Another official four-day week pilot kicks off in the UK

A fresh pilot of a four-day working week is currently taking place in the UK, despite several tech giants recently mandating five days a week in the office for their staff.

Around a thousand workers from 17 businesses will try out working four days a week instead of five in the optional trial, where pay will remain the same.

Dr Doug Brown, chief exec of the British Society for Immunology (BSI), one of the orgs participating, said: "We are excited to offer this new benefit to those employees at the BSI who choose to participate, and hope that this will further enhance our working culture, providing staff with the opportunity to improve their work-life balance and making us an even more attractive employer."

Joe Ryle, director of the 4 Day Week Campaign, said:

"We don't have to just imagine a four-day week any more, because it's already a reality for hundreds of businesses and tens of thousands of workers in the UK.

He added: "We look forward to presenting the results of this latest trial to the new Labour government next summer."

All together, one thousand workers will get an extra day off every week under the pilot, which follows an earlier, larger trial scheme in 2022. Under the earlier pilot, The 4 Day Week campaign signed up 61 companies and approximately 2,900 workers to try out four-day-working between June and December of that year.

A report published at the end of the first pilot found that flexible working was a great success. While revenues for the participating businesses were broadly unaltered during the trial period, rising by 1.4 percent on average, employees were delighted by the change, with 39 percent reporting they were experiencing less stress and 71 percent saying they had lower levels of burnout, anxiety, and fatigue.

According to UK newspaper The Guardian, some of the 17 businesses participating in the latest official pilot have opted to go for a nine-day fortnight rather than a four-day week. Four more businesses will join the trial later.

The pilot comes against the backdrop of several tech giants mandating a return to the office for workers. AWS CEO Matt Garman reportedly told workers that if they didn't like the company's five-day-a-week return-to-office policy, they could look for work elsewhere. Other tech companies, such as Dell, have also insisted some employees be on-site for five days a week.

An AWS spokesperson told The Register that the effort was all about keeping teams connected and strengthening the company's culture.

Such return-to-office mandates could come unstuck in the UK, at least, if the campaign makes enough headway for workers to be given the right to a four-day-week, unlikely as it seems. A similar push in the US was made via a bill to amend the country's Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to reduce the standard workweek from 40 hours per week to 32 hours per week. Introduced by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, it also proposes overtime hours calculated based on daily hours over eight hours instead of weekly hours over 40 hours.

In the UK, employees already have the right to ask for flexible working, but employers also have the right to refuse. Enshrining the right to flexible working in law would not go down well with certain parts of the tech sector.

As for a four-day work week, it isn't on the table any time soon. A UK government spokesperson told El Reg, "We have no plans to mandate a four-day working week."

One Register reader described working a four-day week as "a blessing" and explained that in their company, it had been implemented along the lines of "you work four days per week efficiently so that you don't need a fifth."

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The business stripped unnecessary meetings from the calendar to make things more efficient, and our reader added that there were rules in place to ensure the company had sufficient staff working on any given day to maintain a five-day-a-week service.

The employer still had the power to require the worker to come in on the fifth day if there was "just cause."

"All in all," our reader said, "I find the compromises understandable and still prefer this four-day week to going back."

Reg readers may remember that Dell, in 2022, ran a four-day week trial for staff in the Netherlands and Argentina. The call for many employees to return to their desk in 2024 casts a different light on that experiment. ®