Take a Three-Day Weekend Without Losing Any Pay (with Juliet Schor)

17:41Juliet Schor:So one of the reasons I love your book so much is that it's pushing for what might seem like a radical solution. What is this radical solution?

17:47Laurie Santos:So the radical solution is a four-day week, not four tens. Often when people hear four-day week, they immediately go to four tens. These are four eight-hour days. So it's a 32-hour work week, no reduction in pay. So people get their 100 % of pay. They're working 32 hours. And what most, although, no, not all, and we can talk about the differences, the ones who do and don't. Most of these companies are expecting 100 % of people's productivity in those four days. So they're not expecting to lose productivity or production or output or revenue in that time. There are some that are in a different category.

18:29Laurie Santos:So that first model of maintaining all the productivity, the entrepreneur who did this at his company and then started the NGO, Four Day Week Global, that organized these trials that I was doing the research at from, calls it the 180-100 model. 100 % of the money, 80 % of the time, 100 % of the production or the output. There's also an 180-80 model I talk about. I mean, that's my terminology, but basically companies where people are so overworked, they're leaving at such high rates that the company just gives them a break. And it turns out to work out for them. They save a lot of money because people stop leaving.

19:09Juliet Schor:So people only working 32 hours a week. How novel is this idea? I mean, before you started thinking about it, were there any companies that were already trying it out?

19:18Laurie Santos:I don't think most of them were on that 180-100 model. There were four-day-week companies. I mean, I co-founded an NGO back in the 1990s that was called the Center for a new American dream. And part of the new American dream was working less. So our folks were all on a four-day work week from day one. And so there are places that were on four-day weeks. Increasingly, you had a number of companies that were on those nine-day fortnight schedules. So one week, five, the next week, four, back and forth. The four-day weeks, like at our organization, we didn't explicitly say we had 80 % salary, but we tended to be a little bit on the lower side with salary.

19:59Laurie Santos:And so I think until this movement, the more dominant idea was that there'd be some trade-off of income. Whereas this model is saying, no, you can get everything done in four days, and therefore there shouldn't be a reduction in income because you're just as productive. To some extent, I think this has to do with the fact that there was increasing discussion in the media of white collar workers kind of having, you know, what we would call kind of low intensity work, right? That there was slack in their work day or work week that could be engineered out or that there were the companies were spending a lot of time that wasn't very productive.

20:42Laurie Santos:The, you know, poster child for that being meetings, like so many meetings that people had to go to and it's keeping them from doing their work. And if they could just, you know, have a more functional meetings culture, maybe they could get everything done in four days.

20:54Juliet Schor:And so you had this radical idea, you know, there's been some kind of interest in it, but you really decided to test whether this was possible. So tell me the story of how the four day work week tests came about.

21:06Laurie Santos:So during the pandemic, I was giving talks on shorter work time and I was approached by a man named Joe O 'Connor, who said he was organizing a trial of private sector companies who were going to do six months on this 180-100 model of giving a 32-hour work week with no reduction in pay. But the trial was going to be preceded by two months of coaching, onboarding, mentoring to help companies figure out how to get 100 % of their output or productivity in those four days. Now, one of the interesting things about O 'Connor was that he actually worked for a union, the largest public sector union, maybe the largest union in Ireland.

21:48Laurie Santos:It's called FORSA. And they had sort of released some of his time to organize this trial because they wanted to argue for shorter work time for their members, but they felt unless there was private sector proof of concept, they weren't going to get it because it would just look, I mean, he haven't said this, but maybe lazy public sector workers or something. So that's how it came about. He knew my work. He asked if I would lead the research for this. But very quickly, Joe teamed up with this group, Four Day Week Global, the entrepreneur from New Zealand who co-founded it, Andrew Barnes and his wife, Charlotte Lockhart.

22:31Laurie Santos:And we began organizing a North American trial and then a large British. And so it was the start of a year in which every two months we had another trial, groups of companies starting with the UK trial being the largest. I think there were 70 companies in all. So they asked me to do the research. We sort of set up as an independent research team and we developed a protocol with employee surveys before and after with getting administrative data from the companies and then where we had capacity doing interviews with people, sometimes before and after and occasionally just midpoint after. So we have hundreds and hundreds of interviews also with employees at various levels of the corporations or the organizations.

