A colleague in a former workplace tried to quit and was persuaded to stay by the offer of a four day week on the same salary (talented guy, difficult and expensive to replace). From what I could tell the result was that he was highly motivated, continued to be very productive and of course was much happier. I think he took Mondays off, and would use the extra day to go on longer trips at the weekend (often surfing iirc) that he wouldn't have otherwise been able to. I really envied him :)

> I think he took Mondays off […]

I'm not sure if I'd gone with that given that there are a number of statutory holidays on Monday: if you take Fridays off then there'd be times when you only have three-day weeks.

Where I'm at we have Victoria Day, Civic/Simcoe Day, Labour Day, Thanksgiving:

* https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/public-...

Throw in Family Day for Ontario.

Plenty of floating days as well of course (July 1, December 25).

Ah yeah but I can't remember the exact details, could be that he stacked an extra day onto his weekend in those cases. Thinking about it though, even if he "lost" a public holiday that's still a really nice amount of free time all things considered :D

That sort of thing is very country-specific - in the UK, for example, all bank holidays (except 25-26 December), are set by law on Monday or Friday. That's not the case in most European countries.

How could weekends possibly work? Society would come to a complete halt on Saturday and Sunday! For religious reasons we can all accept Sundays off, but Saturdays? Madness!

Have you tried contacting British council services on a Saturday or Sunday?

What you've described isn't far from reality.

To be fair it's just as bad on Monday to Friday as well at least in the three local councils I've had to try and contact.

I did many years of 4 day work weeks, although I was hourly (and doing a "less skilled" labour type job). It was pretty much a 24/7 type operation, so everyone would have four days of work in a row, but would be evenly distributed throughout the week. Everyone loved it. It was 10 hour days (40 hours a week) vs a normal shift which would be 8 hours (but 5 days a week). That extra day off a week is totally worth the extra 2 hours a day.

My company is on a four-day week. We work Monday to Thursday and just close on Fridays. We're transitioning to a three-day week (dropping Mondays) in January.

We're a small software firm, so this obviously may be less feasible for a City Council.

> My company is on a four-day week. We work Monday to Thursday and just close on Fridays. We're transitioning to a three-day week (dropping Mondays) in January

Wow, sounds good. Are there reductions in pay associated with the change?

No, but we are moving from a 10:00-16:00 workday to 09:00-17:00, so we're theoretically going to end up working 21 hours rather than 20 per week. There's no clocking in/out, so I think it'll work itself out.

I think your problem is thinking of this council as a "business".

If a local council was a business there would be a fire in the basement one Sunday morning.

Follow on - I do a "kind of" 4 day work week at full pay. four full days then 2 hours of wash up on the Friday. Its highly sector dependant to make it work, couldn't possibly work for everyone if we had SLA's to meet.

> If a local council was a business there would be a fire in the basement one Sunday morning.

Sorry I've read this sentence a couple times and I cannot discern the meaning. Perhaps it is a British expression I do not know. Can you elaborate? Why would there be a fire in the basement? Why on one Sunday morning? Why once?

Because that's the best time to burn it down for the insurance money with minimal human cost.

My point is its not a business, it doesn't have to make money and if it was held up to the standards of a commercial enterprise you'd have no better solution then to burn it down.

This is in response to OP's idea that you need to fulfil some kind of service requirement, or even run an effective service at all.

> I think your problem is thinking of this council as a "business"

I wasn't aware I had a problem :) I've been reading about trials of four day weeks for a while[0]. Strangely (or not so strangely) stories like these are always suspiciously light on specifics(!)

From [0]: "The trial is based on the 100:80:100 model – 100% of pay for 80% of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain 100% productivity"

It talks about "an extra day off", but doesn't mention the word Friday. So how do the extra days off get allocated?

"We’ll be analysing how employees respond to having an extra day off, in terms of stress and burnout, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy use, travel and many other aspects of life"

That article claims a fish and chip shop is participating. If you have retail staff working - say - four days per week instead of five, you obviously need more recruit and pay for additional staff to cover the lost day, or your shop loses an additional day's trading each week.

Are they hoping to cook and sell more fish per hour to cover this additional cost due to staff productivity increases? Or convince all customers to purchase the same overall amount of fish and chips each week but to do it over fewer days?

Must confess I've never considered how to increase productivity in a fish and chip shop :)

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/06/thousands-w...

We're a small B2B automation systems integrator... We do simply let everyone work tens on Monday-Thursday and not come in on any Friday from June to September.

Business does come to a complete halt on Fridays every week, we just schedule service work, installs, meetings, vendor shipments, etc. for Monday-Thursday.

You might be surprised to learn that the sky does not fall down. Sure, if a customer has a disastrous issue on a Friday, I'll typically get called to remote in and help fix it, but that happens maybe once a month? And if it takes until Monday to resolve the issue, the world does not come to an end.

> You might be surprised to learn that the sky does not fall down.

I seem to have stepped on toes with my question, that really wasn't my intention. I'm currently self employed so can work as much or as little as I like, but that has pretty direct consequences for me!

> Business does come to a complete halt on Fridays every week [..] Sure, if a customer has a disastrous issue on a Friday, I'll typically get called to remote in and help fix it, but that happens maybe once a month?

So, does the business answer the phones and emails on Fridays for support calls? What about sales calls?

I took Wednesdays off for about 5 months once to burn PTO (the accrual policy was changing, and I would have been over the cap at the end of the year). That wasn't systemic, most of my colleagues either took more vacations before the change or planned to take some bigger blocks.

It was nice to have a day off in the middle of the week, although I had some occasional meetings, I needed to take, which was bleh. It was also super easy to schedule interviews when I was recruited by a former coworker. Unfortunately, I didn't end up fully using my FMLA newborn leave, because it needed to be used in week long chunks and I had planned to burn PTO first, and use the FMLA weeks later, but I switched jobs instead (and went back to a 5 day week)

Good few folks in my company here in Germany do it, it's pretty common. But it's 80% time for 80% pay. I don't have any metrics in terms of productivity, but my personal impression (coming from freelance life before this) is that the corporate world is so incredibly unproductive and inefficient, you can pretty easily remove 1 - 2 days from the working week and remain as productive.