The four-day workweek isn’t dead. It’s just a secret

Some workers are stealthily taking three-day weekends — every weekend

A LITTLE EDITORIAL accountability is in order. Like many others, we here at London Inc. Worklife probably overinvested in the possibility that the four-day work week would become a corporate norm. In our defense, it really did look like it had legs: the global four-day workweek pilot program saw a lot of uptake and among companies trying it, the feedback seemed to be good. Things were, for a while at least, trending in favour of the four-day week.

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And then it got crowded out of the conversation, more or less. Companies got caught up in divisive RTO mandates, there was AI everywhere, inflation, you name it — as quickly as it rose in prominence, the four-day week faded to the backburner.

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But maybe good ideas don’t die, they just go into hiding for a while. That might be the case for the four-day work week: while it isn’t officially happening, there sure are a lot of workers who are doing it unofficially.

The Financial Times in the UK reported recently there is a good amount of evidence that the four-day week is operating in practice, even if it’s not captured by official data.

“In the leisure and retail sectors there are early signs of a more casual attitude to working on Fridays,” wrote reporter Josh Gabert-Doyon. Gym owners (climbing and otherwise) report that daytime hours on Friday are “unexpectedly busy,” while consumer district foot traffic (a proxy for people doing things that aren’t work) has risen 2.5 per cent each year since 2023. Employers sense it’s happening, too, with one COO telling FT that Fridays are seeing a swell in absenteeism.

It’s over here on this side of the ocean, too. Business Insider recently looked into it and found that Fridays are looking less and less like work days. “On Fridays — without telling her coworkers — Annie typically doesn’t work,” wrote Amanda Hoover, chronicling the story of one PR professional who said, “Fridays are the very least that I can do for myself to get through [the rest of the week.]”

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“What was once the final push to the weekend is becoming a sneaky personal day for some remote workers,” Hoover said. “The trend has been called ‘quiet Fridays’ or ‘gentle Fridays’ — a clandestine progression of casual Fridays or summer Fridays from the pre-pandemic era.”

This, it appears, will probably be the real legacy of the four-day work week experiment. “Where there’s a will to work less,” says Hoover, “there’s a way.” Kieran Delamont