23:22Juliet Schor:And what was really the goal to find out with kind of all this data you're collecting?

23:26Laurie Santos:So what happened when you go to a four-day week? We had a lot of access to employees. So one of the big questions is what about their stress, their burnout levels, their work, family conflict, their emotions, their satisfaction with their job, and whether they're thinking about leaving, how much is a four-day week worth to them? But also, what are they saying about their productivity and how they're working? And people were worried there'd be less socializing in the workplace, and that might have a bad impact. Or what's happening to people's creativity? And so we collected data on all of these things.

24:00Laurie Santos:Are they just getting a second job? or what about their work intensity? I mean, the whole theory of this was to organize work and get rid of things that take a lot of time and don't yield much value. But what if it was just a speed up? I mean, people still might like it, but it's a very different thing than saying there's scope to reorganize work to get rid of a lot of wasteful things. You can have a whole day back each week from that and no loss of productivity.

24:27Juliet Schor:It's time for a quick break, but we'll be back soon to hear whether cutting a day from the work week had employees signing up for second jobs or stressing out trying to cram everything into shorter hours. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Happiness is getting harder to come by, so why not go somewhere with the most happiness-inducing activities in the smallest amount of space? That way, you're practically guaranteed to find some happiness. In Rhode Island, between the beautiful beaches, international cuisine, and money-saving deals, there's more packed into 1 ,214 square miles than anywhere else.

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25:39Juliet Schor:Because once you start optimizing an AI for engagement rather than for actually helping someone think, you've introduced exactly the kind of invisible bias my research is about. I've been using Claude to brainstorm new ideas for the show. Claude has helped me think through some of the real-world situations that people tend to get wrong when it comes to happiness. And it gets the nuances that matter for an evidence-based show like mine. That's the kind of thinking tool I trust. Try Claude for free at claude.ai slash happiness and see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. When life gets really busy, taking care of yourself can feel overwhelming.

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27:03Juliet Schor:Before the break, economist Juliette Shore explained all the fears employers had about giving their workers an extra day off each week. Would cutting eight hours out cause a bunch of unfortunate blowbacks? Would workers feel more stressed out and less creative? Would they waste the gift of extra time by just going out and getting a second job?

27:21Laurie Santos:The interesting thing is we didn't see those blowbacks. No increase in second job holding. Almost no increase in work intensity, just a smidgen higher in workload, but really wonderful, big increases in all those well-being indicators. Like 69 % of people who go through these trials have lower levels of burnout in six months than they did at the baseline. But the thing that was most surprising to us, I think, was this huge jump in self-reported productivity. People just, you know, felt so much better about their jobs and their performance in their jobs. And that turned out to be so big in sort of understanding the whole story of what was happening.

28:00Juliet Schor:The first kinds of effects you tested were the change for employees. What did you find?

28:06Laurie Santos:So we find significant improvements in well-being across the board. So we measure people. We have the 20 well-being measures that they fill out before the trial starts. Interesting, even in three months, you see significant increases. Then we also surveyed at 12 months, and for a while we were surveying at 24 months. So basically, every well-being indicator increases significantly, some with quite large increases, but we're talking burnout, stress, fatigue, anxiety, physical health, mental health, sleep levels, sleep problems. People exercise more. They score higher on various types of satisfaction, satisfaction with time especially.

28:52Laurie Santos:In some cases, you see a big increase in satisfaction, say, with relationships with the restaurant workers who'd been working 55 hours before the trial. Now, they got down to about 45 hours, but their satisfaction with their relationships went way up because they just were able to be at home way more than they were.

29:12Juliet Schor:One of the things I was so shocked by in your book was just the words that you talked about people using. Give me a sense of just like how profound this change was for the employees.

29:21Laurie Santos:I think life-changing. I mean, some people would say game-changing, but life-changing, transformational, best thing ever, very superlative. Even, I always think about this one comment I read. It's a person just complaining about everything. My job, there's too much to do in four days and nobody else can do it. And I don't, you know, this and that. And then at the end, the person says, but of course, this is so much better than a five-day week.

