Four-day workweeks don't have to hurt productivity. Ask these companies. (2024)

A good company culture is paramount to ensure employees are delivering their best work every day. A positive workplace culture not only ensures employees are happy and productive, but it makes it easier for companies to make adjustments when faced with internal or external challenges.

"The culture is, as today, maybe one of the main things that brings people on board and keeps them here," Galyna Marchuk, the chief people officer at the Ukrainian company YouScan, told Newsweek.

Newsweek, in partnership with the Best Practices Institute (BPI), recently published its ranking of the Global Most Loved Workplaces. This ranking is based on BPI's Love of Workplace Index and analyzes employee-provided data, surveys and interviews with company officials to rank the top 100 most loved global companies.

One of the main factors that makes a workplace great is flexibility. For many companies, that means adopting a hybrid or remote work setup, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic forced office shutdowns in 2020. But other companies, including three startups on Newsweek's ranking, have taken flexibility a step further by implementing a shorter workweek.

There are many reasons why a company might introduce a four-day workweek, including combating burnout and promoting a healthy work-life balance.

In 2022, the McKinsey Health Institute conducted a global survey of nearly 15,000 employees and 1,000 HR officials in 15 countries. The study found that, on average, one in four employees surveyed across various demographics reported symptoms of burnout.

Malika Begin is a business consultant and founder of Begin Development who works with companies seeking to build a strong, healthy organizational culture.

She told Newsweek that there has been an increased amount of stress and burnout among employees over the last decade. That burnout not only affects the organization's bottom line but also workplace culture and employees' well-being.

"If you have an entire company that is stressed out, people who are unhealthy mentally and physically, you're not serving anyone," she said. "It's not going to be good for your productivity, and it's not going to be good for long-term health."

4 Day Week Global is a company that started in 2019 with the mission of building pilot program guides for businesses worldwide to plan, trial and implement a four-day workweek. In recent years, the company has moved from being an advocate for a reduced workweek to actually helping implement programs.

Its goal is for companies to create plans in which "employees receive 100 percent pay for 80 percent time worked with 100 percent productivity targets achieved."

"Human attention can't focus for eight hours a day," 4 Day Week Global CEO Dale Whelehan told Newsweek. "So we need to figure out how to get the most out of people by actually incorporating effective rest and recovery into them."

He said 4 Day Week's research has found that having an extra day during the week has led to significant reductions in stress levels and reported levels of burnout as well as increased levels of physical activity and quantity and quality of sleep.

In order to launch a successful four-day workweek program, Whelehan said that company leaders must be intentional and have trust in their employees.

"This is best done by leaders who realize that [their] role is to enable this to happen and help co-design it with staff," he said. "It's top-down enabled and bottom-up designed."

Clear communication and good change management are essential to a pilot program. Whelehan said that before any trial, companies should communicate goals and purpose internally to staff and externally to customers and stakeholders. Leaders must also understand which changes are needed to create a reduced workweek and how to measure and evaluate success.

For some companies, burnout is endemic to their industry. Petfolk is a chain of veterinarian clinics across the southeastern U.S. and one of Newsweek's most loved global workplaces. Since the company began in 2020, there has been a four-day workweek for veterinarians and technicians to prioritize team members' well-being while maintaining a high standard of patient care.

According to a 2024 report from the American Veterinary Medical Association, well-being is the most important issue for the veterinary profession.

"It's such a demanding day-to-day career, and our industry is plagued with burnout," VP of People Ashley Russell told Newsweek. "We look at the American Veterinary Medical Association as our number one association, and they're consistently putting out statistics about happiness levels are dropping, burnout levels are increasing, suicide rates are increasing. And so, we try to hyper focus on that."

Russell said veterinarians tend to overwork themselves—something that has been especially difficult coming out of the pandemic. She said there was a large influx of pets that were adopted through COVID, and the veterinarian industry was inundated with pets so that the demand for care outpaced the number of vets.

