BE 636: Should Companies Switch to a 4-Day Workweek?

This is the Business English Podcast, Episode 636, Should Companies Switch to a 4-Day Workweek? Welcome to the Business English Podcast from All Ears English. Get the English skills you need to achieve your dreams in global business. For a presentation, a meeting, or your office party, this is Real Business English with your favorite American hosts, Lindsay and Aubrey, coming to you from Arizona and Colorado, USA.

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Hello, Lindsay. How are you today? Doing great today, Aubrey. What are we getting into on Business English today? We are talking about working hours. What do you think about this trend toward a four-day workweek?

Yeah. I mean, I know a lot of nurses have this kind of more intensive schedule, so longer days, but shorter weeks. And I think there could be something there, you know, because it depends on what kind of work you're doing too. If it requires intensive focus for longer periods of time, it could be helpful.

And then you need the break at the end of the week. Right. I mean, who doesn't love a three-day weekend? Right. right? Of course. Yeah. The longer days, though, if you're still doing a 40-hour week, then they're 10-hour days.

That's tricky. But I have seen this popping up so much in the news lately. So we're going to share a few recent articles and just kind of what was covered in them. And we're also sharing because a lot of...

CEOs of major corporations, industry leaders have given predictions for what they think is going to happen in the US or worldwide. And this definitely makes for a really interesting conversation with co workers, or, you know, with friends and family. So we're excited to dive into this today. Interesting.

All right. So we're going to dive into this topic. There's a lot here. This is going to be a really fun topic to talk about on the show. So first hit the follow button because if you love the way we approach these cultural topics, guys, we not only talk about what's up in culture, but we also show you how to build on connection by talking about these topics with someone, right?

So hit the follow button. Yes. Awesome. So yeah, as you know out there, many European countries offer a four-day workweek and lately other parts of the world are following suit.

So one of the articles I saw was by Chris Lau and it was called Tokyo Government Gives Workers Four-Day Workweek to Boost Fertility and Family Time. So this was really fascinating how Tokyo is introducing a four-day workweek for government employees, 160,000 government employees. This was in April of 2025. Okay.

And it was interesting how it wasn't just about, you know, longer weekends. It was about more family time for families in order to boost fertility rates.

Yeah, that makes sense with the declining fertility rate. I mean, many countries have that right now. This is sort of a crisis in many people's perspective. It makes sense that they're trying this.

So this is currently in action. This is happening right now, Aubrey, in Japan? Okay, for just government jobs. Yeah. Exactly. So it was the compressed hours, 40 hours still, so four 10-hour days, three-day weekends, which would hopefully improve work-life balance.

And also there were additional childcare leave options that should also help with those low birth rates. And this is worldwide. In the United States, birth rates are a lot lower too. Every young person I know is either not planning on having kids or maybe one or two.

This is You know, it's certainly happening all over the world. So definitely companies are going to be thinking about this when they consider working hours. Yeah, exactly.

So give us more information about the thinking and how it's been working in Japan. What else do we know? Well, this was also... So it's not just about fertility rates.

It also was about an intense overwork culture that had been recognized. There's definitely a push toward that as well, hoping that this would help. Like you were saying, nurses in the US often have had this... type of schedule.

And it does help you eliminate that intense overwork if you can work four days and then have a longer chunk of time off to spend with friends and family. So it's interesting to see this was put into effect on

Some time ago, it has not expanded out to anyone other than government employees. And it's like you said at the top of the episode, Lindsay, it depends on the field as well. It depends on the company depends on the type of work you're doing. All of those things will have a factor about where this can work.

Yeah. And I could see it being useful because we have to go to the dentist, we have to go to the doctor sometimes, but then we could place all of our appointments on Fridays, right? Even though it would be hard to get an appointment on a Friday at that point. And then we could be more focused.

I really like intensive focused work, right? Instead of like, let me take a few hours off and then come back to the work. That makes the work feel longer, right? So I think I would like this if I just had like, I'm not working at all on Fridays.

Right. Right. And it seems like it would work if nobody were, but it would cause some complications. But this is interesting. I also saw an article that was called Major 4-Day Workweek Study suggests that when we work five days, we spend one day doing basically nothing.

This I found fascinating. This was by Oriana Rosa Royal, April of 2026. And that was in fortune.com. And this was really interesting. So here's a quote from the article.

It said, between client calls, meetings, and assignments, it may feel as if every minute of our working week is squeezed to the max, but as it turns out, we are all just procrastinators. That's according to research that shows workers can get as much done in a 33-hour week as in 38 hours.

So this is really interesting, right? We had this study that was showing that when you're working for five days, there are a lot of things that you're pushing to Friday, that you're putting off, filling time. And if you compress the work week, you would get just as much done. That's really interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we know that it's a principle, right? Work expands to fit the time allotted. We know that we can be more efficient often if we have less time.

It's just that we do the work differently and we also get smarter about our choices about how we'll spend that time, right? We can't do everything. So what's the most important thing to do in this period of time? Exactly, right?

We become more proactive about managing, prioritizing tasks because we have to. We don't have the time to put something off until later or to do things that maybe don't require as much attention.

Yeah. So what are some of these predictions? I know Jamie Dimon, he's pretty outspoken. The president of JPMorgan Chase, I feel like he's always on the news making predictions about things.

What did he have to say? Interesting to hear these. So he foresees that technology will change the standard work schedule and he actually expects it to go down to three and a half days. So even less.

That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. But I think part – I'm speculating here, but I think what he's getting at is that AI is going to create a lot of, like we said, efficiencies, right?