29:50Juliet Schor:So good. So good. I mean, and the reasons for better were kind of surprising. Some of the changes really were emotional changes, like what people talked about in terms of their stress and burnout. But I was also shocked to see that you also saw a lot of behavioral changes. Like just people were using their time differently. Give me a sense of what some of those behavioral changes were.

30:09Laurie Santos:So we did at the three-month point, we did what's called a time diary. So we wanted to see how people were spending that off day. The thing that people spent most time on was leisure activities and hobbies. They just were able to get into things that they loved or just relaxing in ways that they loved. You know, some might have joined a chorus or a theater group, but then others, it's, I can have a pedicure without guilt, or I go visit my grandmother every Friday. Gym is a big one, doing more exercise, which we know is so key to people's well-being and happiness. I mean, the other thing is sleeping more or catching up.

30:50Laurie Santos:You know, part of what that having that extra day does is it makes the other days less frenetic, especially where we talk to some of the really senior people who just, you know, have overwhelming workloads. So they were able to shift some of that to the Friday and then that would free up other parts of their week. So they just had a much more, they could catch up. They didn't have to catch up on Sundays, right?

31:11Juliet Schor:And what's so remarkable about some of these changes is that so many companies have been trying to figure out a mechanism to help their employees feel less stressed, right? So, so many companies bring in, you know, wellness apps or meditation classes. And, you know, while those techniques tend to work, the research shows my understanding of the literature in companies is that by and large, those kinds of things have mostly been a failure. They don't move the needle that much. But this kind of intervention is moving the needle a lot, right? People are sleeping more and exercising more and saying that they have transformationally less stress.

31:44Juliet Schor:I mean, why do you think the four-day workweek works so much better than some of these other techniques?

31:48Laurie Santos:So I think there are two reasons. One is it's big. I remember I was having migraines and I went to the doctor and the doctor prescribed that I go buy an aquarium so I could look at the fish and relax. I mean, anyway, that created a lot of stress for me because then I had to go buy the aquarium and keep the fish alive and whatever. And there's a sense in which some of those wellness things, you know, they just require people to perform and do things that just puts one more thing on their plate. Now, they may work for some, but also, as you say, they are, they're small things. So number one is a huge block of time.

32:27Laurie Santos:And number two, it gives people what they need, which is people are time stressed and those things don't give them more time. In fact, they take time to do. So that's number one. But I think there's another really important thing. They don't get at the underlying sources of the stress, part of which is those excessive work time. And in the past, we've had individual accommodations to people. So you might go on a part-time schedule and give up that income or whatever, and then you'd have a stigma. You would stop progressing in your career and so forth. Where you get the whole organizational changes, this is really important.

33:06Laurie Santos:Everybody changes. We have measures now in our surveys of the sense to which people believe that at their company, you have to be an ideal worker in order to succeed. And that falls with the four-day week because the whole culture changes. Nobody's being penalized for taking that time off. We think about, oh, we just gave our employees unlimited paid time off. You know, but people can't take it because they're worried about the stigma or because it doesn't transform their workload. Here, the whole company got together and figured out how to take stuff off people's plate and give them the time back.

33:43Laurie Santos:And it's just such a different thing. One is to put it onto the individual. Oh, you're stressed? Well, the problem is you don't do enough yoga or you're not mindful. No, the problem is you've organized a workplace that is too demanding.

33:57Juliet Schor:And so many of these positive changes came about. And the other cool thing about your book is that it looked at the sort of pathways towards these positive changes, right? kind of where they came from. And one pathway is one that we've talked about a lot, right? Outside of work, people are doing different things. They're exercising, they're sleeping more, they're seeing their grandma, they're having more time for their family. But I think I was shocked by in your book is that there's a second pathway to get towards these positive changes. And that's the set of changes that employees are experiencing during the workday.

34:27Juliet Schor:Talk about what's happening there to change how employees are feeling and how stressed they feel.

