The results are in—there’s no reason to work five days a week. This might seem like an outrageous claim, but the world’s first large-scale independent study of the four-day workweek has been, by all measures, a resounding success. Starting in February 2022, Four Day Week Global (4DWG) started trials with dozens of companies with hundreds of employees in the US, Ireland, and the UK. Of the companies that participated, the majority said the experiment was successful. When asked to rank how the experiment affected their organizations overall, the average response was a 9 out of ten. They ranked productivity at 7.7 and performance at 7.6. “As people struggle to recover from the pandemic, workplace stress, long hours, and the pressures of daily life have emerged as urgent problems,” 4DWG says. They think a shorter schedule is the obvious solution and that a rethought workweek will carry social, economic, and climate benefits.