• Business Affairs / County News / Employee Benefits and Relations / Human Resources / Labor

Across the world, communities are grappling with worker dissatisfaction, hiring and retention challenges, and new demands in the workplace. To meet the moment, employers are getting creative with the benefits and workplace environments they are offering. One such new trend is the trial of a four-day work week.

Shorter, fully-paid work weeks are becoming trendy pilots around the country to offer employees greater work-life-balance, more flexibility, and added benefits during a particularly competitive employment market. Models vary, with some employers cutting down from 40 hour weeks to 32, while others maintain the 40 hour structure, squeezed into four days instead of five. Regardless of the model, here, we look at some broad findings of such trials and break down some of the advantages and risks of the adjusted schedule.

WIRED recently contextualized the history of the broadly accepted 40-hour work week and the increasing momentum to change it:

Reduced working hours have long been a demand from labor; unions won reductions from six days a week to five in the early 20th century, and the US Fair Labor Standards Act enshrined the 40-hour workweek in law in 1938. But while productivity has shot up roughly threefold since then, pay has risen by only about half that amount, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. The length of the workweek has stayed largely the same.

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Read Full Story: https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2022/06/15/the-four-day-work-week-all-th...