to design their own flexible work approach based on their goals, workload, or team dynamics. In practice, this could mean your customer success team takes Fridays off year-round, but your engineering team adopts an annualized model, working 40-hour weeks during sprints, and scaling back to 24-hour weeks in quieter periods.
• Annualized: With the annualized model, organizations focus on reducing their employees’ total working hours to a 32-hour workweek, spread out over the course of the year. This means that some weeks, employees might work 40 hours, while in others, they could work 24 hours. This works well in service-based sectors like retail, healthcare, or hospitality, where seasonal fluctuations in opening hours and demand can shift staffing needs. 
• Conditional: The conditional model links four-day week participation to performance criteria. If employees or departments aren’t meeting targets or other performance management goals, their four-day week allocation may be temporarily revoked.

Another model not referenced in the report is the compressed model, where employees work a 40-hour workweek compressed into four 10-hour days.

Why the 4-Day Workweek Works — for Employees and the Bottom Line

At first glance, giving everyone an extra day off might seem like a slippery slope to slacking off for any leader with a magnifying glass trained on the bottom line. 

But research is increasingly pointing to a similar conclusion: Working less isn’t a direct line to underperformance, and in many cases, focused time and autonomy trump the classic input-output grind.

The 2022 UK pilot study, for example, tested the impact of the four-day workweek on over 60 businesses. In a 2023 follow-up study involving 28 of those businesses, 38% of respondents reported that a shorter workweek improved their efficiency, while another 30% reported increased productivity and focus.

And that’s not the only win — a series of pilot programs run across the world, including the UK, Brazil, Portugal, and New Zealand, found that the four-day week can:

• Decrease burnout
• Improve work-life balance
• Boost creative work
• Decrease sick days
• Improve employee performance
• Increase revenue
• Improve employee retention

Rita Fontinha, PhD, associate professor of strategic human resource management at Henley Business School, has seen these benefits play out firsthand in a 2024 joint-authored study on the four-day week in Portuguese businesses.

“While the four-day workweek may be perceived as a radical shift, our research shows that it can deliver substantial benefits when implemented thoughtfully,” she said. “Employees report improvements in work-life balance, stress levels, and job satisfaction. This also translates into individual performance, which over time contributes to higher organizational productivity.

“From the employer’s perspective, we’ve also seen a significant reduction in HR-related costs, particularly through lower staff turnover and absenteeism,” Fontinha added. “Companies reported stronger employer branding and greater success in attracting top talent.”

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When the 4-Day Workweek Doesn’t Work

Changing the operating model for how work gets done is no small feat for most organizations. Most businesses tether everything from revenue projections to team capacity on the assumption that work happens five days each week. 

This assumption is exactly where some of the four-day week’s major sticking points show up. 

A 2023 systematic review of four-day week research found that some organizations faced scheduling challenges, increased their employee monitoring efforts, and struggled to sync their performance expectations with a new way of working.

Another systematic review of the literature on the four-day week found that more research is needed on how the four-day workweek impacts organizational and individual outcomes — including long-term effects on employee wellbeing, productivity, and team relationship dynamics. 

When there are gaps that go unaddressed, the fallout looks a lot like burnout, mental health challenges, and inequitable work conditions — the exact problems that the four-day workweek is supposed to solve. 

This, says Fontinha, isn’t a conceptual issue — it’s a process one.

“While the four-day workweek offers many benefits, it’s not without challenges — especially in the longer term,” Fontinha said. “Some organizations reported issues with coordination across teams, client expectations, and perceived equity. 

“There are also concerns about increased work intensification. While our data found that around 30% of workers report experiencing this, the vast majority still express a clear preference for the four-day workweek over returning to the traditional five-day schedule.”

6 Best Practices for Getting the 4-Day Workweek Right

When done well, the four-day workweek forces organizations to rethink the age-old workplace equation that input is equal to output. 

Productivity is independent of the number of hours worked. Performance is about outcomes, not optics.

Instead, what matters most is bringing your systems, processes, and policies in line, so that meaningful work gets done and goals get hit — just in fewer days.

1. Analyze the impact on your existing processes and systems.

A shorter week sounds simple enough to organize from a people perspective, but under the surface, it touches everything from customer relationships to sales cycles, product development, and more. 

Before hitting the launch button, you’ll need to audit your existing setup to identify how working shorter hours could impact broader processes and systems within the business.

Look beyond HR to the day-in, day-out business-as-usual processes that define how you operate. Talk to department heads to understand their weekly workflows, and identify where the biggest stress points will be. 

Use these questions to guide your thinking:

• How might a four-day workweek impact our customer experience? How will we measure this impact?
• How will fewer hours at work affect our product development cycles, service delivery timelines, or support coverage?
• Are our current employee-facing processes — such as performance reviews, promotion cycles, and compensation reviews — set up to handle the realities of a reduced working week?
• How will we position changes internally and externally as part of our employer brand — especially if they impact compensation, benefits, and perks?