It's going to take a lot of roles probably. Right. And so less actual human work will be required. I mean there will be new roles that will be created, right?

Right. So that kind of makes sense if you think of it that way. Yeah. It was similar what Bill Gates said. He was publicly questioned about whether society might have a shorter workday, just like you're saying, due to AI efficiencies.

And he predicted even lower, a two or three day work week. Wow. driven by AI efficiency. So the question is, could we still sustain, you know, can we still be paid enough to make ends meet if we're working that few of hours, right?

What's that going to look like? Yeah, really interesting question. And Eric Yuan from Zoom predicts a standard three to four day work week. I'm wondering how far off this is.

I know, I think we're still a bit off from being able to fully replace a lot of jobs with AI, honestly. I would love to hear their predictions for when, right? They're like, this is in the future. How soon?

And it's still just a prediction. They don't know, right? Maybe 10 years. Yeah, for sure. What does Elon Musk think? Yeah. So he thinks that advanced AI and robotics will make human labor completely optional and that a lot of jobs would go away.

So that's interesting. Can you imagine? Yeah, this is a bigger conversation. This is really about AI, I think, this conversation here. But what do we do when we don't need to work anymore?

I mean... How does it work? Would there be enough innovative jobs that are the critical thinking or will that be replaced by AI as well? We are around in such an exciting time, aren't we?

But it is interesting how much this relates, innovation in technology and AI, how that relates to the work week because that's what's necessitating change there. Exactly. Yeah. That's where this is coming from.

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Okay. How could our listeners attempt to start a conversation about this with friends? We have speakers. Where would we go? What would we do? Right. So this would be a great conversation in the break room at work.

This is interesting to talk about or just with friends. One question you could ask is, would you rather work four 10-hour days or five eight-hour days? So this is interesting. An interesting would you rather.

If you had the option, what would you choose? Yeah. What about you, Aubrey? What would you rather do? I think I would stick with the five, eight hour days.

A 10 hour day is really long. Intensive. Really. What about you? Oh, I like intensity. It might be less sustainable. I don't know because then you would rest on the three day weekend, right?

I would probably want to try it. I would want the option to be able to go back if I hate it. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Or another way to start a conversation, do you think a four-day work week would make employees more productive or less productive?

Yeah, this is interesting too. It's related to that article. And you could even share that and be like, I actually saw this study that we're just as productive working four days as five days. That would be interesting because the proof is in the pudding, as they say, but it seems like that's been proven.

Yeah, you could ask people what kinds of jobs do you think are well suited to this four day work week? I guess nursing does make sense, right? The longer shifts.

What else could you ask? My neighbor's son is a firefighter. And he has that same, it's more like a medical shift. Right. It was like four days on four days off.

And there are a lot of jobs like that that are well suited to that type of schedule. So this is an interesting conversation to ask someone, would this work for your job or what other jobs? What do you think? What are the best jobs for this type of schedule?

Yeah. And then you could ask someone if your company switched to, hypothetically speaking, to a four-day work week, how would it affect your work-life balance? In some ways, it would be worse because you're working 10-hour days and you're not doing anything before or after work. In some ways, it would be better because you could take longer trips and actually relax on the weekend instead of get ready for the next week, right?

Yeah. You can see how this is going to lead to really interesting conversations, right? People likely have thought about it. They likely have something to say, strong opinions.

And it's going to be one of those interesting conversations where your thoughts might sort of adjust as you hear someone else's reasoning. Yes. Yes, for sure. So let's talk about it together.

Let's go through a role play, Aubrey. We're co-workers chatting over a lunch. Perfect. I'll start us out. If you had the option, would you rather work four 10-hour days or five 8-hour days?

I think I'd choose a four-day week. Having a three-day weekend would definitely help me recharge and avoid burnout. How about you? It's tricky. 10-hour days are really long days.

I'm not sure I'd have enough energy to be productive the entire day. That's a good point. Maybe if I knew I'd have an extra day off, I'd stay motivated those longer days. True.

There's also other considerations like customer service. If our clients need help on Fridays, someone would still have to be available. True. But we could stagger the schedules.

Half the team could take Monday off and then the other half could take Friday off. That way the office would stay open all week. Oh yeah, that would work. Ideally, employees would be able to choose between a traditional schedule and a compressed work week.

All right. So that was our conversation. Probably pretty similar to what we would have said personally if we had the conversation. And it's interesting.

This could go lots of different ways, right? You could get more hypothetical. You could bring in this and what about three day we could end up and then I could definitely see how this could lead to talking about AI replacing jobs or, you know, lots of those types of changes, which is also makes for an interesting conversation. A lot of conversations lead in that direction nowadays.

I think that interview happened in 2021. So I believe it was post COVID. We saw the changes with COVID with work from home. But it was kind of pre AI pre chat GPT getting launched into just the general public right in 2022 is when that happened to him again about, you know, what's changed?

What are thoughts now, but the best way to find that episode is probably on the app where you can search an episode number and that episode will come up. So you could find that at allersenglish.com slash app app. It's really the best way to find old episodes.

Exactly. I agree with you. All right. Great topic today, Aubrey. Maybe we'll have Alex back on the show and we'll have to see what's changed here and the predictions for the future.

But guys, use this topic to connect. Again, most people work, not everyone works, but many people do. And they probably have opinions because this affects our interactions with our family members on a daily basis. Are we working 10 hours or seven hours or eight hours?

What are we doing? What a great connection topic. So use these questions. Ask a coworker or a family member one of these questions and get their thoughts.

Interesting. All right. Sounds good. Aubrey, see you soon. Awesome. See you next time. Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening to Business English, a podcast just for you, the high achieving global professional.

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