34:31Laurie Santos:Yeah, that pathway, which is the transformation of people's work experience from the five to four, was not necessarily something that we had anticipated. But what happens is that people feel so much more productive at work. They feel on top of their work. Instead of things like coming to the middle of the week, that hump day, they call Wednesday the hump day, and feeling like, oh my God, I can't get through the week. So already feeling stressed or so-called Sunday scaries, really dreading going back to work. Instead, what people tell us is they feel refreshed and ready to get back in. And when they come back in, they use terminology like my whole self is there.

35:16Laurie Santos:I'm energized to be back. I'm excited about the work. They have energy levels and motivation, and it shows up in their self-reports of productivity and workability. We ask them your current workability compared to your lifetime best. But the other thing is that because they feel so much more competent and on top of their work, they score higher on the smart working scale. So they feel competent and smart, efficient, and that just makes people feel good. why who we are at work is it's a big part of our well-being and it's also a big part of how we spend our time we spend a lot of time at work so feeling good about what we're doing rather than sort of ending the day feeling drained and horrible and that it's just it really improves their emotional and physical they say it improves you know i think it improves people's physical well-being as well.

36:13Juliet Schor:I love this result about what's happening inside work so much because I think a thing that people don't realize about burnout, and this comes from the work of Christina Maslach, is that one of the main symptoms of burnout is what she calls a sense of personal ineffectiveness. You feel like even if you were doing your job perfectly, it kind of wouldn't matter or would feel sort of crappy. It wouldn't be worth it. And it seems like what you're intervening on with the four-day workweek is you get people to feel like they're effective at work. And what happens is the opposite of all the emotions that come with burnout.

36:42Juliet Schor:You feel kind of excited to be on your job. You feel agency, you feel intentional, and those things just contribute to people's happiness, I think, in lots of ways that we don't really expect.

36:51Laurie Santos:Yeah, that seems so right to me. And then the other piece of it I would add is they also feel more loyal to their jobs. They value their jobs more. I mean, this gets to why people in four-day week companies don't quit. They almost never quit. They're just so much more positive about their work. It's not a source that's draining them. It's a source that they're getting energy from.

37:16Juliet Schor:So it seems like people really enjoyed this. They got a lot out of this emotionally, behaviorally. Did you get a sense of how many employees wanted to keep this new policy in place? How many were like, yes, let's keep going with this trial?

37:28Laurie Santos:Yes. It's about 94, 95 % when we We ask which you prefer. And then, so we ask which they prefer. And then we ask them if they were going to another job, if it were a five-day week job, what would their salary requirements be? Because if they prefer this, maybe they would want more money to go to a five-day. And there's pretty significant salary increases required all the way up to the 13 % who say, no amount of money could induce me to take a five-day week.

38:01Juliet Schor:I'm never giving this up, no matter how much you pay.

38:03Laurie Santos:A lot are in that 25 to 50 percent increase in salary. That's a lot of increase.

38:08Juliet Schor:So most workers really value a four-day week and would even need a substantial pay rise to go back to the old system. But are there any benefits for companies to offer shorter weeks? We'll have the surprising answer to that question when The Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

38:49Juliet Schor:Thank you. Plan your trip today at visitrhodeisland.com. That's visitrhodeisland.com. One of the things I keep coming back to in my research is how often our intuitions lead us astray. We think we know it will make us happy, and we're wrong. So when I started thinking about AI and how much time people are spending with it, I couldn't help but wonder, are we paying attention to what's actually shaping those conversations? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, committed to not running ads inside their AI. And for me, that matters. Because once you start optimizing an AI for engagement rather than for actually helping someone think, you've introduced exactly the kind of invisible bias my research is about.

39:34Juliet Schor:I've been using Claude to brainstorm new ideas for the show. Claude has helped me think through some of the real-world situations that people tend to get wrong when it comes to happiness. And it gets the nuances that matter for an evidence-based show like mine. That's the kind of thinking tool I trust. Try Claude for free at claude.ai slash happiness and see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. As someone who teaches about the science of happiness, I spend a lot of time thinking about time affluence, how the simple act of having a bit of free time can help us live better lives.

