The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

ktallett

Basically every study shows a four day week works best. The issue is why we never go with what the study shows.

aeternum

Papers like this should be called opinion surveys. Calling it a study is a disservice to science. As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.

B1FF_PSUVM

I remember one business class anecdote, where the conclusion of changing workplace conditions (light, music, etc. both ways) was that productivity studies increase productivity ...

yshamrei

Won’t we face an economic decline if we continue reducing the work week even further?

cluckindan

But how will a consulting company bill for the 20%?

ENGNR

Australia also has a 60 year productivity low and a government that is boosting taxes on capital gains on shares/business to basically a worldwide high. So take our experiments with a grain of salt!

panny

>scienceaim >!! Junk science slop blog. Nice. 87.3% AI GPT zerogpt.com https://i.imgur.com/9lT1VSp.jpeg

oompydoompy74

Speaking as an American, I don’t give a shit if it increases productivity or not. Productivity has gone up exponentially with technological advancement since the advent of the 5 day work week. We, as a species, should be minimizing work to 3 or 4 days a week with equal overall pay. Corporations should be fined heavily for contacting an employee after working hours. On call should require corporations to pay hefty overtime. This is a compromise because really and truly corporations should be illegal. Employee owned co-ops are more humane.

claudiug

USA: So what I hear, is we need to work 6 days per week + AI? Correct?

sublinear

> What success looks like differs by industry, and a rigid, one-size-fits-all measurement would have made the findings less applicable to the real world [...] Burnout emerged as a major theme in the findings. This is the actual problem to discuss, not the days per week. Stressors vary a lot by industry and experience level. A senior manager in IT may do more than 40 hours a week plus be on-call with almost no stress as long as their projects are doing well. Meanwhile, there may be no sane amount of overtime pay that will convince a young guy doing roofing in his first year, and he's highly stressed out either way. Anyone spinning this as a political issue is plain ignorant.

userbinator

Now do 3, 2, 1, and perhaps 0 days... but seriously, this probably just resulted in employees squeezing out some of the slack time they would otherwise have with an extra day.

pizzly

Working based on time i.e. 5 days a week is already problematic. We all see the pay by the hour workers like pool cleaners, vendor machine stocking people etc spending lots of time dragging out their work as they get paid by the hour. It makes perfect sense from their perspective and yes not everyone drags the work. Fixing the work week to just 5 days have similar issues. Some weeks will be less work and other weeks more work but you spend the same five days there. So the what you learn that matters is to spend 5 days physically there and perform a minimum workload so you don't get fired. You drag the weeks with less work and pick up inefficient habits as a result. That is what a 5 day working week teaches. Again there will be exceptions. Now assuming this study is correct I am not surprised with the results. You just incentivized workers to get the same amount of output done with the condition that you gain 1 day off. Off course workers will find better and quicker ways of working to get that day off. Even if we did a 4 working day week the problem of working based on time either fixed or paid by the hour remains. The incentivisation is the problem.

passive

Four-day work weeks are for cowards. Take all that AI productivity and found a one-day work week company. One day of focused collaboration each week, let bots and brains chew on stuff in the interim.

rr808

As someone working on a Sunday on a rainy memorial day weekend. Bring back the 5 day week!

Pacers31Colts18

Corporations really dont care about productivity. Wfh has shown we are more productive

stego-tech

Given the gargantuan amount of data showing productivity relative to wage gains, or productivity relative to time worked, or productivity relative to physical office proximity, and the absolute staunch refusal of business to listen to any of it, I can only assume one thing: The point was never productivity, it was about humiliation and control. If it were about productivity, workers would be paid substantially more to reflect the immense productivity gains we’ve created through automation; we are not . If it were about effective time management or efficiency, we would be on four-day, 32 hour work weeks to reflect the real productive output of labor; we are not . Just like how RTO excuses of “mentoring Juniors” and “improving team cohesion” went out the door for mass layoffs, despite data showing that a flexible schedule adapting to the needs of the team rather than whims of leadership have better outcomes and higher productivity; we now pay higher commute costs, fuel costs, energy costs, and opportunity costs so real estate investments don’t invert. It’s all bullshit and lies, and this is one more study to add to the Alexandria-esque library of research proving that there is no single good way of working, and the insistence of refusing to change how we work is ultimately costing us more than if we just learned to adapt.

sensanaty

Here in NL lots of people do 32 hour weeks (legally your employer cannot deny you this if you ask for it), and I've literally never seen it be an issue productivity/team-wise, and people's QoL raises dramatically having an entire extra day free to themselves.

jpollock

Glancing through the study, I'm curious about both sample bias, and the lack of formal measurement. I'm not an expert in this type of thing, not even an amateur. I'm poking holes to see what's left. "Participants were identified via media reports featuring Australian firms trialling the 100:80:100 model, in addition to companies listed on recruitment sites that specialise in 4DWW jobs. In other instances, eligible organisations were recommended by the participants themselves." I'd expect organisations with positive results will be the ones recommended by other participants - "talk to these people, it worked for them too!" I'm also interested in whether or not organisations converted all staff to 100:80:100, or if it was optional. Is the performance driven by peer pressure? Finally, the participants' measures of productivity will have significant lag time in them, so it depends on trial's length, e.g. "revenue", "profit", "csat", "projects delivered on time", "net promoter score". Table 1 has "Duration", but the units are unlabelled, if it's weeks, it's less than a year, months is probably better for seeing performance changes. It's an interesting qualitative study, I'd certainly like a four day work week with no change in comp.

optiWorker

I believe these results, as my experience of Australian workplaces has been ubiquity of people whose presence is net negative to the workplace, even after discounting their salary. Most Australian companies would be better off simply paying (10~90% of) its employees to stay at home. I do wonder to what extent this is due to the Great Feminization - it is now routine to find workplaces that have "upgraded" their wokeness from reminders that sexual and physical violence is not OK, to policies like "disparaging remarks are not tolerated" or "you must respect your colleagues at all times".

mmooss

Here's the paper, with no paywall. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x Hopkins, J., Bardoel, E.A. & Djurkovic, N. The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of the 100:80:100 model. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07536-x