Huge 4-Day Work Week Experiment Begins in The UK: The Largest Ever Conducted

Even though they've gained an entire day of personal time, thousands of lucky people still get paid 100 percent of their regular income to do their jobs.

It sounds too good to be true. It is possible to have a dream. A four-day work week could become the new normal if campaigns continue to gather steam.

70 companies and over 3,300 employees in the UK are embracing the work-life balance shift as part of a pilot program to trial four-day work arrangements for the next six months.

The initiative, spearheaded by 4 Day Week Global alongside other organizations, is being run in conjunction with researchers from Cambridge University, Oxford University, and Boston College, who will investigate how the four-day week impacts workers

Juliet Schor from Boston College will be analyzing how employees respond to having an extra day off, in terms of stress and burnout, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy use, travel, and many other aspects of life.

It's not just workers in the UK who will benefit from the four-day work week. The deadline to sign up for a trial in the US and Canada is next month, and the pilot is expected to get underway in October.

Four-day work weeks or, alternatively, 35-hour weeks have been studied by researchers for years now across a number of international trials, with the largest to date being an experiment inIceland that involved approximately 2,500 participants.

Reducing hours worked by staff was found to offer many benefits to employees.

After starting to work fewer hours, many workers said they felt better, had more energy, and were less stressed.

The positive effect on their work was caused by this.

It makes sense for employees to work less time in order to earn the same amount of money. They can be more productive in the time they do spend working if they spend less time working and more time with their families.

The 100-80-100 model is an in-principle commitment made by employees who take part in these programs, meaning they get 100 percent of their pay, working 80 percent of the time.

Research suggests that if we reduce our working hours, we can reduce carbon emissions.

According to Schor, the four-day week is a triple dividend policy that helps employees, companies and the climate. We will be digging into all of this.

The first successful experiment of a four-day work week at a trust firm in New Zealand led to the creation of 4 Day Week Global.

"What we've seen is a massive increase in engagement and staff satisfaction about the work they do, a massive increase in staff intention to continue to work with the company, and we've seen no drop in productivity," Andrew Barnes said at the time.

We pay for productivity.

We can expect even more support to get behind the campaign if the new UK, Australia, and New Zealand trials deliver such promising results.

Modern society's adoption of the five-day work week in the early 20th century is what some think the transition will be like.

The head of people and talent at a British tech company told Euronews that moving first gives them a lot of advantages.

There has been an increase in applications, an increase in sentiment, and we have been able to hire more diverse people.

The pilot and campaign can be found at the website.