Combating these issues requires leadership that is not only aware of systemic issues but understands them on a personal level and is determined to fix them.

Petfolk's CEO Dr. Audrey Wystrach is a veterinarian herself who has practiced for almost 30 years and worked in both big corporations and small mom-and-pop clinics.

"She's been around the block," Russell said. "She travels from clinic to clinic and knows every employee by name. Her being on the ground and people seeing that she's a real human that understands their challenges firsthand is a big piece to this."

To accommodate this, Petfolk has implemented a four-day rotating schedule among vets and technicians to ensure that there is always someone in the office to take care of patients seven days a week.

"It seems like the younger doctors do their four days consecutively and then get a three-day weekend [and] the older doctors like to do two days on, rest and come back in for a few days," Russell said. "They can pick and choose and tell us which kind of schedule works best for them."

This system requires a clear set of protocols between veterinarians and technicians who work in the office and virtually. Being all on the same page and overly communicating allows for patient records and other information to easily be passed along between doctors.

It also requires open and honest communication between staff and leadership. At Petfolk, Russell says those in charge listen to and believe in their employees and are open to hear ideas and suggestions to improve operations.

The result: increased productivity, improved work-life balance and better retention.

"By reducing their workload to four days, our team members have more time for rest and rejuvenation, helping to prevent burnout and maintain their passion for their profession," Russell said in a statement to Newsweek.

Burnout and poor mental well-being don't only come from the everyday pains of an industry. Great geopolitical issues outside of the workforce can also lead to negative mental health for employees.

YouScan, a social media monitoring startup that was founded in 2009, is also one of Newsweek's most loved global workplaces. While it is based in Ukraine, the company has employees around the globe.

A four-day workweek was never a consideration for leadership, until the unimaginable happened. When war broke out in 2022, YouScan had to make adjustments for the benefit of its employees.

"A big part of our team was in Ukraine, and we are living in challenging times," YouScan's Chief People Officer Galyna Marchuk told Newsweek. "It's really challenging to keep being a good employer for all our team during the war."

Employees working at the office in Kyiv heard air raid sirens every day, Marchuk said, and she was notified that the staff was exhausted. In 2023, she said the company was looking for ways to prioritize the team's mental health. While she couldn't change the circ*mstances they were in, the company could find solutions to make employees healthier and happier.

Initially, leadership considered giving everyone a two-week vacation. But certain teams could not afford to shut down customer support for that long. The alternative option was to implement a four-day workweek during the summer months.

This plan still gives employees about 14 days off but allows all teams to maintain consistent operations. Having an extra day off requires everyone to be more intentional and better at prioritizing work, Marchuk said. So far, she hasn't seen any real negative impacts.

"It was the best decision we could offer," Marchuk said. "It cost us no money, it didn't mean any issues with customers, all the business operations run smoothly [and] people are happy they got to have an extra day off for themselves."

Marchuk added that the long weekend allows employees to spend time with family, meditate, go on short trips or take care of household chores.

The four-day week was initially meant for the Ukrainian team, but the policy has been extended to employees in other countries. Marchuk said everyone reported they feel happier, productive and grateful for the policy.

The only feedback she's received is the desire from employees to extend the summer schedule year-round. Unfortunately for many employees, a full five-day workweek is set to return in the fall.

Workplace culture consultant Malika Begin told Newsweek that many people equate a four-day workweek with "being lazy or doing less." But she disagrees.

Begin said employees, largely, want to work hard on high-achieving teams where they can excel together with people they can trust.

"It's about how to figure out how to do more with less," she said. "It might be about doing more together, to work toward a healthier place and have better meetings, better culture in your company."

Having a healthy culture, she said, is the number one thing a company can do to benefit its employees.

Simprints is a nonprofit technology company based in the U.K. that helps vulnerable communities around the world access critical health services, like maternity appointments or a child's vaccination series.