40:07Juliet Schor:But here's the irony. When you're racing between teaching classes, recording podcast episodes, and actually trying to practice what you preach about well-being, sometimes the basics, like eating well, get pushed aside. That's why Premier Protein shakes have become my go-to. They have 30 grams of protein, 160 calories, no added sugar, and tons of delicious flavors. They're the healthy choice you'll actually want to make, not one that feels like a chore. Premier Protein helps me protect my time affluence. Using those shakes empowers me to say yes to more, whether that's an early morning walk before work, hosting a cozy dinner party which I love, or having the energy to really be present with my friends.

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41:02Juliet Schor:Here's a no-brainer question for you. Would you like a big reduction in your working hours with no corresponding cut to your pay? That sounds like a great deal, unless you're an employer. Paying the same money just for your staff to stay home? That sounds terrible. But economist Juliette Shore has found that bosses also see the benefit of a reduced work week.

41:22Laurie Santos:So the model is called the 180-100 model. It was invented or conceptualized by Andrew Barnes, who was the New Zealand entrepreneur who did this at his company. he actually asked his employees to sign a contract saying that if they got a four-day week with no reduction in pay, they would do 100 % of the work that they were currently doing. That was the dominant model based on the idea that there were enough ways that companies could save time through looking at things they were doing that were wasting time. Meetings being really key there, like excessive numbers of meetings, too many people at them, meetings that went on too long, etc.

42:05Laurie Santos:Creating focus time for people where they could just put the head down and get a lot done and not be distracted by constant interruptions. There's a whole science of work interruptions, which shows that it's very bad for people. It's stressful, but also obviously it's going to interrupt their productivity. To other kinds of things where they brought in speakers who talked about how they'd done this in their own companies and figured out they were spending a lot of time doing things that weren't yielding much value. So kind of getting intentional about what you do. What these companies did to reorganize work and make it possible to get everything done in four days really varied.

42:45Laurie Santos:Like at the brewery we studied, they did time and motion studies for all the tasks. There are many tasks that go into brewing, a lot of cleaning equipment and waiting around. They figured out how much time each task could take. They sequenced them differently so they could slot shorter tasks into things that took a long time, but that had sort of dead time in the middle and so forth. So that's one model. That was probably the dominant model. But one of the things I realized as I was doing interviews for my book and as I was also looking at other data and just hearing companies talk about what was going on was there was another model which was based less on sort of meetings and time-saving and more on keeping people from leaving.

43:36Laurie Santos:And that you had a whole group of companies who were experiencing high levels of quits, which are very costly, or high levels of burnout, which even if they didn't lead to quits, were just leading to not good outcomes. Some of these were basically saying to me, we just gave people a break. Most of the companies was that hundred, eighty, hundred. But as I was analyzing the data and doing interviews and so forth for the book, I realized you had a group of companies that I called hundred, eighty, eighty. People get a hundred percent of the money. They only have to work 80 % of the time and they're not expected to do more than 80 % of the work.

44:21Laurie Santos:So they work at their normal pace on those four days, but they get an extra day. And those companies are the ones where work intensity is very high. In other words, we gave them a day off and we didn't really change that much about what was happening on the other four days. They didn't have a lot of meetings. They didn't have slack time. People were running really fast. And I call this the paradox of intensity because that first group are sort of low intensity workplaces, but these others are really high intensity. And what was happening in the healthcare organizations and in the restaurant chain that I looked into, you know, kitchens run really efficiently in restaurants.

45:03Laurie Santos:They're not sitting around having meetings there. You watch a kitchen at a, you know, a good restaurant, they're like, woo, they're really, they're moving and they're really burned out at the end of the day or the end of the week. And so they're just, nope, you got an extra day off. You're still going to do things pretty much the same way on the four days. Same thing with some of the nurses' studies. So the nurses' studies were nurse managers. So a lot of the entry-level nurses are on three 12-hour shifts. So the four-day week is not so relevant for them. But you have these nurse managers working five days with really long hours, and they're burning out a lot.

45:44Laurie Santos:And they're the most experienced and responsible. They're running things. A couple of these hospitals just said, you're on four days now. So you had people rescinding their resignations when they got that news and they don't leave. Patient outcomes improve. In both of these cases, they figured out how to adjust their divisions of labor. In the restaurant, they hired a few people, but the cost they said was really minimal compared to the benefits. In the nurses' studies, they tended not to actually hire new people. They just changed responsibilities and they gave people that third full day off where they could just decompress and rest and just had really, really strong results.

