alt Hacker NewsThe four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100
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I was contacted this week for a position that was openly 6 days a week. We need to end H1B in this country as soon as possible and keep the 996 schedule firmly out of the United States.
They call you lazy for not wanting to compete against the entire world in your own country.
Papers like this should be called opinion surveys.
Calling it a study is a disservice to science. As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
Australia also has a 60 year productivity low and a government that is boosting taxes on capital gains on shares/business to basically a worldwide high. So take our experiments with a grain of salt!
Not the first study, and they all largely report the same results:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02259-6
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/19/four-day-week-...
Here in NL lots of people do 32 hour weeks (legally your employer cannot deny you this if you ask for it), and I've literally never seen it be an issue productivity/team-wise, and people's QoL raises dramatically having an entire extra day free to themselves.
Glancing through the study, I'm curious about both sample bias, and the lack of formal measurement. I'm not an expert in this type of thing, not even an amateur. I'm poking holes to see what's left.
"Participants were identified via media reports featuring Australian firms trialling the 100:80:100 model, in addition to companies listed on recruitment sites that specialise in 4DWW jobs. In other instances, eligible organisations were recommended by the participants themselves."
I'd expect organisations with positive results will be the ones recommended by other participants - "talk to these people, it worked for them too!"
I'm also interested in whether or not organisations converted all staff to 100:80:100, or if it was optional. Is the performance driven by peer pressure?
Finally, the participants' measures of productivity will have significant lag time in them, so it depends on trial's length, e.g. "revenue", "profit", "csat", "projects delivered on time", "net promoter score".
Table 1 has "Duration", but the units are unlabelled, if it's weeks, it's less than a year, months is probably better for seeing performance changes.
It's an interesting qualitative study, I'd certainly like a four day work week with no change in comp.
Four-day work weeks are for cowards.
Take all that AI productivity and found a one-day work week company. One day of focused collaboration each week, let bots and brains chew on stuff in the interim.
I haven’t had a solid schedule since Covid, work just happens whenever and I weave my personal life into it. Sometimes it’s late nights and a weekend, sometimes I take off a random Wednesday and do errands.
Given the gargantuan amount of data showing productivity relative to wage gains, or productivity relative to time worked, or productivity relative to physical office proximity, and the absolute staunch refusal of business to listen to any of it, I can only assume one thing:
The point was never productivity, it was about humiliation and control.
If it were about productivity, workers would be paid substantially more to reflect the immense productivity gains we’ve created through automation; we are not.
If it were about effective time management or efficiency, we would be on four-day, 32 hour work weeks to reflect the real productive output of labor; we are not.
Just like how RTO excuses of “mentoring Juniors” and “improving team cohesion” went out the door for mass layoffs, despite data showing that a flexible schedule adapting to the needs of the team rather than whims of leadership have better outcomes and higher productivity; we now pay higher commute costs, fuel costs, energy costs, and opportunity costs so real estate investments don’t invert.
It’s all bullshit and lies, and this is one more study to add to the Alexandria-esque library of research proving that there is no single good way of working, and the insistence of refusing to change how we work is ultimately costing us more than if we just learned to adapt.
If you look at Australian IT companies they're management and consultant heavy. Roles like architects, review boards, program managers etc., exceed actual engineering roles. In such a set up it takes forever to get any real work done.
Then Australian real wages have also declined. So there is already low motivation to work beyond the minimum expectation.
Australia also has strong social security, at least until now, and there are plenty of odd jobs due to the real estate and tourism industries, so there is little pressure to survive unless you owe too much credit.
Automation and technology adoption also lags behind. For example, people still wait thirty minutes on a call to get an appointment with a doctor instead of making an online booking.
For all of these reasons productivity has been low and declining. An extra day off work is a strong stimulus for squeezing what gets done into the rest of the days.
In my opinion this is an extreme, just as the work yourself to death culture in India and China is. On a scale of a few decades economies where people worked agressively harder have grown tremendously but at the expense of the long-term wellbeing of the people. Places like Australia that were well off and felt little pressure to compete have sustained good quality of life but at the expense of having no competetitve edge anymore.
