The four-day workweek is no longer a pipe dream: In the last five years, hundreds of companies have piloted a four-day, 32-hour workweeks with no pay cuts to some 8,700 workers around the world.
The results have been overwhelmingly positive: Workers love it (they’re less burned out and more engaged) while businesses have reaped the rewards, too (with boosted profits and less turnover).
Companies who successfully made the shift used three key strategies to get as much work done in less time, says Juliet Schor, an economist, sociologist and lead researcher on the experiments. Schor recently detailed the trial results in her latest book, “Four Days a Week,” and told CNBC Make It about the companies’ keys to success:
1. They cut down meetings
The first is implementing productivity hacks, especially shortening or deleting meetings, making meetings more efficient, and adding protected focused time.
During a typical 9-to-5, employees are interrupted every two minutes by meetings, emails and other pings, according to recent Microsoft data.
The businesses Schor studied had a lot of ways to cut down on meetings. Some did a calendar audit to determine if recurring check-ins were really necessary, could be done less frequently or could be shorter.
Some meetings were deleted and replaced with written status updates. Meetings that remained had to include advanced reading and an agenda so participants spent their time together discussing solutions rather than going over summaries.
Finally, many businesses set meeting-free days or calendar blocks to help workers protect their schedules and get focused work done in peace.
2. They made processes more efficient
While more effective meetings and communication help white-collar offices cut down their work schedules, those who work in factories did so through process engineering, Schor says.
For example, at Pressure Drop, a U.K.-based brewery that Schor studied, leaders encouraged employees to “own” the process of making their work tasks more efficient.
Brewing involves a lot of tasks, but one person can do a few of them at a time if they set themselves up well. For example, it takes hours to clean machinery, but there are 30- to 45-minute periods where the operator is waiting around. Instead of letting that dead time go to waste, workers learned to start setting up the next packaging run, lining up kegs, and getting cans ready for the feed line.
At Advanced RV, a motorhome manufacturer near Cleveland, Ohio, the company figured out which people were best at certain tasks, and then changed their division of labor accordingly to let people do the job they were best (and faster) at.
When workers feel like they have ownership about how they get their work done, it helps them feel more capable, Schor says. This, in turn, helps them feel more satisfied in their jobs and in their lives overall, she says.
3. They eliminated low-impact work
Finally, many businesses went deeper to question the tasks and projects they focused their time on, and whether they lined up with their company mission and overall strategy.
One company re-evaluated the purpose of one of their newsletters, Schor says. “They spent a lot of time on the newsletter and realized it just wasn’t really giving them anything, but it was extremely time-consuming.”
The team realized they were only creating and sending out the newsletter as often as they did because they’d always done it, Schor says, though it wasn’t delivering the results they wanted. So, they ended up sending it less often, thereby freeing up the time for the newsletter team to work on more high-impact projects.
This level of intentionality, plus the reward of more time off work, leads employees to value their jobs more, boosts their motivation and yields company success, Schor says.
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