46:27Juliet Schor:Give me a sense of the kinds of companies that joined this trial.

46:30Laurie Santos:Well, we have all kinds of companies in these studies. So we have some restaurants, brewery, there are healthcare. So there's manufacturing. We have an RV customization manufacturing plant, a company that makes skateboards, but most of them are white collar. So the large number are white collar, the biggest group are professional services. So there are a lot in graphic design or PR, marketing, advertising. We have lawyers, architects, finance. So there are banks, a lot of tech firms. There are a lot of social services. There are also some local governments, and we're seeing more and more local governments.

47:13Juliet Schor:So it seems like it was really broad. This was trying to ask whether the four-day workweek worked across all kinds of forms.

47:19Laurie Santos:It does, but here are the caveats. Number one, these are mostly small firms. The biggest firm that really did it for a lot of employees was a 5 ,000 person, kind of a social services healthcare firm in the UK, which started with 1 ,000 of its 5 ,000 employees. And then after the success of the trial, they've been rolling it out to all of them. But a lot of them are in the, you know, sort of one to 500 person range or even the 25 to 50, you know, and then we have a big clump of really little firms to under 20 person. So we don't have a giant firm that has transitioned everybody yet. I think the giant firms are going to do it.

48:01Laurie Santos:They're going to start with some divisions. We are very overwhelmingly white collar though, but a range of white collar. If you count, I don't know, social service workers, if you're a Head Start teacher or a residential counselor in a facility for young people, I don't know if that's considered white collar.

48:22Juliet Schor:No, that makes sense. That makes sense. So starting with the companies that really were not trying to decrease their productivity, they were hoping in four days that workers could do just about as much. How were they able to make that change? Like, what did they take off their plate to keep employees productive?

48:35Laurie Santos:The biggest things, the bread and butter of what they were taught was meetings and focus time. So those are really key. But the process was a kind of employee empowered work reorganization. Let's say you have a team, they get together and they might do like a very intensive scrutiny of everything that they do. All the documents they have to fill out. what are the steps? I remember talking to someone who did accounting in a firm, like every step of approval of an invoice and figure out where the bottlenecks were. I call that in the book process engineering. That comes from manufacturing where you're looking at all your steps, but you can do that in offices too.

49:18Laurie Santos:But then you have some other kinds of things like at Kickstarter, which is a tech firm. One of the things I learned is that the senior leadership team realized that it had to make changes in how it gave instructions to its development teams. So it wants a new product, gives them some instructions. The development team goes down a road, it gets to a fork in the road, very common in software development. They don't know what the leadership prefers. They go off on one and then the leadership looks at it. No, no, we really wanted the other. So what the leadership had to do is figure out how to decide what they want earlier and give more detailed instructions to the team and then give the team more autonomy.

50:01Laurie Santos:And that point about more upfront investment came up in some other contexts. So for example, where you have customer service in IT companies providing internet service to rural areas, and they got a huge new contract at the same time they started the four-day week. And when I went back to talk to them at six months, they tell me they'd just gotten this big contract. We didn't know that when they started. How did you make it work? I mean, it seems like it would be impossible. And they said, no, actually the four-day week made it possible. So they had a massive increase in demand. Well, how could that be?

50:38Laurie Santos:Number one, they said it stopped people from getting burned out so they could keep working hard. But the other big thing was it forced them to document what they were doing. So whenever a customer service complaint came in, they weren't doing the documentation. So the next time the same one comes in, somebody has to reinvent the wheel. If you document upfront, I mean, it's a basic principle of customer service, right? But unless you put in that upfront time, you may just be constantly trying to keep your head above water and not do it. And that's something that I talked to a number of people about, Lou, is like the things that seemed obvious that they should have done or like, why do you have so many dysfunctional meetings?

51:20Laurie Santos:Or why don't you give people more focus time? And it was like, oh, we're just trying to keep our head above water. So I liken it to that thing about you get a new piece of software and you just start using it instead of like learn it to figure out how it can help.