As someone working on a Sunday on a rainy memorial day weekend. Bring back the 5 day week!
Working based on time i.e. 5 days a week is already problematic. We all see the pay by the hour workers like pool cleaners, vendor machine stocking people etc spending lots of time dragging out their work as they get paid by the hour. It makes perfect sense from their perspective and yes not everyone drags the work.
Fixing the work week to just 5 days have similar issues. Some weeks will be less work and other weeks more work but you spend the same five days there. So the what you learn that matters is to spend 5 days physically there and perform a minimum workload so you don't get fired. You drag the weeks with less work and pick up inefficient habits as a result. That is what a 5 day working week teaches. Again there will be exceptions.
Now assuming this study is correct I am not surprised with the results. You just incentivized workers to get the same amount of output done with the condition that you gain 1 day off. Off course workers will find better and quicker ways of working to get that day off.
Even if we did a 4 working day week the problem of working based on time either fixed or paid by the hour remains. The incentivisation is the problem.
But how will a consulting company bill for the 20%?
I remember one business class anecdote, where the conclusion of changing workplace conditions (light, music, etc. both ways) was that productivity studies increase productivity ...
Basically every study shows a four day week works best. The issue is why we never go with what the study shows.
What a huge surprise. Every one of these studies shows the same thing.
Same as every study of open-plan offices shows that they suck.
The psychopaths in charge do not care.
Speaking as an American, I don’t give a shit if it increases productivity or not. Productivity has gone up exponentially with technological advancement since the advent of the 5 day work week. We, as a species, should be minimizing work to 3 or 4 days a week with equal overall pay. Corporations should be fined heavily for contacting an employee after working hours. On call should require corporations to pay hefty overtime. This is a compromise because really and truly corporations should be illegal. Employee owned co-ops are more humane.
Won’t we face an economic decline if we continue reducing the work week even further?
Corporations really dont care about productivity. Wfh has shown we are more productive
USA: So what I hear, is we need to work 6 days per week + AI? Correct?
Now do 3, 2, 1, and perhaps 0 days... but seriously, this probably just resulted in employees squeezing out some of the slack time they would otherwise have with an extra day.
Here's the paper, with no paywall.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x
Hopkins, J., Bardoel, E.A. & Djurkovic, N. The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of the 100:80:100 model. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07536-x
> What success looks like differs by industry, and a rigid, one-size-fits-all measurement would have made the findings less applicable to the real world [...] Burnout emerged as a major theme in the findings.
This is the actual problem to discuss, not the days per week.
Stressors vary a lot by industry and experience level. A senior manager in IT may do more than 40 hours a week plus be on-call with almost no stress as long as their projects are doing well. Meanwhile, there may be no sane amount of overtime pay that will convince a young guy doing roofing in his first year, and he's highly stressed out either way.
Anyone spinning this as a political issue is plain ignorant.
I believe these results, as my experience of Australian workplaces has been ubiquity of people whose presence is net negative to the workplace, even after discounting their salary.
Most Australian companies would be better off simply paying (10~90% of) its employees to stay at home.
I do wonder to what extent this is due to the Great Feminization - it is now routine to find workplaces that have "upgraded" their wokeness from reminders that sexual and physical violence is not OK, to policies like "disparaging remarks are not tolerated" or "you must respect your colleagues at all times".
An AI-generated article which summaries a pre-print release which surveyed 15 people at 15 companies about their thoughts on whether the arrangement was working for them. Of those 15, a grand total of 6 (unidentified) people at 6 (unidentified) companies (all in the same country), said they "thought" productivity had increased. Not a single data point was taken about whether it actually increased. The questions that these 15 people were asked was not disclosed.
An informal survey, of unknown content, of 15 unidentified people, with 6 of those people being in the "boosts productivity" camp. Cool beans. I guess that settles the matter once and for all.