2. Codify a clear structure and guardrails.

Next, it’s time to build the terms of engagement. How do you want your four-day setup to look? What shape and structure will it take, and what are your non-negotiables? 

Laying out these building blocks and guiding principles early adds structure that tells you quickly what’s working (and what isn’t).

Having this clarity upfront was key for people leader Monique Major, who has scaled the four-day workweek in early startups.

“We knew our six-month pilot needed to start with clear guidelines around when and how people would be working,” she said. “We codified those expectations from the beginning and were really clear this was a trial — one we’d measure over time to understand the business impact.

“We already had cultural elements that worked in our favor here, like our no-meeting days. But we also made sure to define the parameters of the trial really well — setting specific days off, adjusting compensation and benefits, and making sure everyone knew it was a work in progress that would evolve based on feedback. At the end of it, we agreed that if it didn’t work — for the business or for the individual — we could switch back. That structure helped safeguard it for everyone.”

Here are the basics you need to get clear on before you start:

• Working model: Which model makes the most sense given your organization’s current setup?
• Eligibility: Does this apply to all employees, a select group in one office, or is it opt-in? Are there core hours when employees need to be online?
• Length of time: If you’re running a trial, how long will you test your approach for?
• Metrics of success: What outcomes are you working toward, and how will you define if the four-day week is working? How do you plan to measure employee wellbeing, productivity, or performance?

3. Make employee equity a priority from the start.

Whether your whole organization adopts the four-day model or some employees remain full-time while others take Fridays off, your compensation, benefits, performance management processes, and growth structures must feel fair, proportional, and consistent.

If they don’t, you could risk sowing resentment on all sides — derailing a successful rollout. 

“We started with a six-month trial with a prorated compensation and benefits structure,” Major noted. “For us, the four-day week was optional, so we were conscious of making sure employees on both sides felt that they had a fair offer.”

For Major, it wasn’t just compensation that was up for discussion — it was also how her company assessed employee equity in terms of perks.

“Launching a four-day week brought up questions around how we thought about things like our learning and development budget,” she said. “Is it still the same amount? Do we adjust all benefits down equally? In the end, we kept our L&D budget the same, because growth was a core part of our values.”

4. Scale goal alignment across the organization.

If there’s one thing that can make or break a shorter workweek, it’s a lack of clarity and alignment on where your people should be focusing their energy. Without clarity on what matters most, teams risk spending time spinning their wheels on side quests instead of working toward the targets that directly contribute to business goals. 

When Leia Marshall joined Wildbit (since acquired by ActiveCampaign), the company already had the four-day week well underway. But they hadn’t quite nailed the goal alignment process, and this was translating into challenges at a team level.

“Wildbit had already tried the top-down method for goal planning, but it felt too disconnected from how our teams were working,” Marshall said. “When launching a four-day workweek, this North Star around goal-setting and alignment is critical to center your teams and make sure everyone’s working on the right things.”

Wildbit eventually adopted the W framework to give leaders and teams the right structure and context around goal planning that kept lower-level goals in step with strategy.

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5. Set communication norms that support asynchronous decision-making.

When time is at a premium, how we spend our hours at work matters even more. Back-to-back meetings, or even just wrongly-timed 30-minute slivers here and there, can disrupt deep work and productivity.

“Companies talked a lot about asynchronous work after the pandemic — but it doesn’t seem like many actually thought about implementing the communication processes to support it,” Marshall noted.

“If decision-making only happens in meetings and you depend on verbal communication to get stuff done, your team will be racing the clock to stay effective. In a four-day week, organizations need to be much more intentional about how communication and decision-making work — and draw a clear line between what needs a meeting, and what doesn’t.”

This mindset shift in communication is grounded in how organizations reframe their sense of urgency and speed in the age of instant feedback, Marshall added.

“Our CEO would just say, ‘Take a beat,’” she said. “That allowed us to take a pause and evaluate if having this conversation was getting us to the answer more quickly, or if we needed to go think, do some research, and come back.”

6. Use feedback and measurement to refine your approach.

One of the hardest truths about rolling out something new — especially when it dismantles the entire system that underpins modern work — is that you might not get it right the first time. Or the second time, come to that.

This is why the organizations that make the four-day week work long-term are the ones that view it as a roadmap, not a final destination. 

“Companies that adapt well tend to treat the four-day week as a long-term change process rather than a one-off switch,” Fontinha said. “Many implement regular check-ins or feedback loops to identify pressure points and adjust workloads, staffing, or scheduling accordingly. The key is ongoing reflection and adjustment — what works well initially may need tweaking as the organization evolves.”

Collecting quantitative data — such as employee engagement, productivity, and performance-related goals — is critical to showing you’re on the right track. But Major suggests intangible data that shows the human impact can be an equally powerful metric.

“There’s no magic formula for measuring productivity — it looks different for each role,” she said. “But we also noticed that some team members showed up more excited about projects, took on lead roles, and were more engaged in meetings. That helped us gauge success alongside the hard numbers.”

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