51:36Juliet Schor:It also seems like even though workers were kind of in some ways having a higher pace at work because they're kind of putting more work into the four days, they actually enjoyed the busier pace more. And that seems like in part because they were empowered during the busier pace, but also because they had this lovely reward at the end that they could look forward to. And that kind of seemed to help a lot in terms of people's happiness and sense of engagement too.

51:58Laurie Santos:Yeah. And I think that question of pace sort of differed. I mean, if you look at our survey results, we ask about pace of work and intensity of work. It doesn't go up by much. It does go up a little bit. And I don't know if it's that people just don't, like what you're saying, they just don't feel it. It doesn't feel too sped up. Or it really, if that work reorganization really did take a lot of stuff off their plates. But either way, the point is that it's working.

52:29Juliet Schor:So that's in the companies that expected the same level of productivity across the four days, these 180, 100 companies. But let's talk about companies that were more on the 180, 80, right, where they really got into the four-day work week thinking, you know, there's not a lot of meetings we can cancel. People are at the max pace they can be at. We're just going to give them some time off. How did the companies react to the time off in this case? Did they see any benefits and what were they?

52:56Laurie Santos:I think in those cases, there are two things. One is you see improvements in product quality. So at the restaurant, the level of service and the quality of what was going on at the restaurants really improved a lot. Plus, of course, not losing people. You do see the same thing with the nurses. So these are the two sort of purest cases of 180-80s where the nurses, you get improvements in patient outcomes and you get people stop quitting. One of the examples that I give a lot of space to in the book is an advertising team in Canada. It was, I think, a 57-person team. During the pandemic, everybody was so stressed out.

53:46Laurie Santos:They had very high rates of turnover in this industry, maybe about 30 % on average is what the leader of the team told me. Before the pandemic, she gave them three hours of time a week to just take exercise. And then she was like, oh my God, everybody is so stressed out with the pandemic. What can I do to help them? And the obvious thing was, we just need time. This was at the height of the pandemic, and it was just really hard for people to even get food. And they had to wait on. In Canada, the lines were really long, social distancing in the groceries. And so she gave Friday afternoons off. Someone came and said, you know, you already given us three and then the four, it's a four-day week.

54:27Laurie Santos:And she's like, okay, everybody has a four-day week now. But they had high turnover. And after that, nobody left the team. What's fascinating about that story is, this is a very enterprising moment, she realized she could start to monetize the team's stability. So she went to her finance division to say, okay, how much does it cost us to lose a person? And it's a lot. And it was a big company, millions and millions of dollars. And then she started talking to the clients and saying, I can promise you team stability. Nobody is going to leave over the course of this contract. And if we achieve 1 % turnover or something, we get a bonus.

55:13Laurie Santos:The clients couldn't believe it because people are always leaving and it creates a lot of wasted time, hiring, onboarding, training, exit interviews, all of that. And this came out in another marketing agency. And what both of them experienced was the ability to sell more business to existing clients because they were providing a better service. So they didn't have to be spending as much time just out there trying to get new clients.

55:41Juliet Schor:Did you think you were going to see this many companies who wanted to stick with it when you first started the trial?

55:46Laurie Santos:We've been surprised at how positive the results are, I guess would be a way of saying that. I think we were pretty sure we'd get nice employee benefits. But what really surprised me is that if we had better measurements, I could have done the 180, 125, right? The companies who report much higher productivity, and there are a lot of them, a lot. I never expected that. I figure the main thing is to just keep up where you are, and then you get all these employee benefits, so you have to be better off. You're no worse on the productivity and you're better off on this other stuff. But it's a real business strategy for many.

56:29Laurie Santos:It's actually something that's going to really help your company as opposed to something that you'll just be okay if you do it.

56:36Juliet Schor:Do you think we're in for a change? You know, I guess when we changed the five-day workweek, that was a huge transformation. It felt like no one could possibly have us do this. And now a five-day workweek just seems normal. Do you think in 50 years or so, the four-day workweek will be the norm?

