32, 36 or 40 Hours? Three Four-Day Weeks, Compared
A reduced 32-hour week, a gentler 36-hour week and a compressed 40-hour 4x10 are three different products. Benefits, risks, and how exempt and hourly overtime rules change the answer.
4 Day Work Week Consultancy
Take back day five.
Day5Group helps organisations move to a four-day week without cutting pay or breaking coverage: redesign the work first, pilot with agreed measures, then decide on evidence.
Evidence first
Claims tied to named trials and studies, with the caveats attached. No borrowed percentages.
Redesign, not deletion
A stop-doing list and workflow changes come before the day off. Calendar-only pilots fail.
Coverage protected
Demand modelled by day and hour, staggered cover agreed, service floors set before launch.
Decided on data
Outputs, quality, customers and wellbeing baselined in advance, with pause and stop rules.
What we do
Four focused ways in. Each starts with readiness and ends with a decision you can defend.
Readiness audit
Demand patterns, waste, coverage risks and legal checks, scored against a ten-point audit before any date is announced.
Read the audit →Pilot design
A six-month pilot with preparation workshops, meeting and workload redesign, and customer floors agreed up front.
How pilots run →Manager enablement
Training managers to run outcomes, spot hidden overtime, and visibly take the day off themselves.
For managers →Measurement & follow-up
A twelve-number scorecard, equity breakdowns, and a published twelve-month follow-up, misses included.
See the scorecard →How it works
Three stages, roughly nine months from first audit to a permanent decision.
1
Diagnose & design
Baseline the work, build the stop-doing list, choose the model team by team, and agree how success will be judged.
2
Pilot
Six months on the shorter week with weekly service checks, monthly wellbeing pulses, and fixes made in the open.
3
Decide & embed
Publish results against the agreed criteria: make it permanent, adjust the model, extend, or stop honestly.
Latest writing
Evidence, implementation guides and case studies from the Day5Group blog, newest first.
Three Reversals, One Pattern: Krystal, Safeguard Global and Alter Agents
Workload unchanged, intensity up, trust down — the shared failure pattern.
What a Major 2025 Study Added: Gains Track Real Hour Cuts
2,896 staff vs controls: burnout down, health up, larger cuts, larger gains.
The Latest UK Pilot: What 17 Firms Did Differently
All 17 continued in 2025 — twelve on four days, five on a nine-day fortnight.
Older Workers and Longer Lives: Time as Retention After 50
Shorter time as a labour-supply strategy for experienced staff.
Designing Your Day Off: Rest, Life Admin and Second Jobs
Protecting recovery without policing adults.
Thinking about a four-day week?
Start with the readiness audit and the pilot scorecard. Both are free to read, and they will tell you whether you are ready.