Thousands of workers to take part in ‘biggest ever’ four-day working week trial in UK

The four-day working week dream could soon be a reality with the launch of the UK’s ‘biggest ever’ pilot scheme.

Over 3,000 British workers at sixty companies across the country will work four-day weeks and enjoy three-day weekends, all without any reduction in pay. 

A wide range of businesses and charities from a variety of industries are expected to take part in the scheme, including a Manchester-based medical devices firm.

And while the pilot is planned to run for an initial six months from June to December, if it works well, the participating firms could make the rota permanent.

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The pilot is being run by academics at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as Boston College in the US, in partnership with the campaign group 4 Day Week Global, the 4 Day Week UK Campaign, and the Autonomy thinktank.

The trial was launched to examine how four-day working weeks might work at a broad range of companies across the economy in the wake of the Covid pandemic, which saw a number of companies reevaluate the standard 9-5, five-day working week.

Read More: Scotland to trial a four-day working week with no loss of wages for employees

Joe O’Connor, the chief executive of 4 Day Week Global, said there was no way to ‘turn the clock back’ to the pre-pandemic world. He explained: “Increasingly, managers and executives are embracing a new model of work which focuses on quality of outputs, not quantity of hours.

“Workers have emerged from the pandemic with different expectations around what constitutes a healthy life-work balance.”

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Last year, a Greater Manchester-based packing firm made headlines for permanently adopting a four-day working week to give its employees ‘time to focus on themselves’. 

Belmont Packaging and its e-commerce sister business, Boxed-Up, both based in Wigan, initially trialled the shorter working week in its manufacturing departments before the pandemic in late 2019.

Bosses said they started the trial initially to ‘give staff more time to focus on themselves, their mental health and their loved ones’ without any reduction in wages.

After the trial proved to be a major success, the company announced last year that it would be making the shorter hours a permanent fixture for its thirty-one staff members.