56:51Laurie Santos:Definitely. I think we're going to be close to that in 10. Really? AI is going to make it a lot easier to reduce work time. And I think there's momentum here. Right now, we're in a little bit of a, the companies are scared right now because there's a lot of political turmoil. They don't know what AI is going to bring. They don't know how the tariffs are going to affect the economy. And it's just a period of a lot of uncertainty. I think it's part of why they're calling people back into the workplace, which they haven't actually been able to do for the most part. Those numbers of remote work are really holding steady.

57:29Laurie Santos:But I feel that the pandemic transformed the four-day week into common sense. And what I hear from some of these folks who interact with customers is that when they tell their customers about it, instead of the customers freaking out that they're not going to be able to contact them on the off day, they're sending back messages with all caps and tons of exclamation marks saying, oh, I'm so excited for your Yugo.

57:59Juliet Schor:I wish I had that.

58:00Laurie Santos:When you talk to people about it now, it seems realistic in a way that pre-pandemic, it seemed like, oh, we could never have that. I would love it, but that's not possible.

58:11Juliet Schor:And now it just seems possible. We're just moving towards the new era of work weeks.

58:15Laurie Santos:It does seem possible.

58:17Juliet Schor:So imagine a lot of people who are hearing about the benefits of this who are themselves employees but might not be employees at a place that is amenable to a four-day work week are thinking, oh my gosh, this sounds amazing. Any advice for them about how to make this a reality in their own workplace or things that they should be thinking about, about how to change their pace of work?

58:34Laurie Santos:That's a great question. I do have some discussion at the end of the book about how to do it, but I think there are resources online also, how to talk to your boss about a four-day week. But I think the first thing to do, like, well, of course, read my book, but also So get educated on now the growing amount of evidence about the benefits of a four-day week. Start a conversation at your workplace, whether it's first with your boss or maybe with some co-workers. Don't assume that it's a non-starter. Don't assume that it's impossible where you work. Survey data that I talk about in the book shows that something like close to a third of all senior executives have been saying they're interested in a four-day week, that it's coming, or they're open to it.

59:22Laurie Santos:So there's just been a lot of increased openness at higher levels of management about it. And I think sort of trying to go about it in all kinds of workplaces is a lot more viable now, trying to start that conversation. If you have a boss you can talk to who might be willing, ask them to send me an email.

59:44Juliet Schor:My gosh, you're going to have RIP inbox with every person listening to this.

59:49Laurie Santos:You know, I hear from employers on a regular basis and I say, you know, I'd be happy to come and talk to your team. I think it's really viable pretty much everywhere. And there are plenty of other people like me. There's an organization called WorkFor.org, which is mostly volunteers working in different different communities, to bring groups of companies together to talk about it, creating what we call communities of practice. So you could try and do that. Just lots of way. I think get the conversation going. The more people learn about it and think about it, the more open they are to trying it.

1:00:27Juliet Schor:You talked about all these emotional behavioral benefits of this four-day work week. I'm curious if that applies to people who are working remotely too. How much of it is just kind of taking that full day off of work and how much of it is not having to go to the office, not having to do the commute and so on?

1:00:41Laurie Santos:Yeah, that's a great question. So some people do reference their commutes and so forth, but a quarter of our sample is fully remote. We only have five or six percent who are fully in person. So most are hybrid. There's no difference in anything across these modalities in terms of these findings. So yeah, it works for all those modalities. Here's another surprising thing. It also works across all the sort of socio-demographic categories that we look at, whether we're talking age, gender, race and ethnicity, parental status, disability status, great improvements for people with disabilities, managers, non-managers, education levels, et cetera.

1:01:27Laurie Santos:I mean, very, very similar well-being impacts across all those groups. So it really is, you know, four for all, I think. It really works for everyone.

1:01:39Juliet Schor:Well, that's a pretty ringing endorsement to end on. The four-day week works for everyone. If Juliette's research has got you thinking about how transformative an extra day off each week could be for you, then you should check out her new book, Four Days a Week, the life-changing solution for reducing employee stress, improving wellbeing, and working smarter. Juliet's book is packed with insights, and it just might be the perfect gift to give your boss. Next time on The Happiness Lab, we'll hear about another of my favorite books of 2025. It's from an expert on decision-making who has some important advice on how to make choices that more closely match our values.

1:02:15Juliet Schor:All that next time on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

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