"Potentially this is because they have no formal form of ID; they have no birth certificate, or maybe their ID has become displaced because they're a traveling community, all kinds of different scenarios," Sima Bodalikar, head of strategic marketing and communications at Simprints, told Newsweek.

The company, which is also included on Newsweek's ranking of the most loved global workplaces, created a digital platform that provides face and fingerprint biometrics and that works in the toughest conditions for nearly 3 million people in 17 countries, including Somalia, Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia.

After nine years, Simprints decided to shift to a more flexible workflow and hired Tara Clarkson as chief people officer about a year ago to develop a new system to engage remote workers and bring in a high caliber of employees.

"We wanted to attract some great people and were noticing that it was taking a long time to fill roles," Clarkson told Newsweek. "We wanted to make sure that we had a very attractive culture and we knew this would be one way of doing that."

After a six-month pilot period, Simprints launched a four-day workweek. Recently, the company has shifted again to what it calls a mutual flex—meaning some employees are available to work on Fridays if there is a client meeting or a project that needs to be delivered, but they are able to make up that time off during the week.

Clarkson said Simprints is a "very high-trust environment" in which people appreciate the lack of micromanagement that comes with this flexible system. Both Clarkson and Bodalikar note that a flexible workweek would never even be a conversation at previous corporate companies where they worked.

The high level of trust among colleagues comes from great leadership and the ability to stay "magically connected" across the company through the mission of amplifying their impact, Bodalikar said.

"Because we're so passionate about our mission and our work, it helps us engage with each other and stay connected, even though we're across multiple time zones and geographies," she said.

Like the other companies that have adopted a four-day workweek, Simprints is thriving under this system. Clarkson said the feedback from employees has been "absolutely phenomenal" and productivity is "through the roof." The company can also recruit a more diverse slate of people who may not be able to do a five-day workweek, like family caregivers. The number of employees has jumped from under 30 to 54 in a year.

"We've seen a huge increase in our employee engagement scores, and our team feels that they can balance home and work life," Clarkson said. "They feel more productive and our turnover has decreased a lot since I've started."

Implementing a successful four-day workweek isn't an easy feat—it requires engaged leadership, clear goals and metrics and effective communication between the company and clients.

"I think you need to get a lot of different viewpoints from all your different teams," Clarkson said. "Spending more time polling everyone to ensure that you're hitting all the touch points before you make it permanent would be my number one thing."

But if companies can accomplish this, the benefits of a four-day workweek can make a lasting impact on the company and employees.

According to Dale Whelehan at 4 Day Week Global, about 90 percent of the companies that start their trial maintain a four-day workweek at the six-month mark and all of the companies from their first trial cohort kept up the four-day workweek 12 months out.

The impacts, Whelehan found, go well beyond the workplace. He said the reestablishment of human connection is one of the biggest impacts of a reduced workweek.

"Outside the workplace, people have more time to be better parents, be better partners, be better sons and daughters," he said. "We find that people spend a lot of their time off actually reengaging with those communities of people that work often takes away from them."

This also extends to communities outside of families. Whelehan said that people with more time tend to do more selfless acts—like volunteering and taking public transport.

Simprints strategic marketing and communications head Sima Bodalikar said she falls into the category of the demographic fit to benefit from a flexible work schedule.

"I am a working mom with two young children," she said. "[The four-day workweek] has given me time to have an extra day with my children, you can't put a price on that."

She added that many employees also use their "free Friday" to develop a hobby, learn a new language, study or participate in a training or just rest, relax and recharge.

There are many ways to create a positive and supportive workplace, but it always starts with a good company culture. For some companies, adopting a shorter workweek is a natural progression for offering more flexible work hours while maintaining productivity.

When established along with effective communication, trust among team members and clear goals, a four-day workweek can be a key to reducing burnout and increasing retention.

At Simprints, Tara Clarkson credits the four-day workweek for transforming the company while never distracting from its mission.

"With a high-trust environment," she said, "we were able to bring in really brilliant people that have helped us grow the company."