4-day work week: these are the countries that have experimented with it and the bias that calls it into question

It seemed that for a while the debate on the 4-day workday had been deadlocked. However, a new proposal.

Belgium is going to introduce the four-day working week for those who request it. However, employees will not work less. Instead of betting on a week of 32 working hours in four days (as has been proposed in most experiments so far), the Belgian plan proposes working 40 hours divided into four days. That is, they will simply condense their hours into fewer days if they wish, and the proposal includes that workers will be able to decide flexibly whether they work four or five days a week.

Beyond the debate on productivity or whether there are sectors or professionals where any such proposal may be unfeasible, during the last two years there have been several countries that have carried out experiments with different conclusions. Here we collect them.

Iceland: Fewer hours with the same salary among civil servants

Iceland tested a similar model between 2015 and 2019 that is considered the largest experiment to date. However, it reduced the week and maintained salary levels. Some 2,500 people participated in the test phase, all of them civil servants.

A study conducted by the Icelandic non-profit organization Alda (Association for Democracy and Sustainability) and the British think tank Autonomy found that the well-being of participants had improved markedly, work processes had been optimized and collaboration was more Close between colleagues. Productivity was maintained or improved. Although as we will see later, all this may have a later bias.

Scotland and Sweden have also launched initiatives branded as expensive

Scotland is also trialling the four-day workweek, with the state supporting participating businesses with around £10m. For now, the plan is going ahead.

For its part, in Sweden, a four-day work week with equal pay was tested in 2015, with mixed results. Even the left parties thought that it would be too expensive to apply it on a large scale. But some companies chose to keep the reduced working day for their workers.

And in Spain?

In Spain, the initial plan proposed by Más País, the party of Íñigo Errejón, seems .

Until now, the Ministry of Industry has frozen a plan that will affect 6,000 employees of 200 small and medium-sized companies if they start up, they will be able to extend the weekend by one day, keeping their salary for a year.

The pact was born from the support of Más País to the Royal Decree Law for the Management of EU Funds a year ago. In exchange, the Government promised to allocate 50 million spread over several years to start this pilot study with voluntary companies, between 200 and 400.

Industry alleged to Más País that the pilot plan could not be started until it had a specific budget item. Tejero comments that this year’s Public Accounts include 10 million euros for this plan. And the bases have not yet been developed to allocate such funds to companies that voluntarily want to join the pilot program.

The Valencian Community, at a regional level, also contemplates that it is expected to start up this year.

Hawthorne effect: the bias that makes these experiments questionable

Although some of these cases, such as the Icelandic one, have been seen as a success, however, there are several opinions that in recent times have called it into question. Professor at the University of Technology in Sydney Anthony Veal commented in an essay in The Conversation that the fact that they were civil servants was something to take into account, and also commented on an important aspect: .

What does this effect consist of? Its name comes from an experiment carried out in 1924 by Elton Mayo, an Australian-born sociologist. He conducted his research at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company, which manufactured telephone equipment for AT&T.

The simple experiment aimed to assess the effect of working conditions on productivity. When the lighting in the work area was increased for a few workers, it was observed that the productivity of the workers in that particular hall had also increased. This allowed establishing the fact that the change improved productivity.

These workers were also part of other successful experiments in the following years. Work schedules and rest breaks were changed, and food was offered during the breaks. It was found that every small change was an improvement in productivity.

The experiments continued until 1932 and all these changes were reversed assuming productivity would fall, but surprisingly there was no drop in productivity levels.

Mayo established that it was not the change in the physical environment that increased productivity, but rather workers’ belief that they were valued, cared for, and that someone cared about their workplace. In addition, having the opportunity to discuss changes before they were applied contributed to increased productivity.

However, the Mayo experiment has been evaluated differently by different researchers. Many claim that the increased level of productivity was due to the fact that employees knew they were being watched and that they had to do more.