Employees Who Shifted To 4-Day Work Week Use Free Time To Sleep More, Claims Survey

What would you do if you got to work four days a week instead of five? Maybe enjoy your hobbies such as sports, music or art, or spend more time with family and friends? Well, as per a study, when employees get to cut their traditional five-day workweek down to four days, they prefer to allocate their new free time to none of these but sleep.

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Workers who shifted to 32-hour workweeks (4 day work week) logged 7.58 hours per night of sleep, nearly a full hour more than when they were keeping 40-hour workweeks (5 day work week), according to lead researcher Juliet Schor, a sociologist and economist at Boston College, who has been tracking over 180 organizations globally as they shift to shorter work week schedules through six-month pilot programs, as per a Bloomberg report.

Employees spent nearly 7 out of their 8 extra free hours per week snoozing, rather than knocking out errands or socializing with friends.

"I wasn't surprised that people are getting a little more sleep, but I was surprised at how robust the changes were," researcher Schor said. The percentage of people considered sleep deprived, getting less than 7 hours of nightly sleep, dropped massively from 42.6% to 14.5% on four-day work schedules.

Schor's surveys of 304 workers at 16 companies (3 US-based, 1 in Australia and 12 headquartered in Ireland) track a set of global, six-month trials being run by a nonprofit organization called 4 Day Week Global and come as the pandemic has pushed employers across industries to rethink how, where and when work gets done, as per the report.

Also Read: 60% Employees In India Prefer Work Flexibility Over 4 Day Work Week

Connection Between Sleep & Work Hours?

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The concept of shortened workweeks has been gaining traction since the covid pandemic gave many workers a glimpse of how flexibility could improve their lives.

Some other studies have shown a connection between sleep and work hours, especially in jobs prone to long hours. "Sleep and work are sort of in competition with each other," according to Barnes, "and when you trade sleep for work, it's problematic. You sacrifice your health and have bad work outcomes." The consequences of low sleep include unethical behaviour, lower work engagement, less helpful behaviour toward colleagues, and more abusive and aggressive leadership tendencies, he said, as per the Bloomberg report.

Also Read: Scotland 4 Day Work Week In Exchange For Pay Cut

Benefits Of A Four-day Work Week

Researcher Schor's preliminary data show that workers on four-day schedules in the study saw improvement in a variety of well-being and productivity measures, such as life satisfaction and work-family balance, and she said that those results may be correlated with additional time spent sleeping.

In the view of Clete Kushida, a professor of sleep medicine at Stanford University, increasing nightly sleep should likely help workers see some combination of improved mood, enhanced short-term memory and focus, higher executive function skills and less risk-taking behaviour.

"More sleep is always good," Kushida said, as per the report. "Improvements vary from person to person, but the biggest effect would be alertness throughout the day."

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