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The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100
- ktallett 5mo agoBasically every study shows a four day week works best. The issue is why we never go with what the study shows.
- t-writescode 5mo agoBecause if we did we’d have universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing, and every single one of those things makes it harder for abusive jobs to control their employees.
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoProgress is a functioning of effort, time, and luck. It’s a marathon. Keep grinding. Success is proven possible.
- amelius 5mo agoWe're all in competition with each other. One person works 4 days, another person still working 5 days puts them out of business. Reality is more complicated but in the end there is no way around this basic fact.
- toomuchtodo 5mo agoLabor law changes reduce the work week, as was done previously. How many people work six days a week for no additional pay beyond five days today? With population declines locked in almost globally (About 71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size), working age population decline, reducing labor supply, is also locked in. Reduced go forward labor supply reduction means labor power. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/fertility-rate-of-world-populations/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/fertility-rate-of-world-pop... https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbea597263a88f27075bd6eb49_17385_suerf.pdf https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe... The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680794 (US specific citations)
- latexr 5mo ago> universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing My my, seems like we gots ourselves a socialist o’er here. We don’t take kindly to your kind ’round these parts. What’s yer idea? Improve folks lives? Treat others with respect and dignity and give e’ryone meaning? Are ya cuckoo in tha head? Git him, boys.
- cluckindan 5mo agoBy inductive logic, a zero day week works best.
- danielmarkbruce 5mo ago"study"... The replication crises in science has shown that most studies are total bs. So we probably don't want to go with them.
- ktallett 5mo agoHow does that differentiate from a boss or a company philosophy stating a 5 or 6 day week is better? With no reliable metric on better, other than ancedotal evidence. It's not as if it's repeatable experimentation.
- danielmarkbruce 5mo agoIt doesn't, but in the case where a boss or company say it, at least we know it's bs. Do you believe something because your company or boss says so?
- zurfer 5mo agoNaive question but if it works best wouldn't companies that have a four day work week outperform theirs peers and because of that grow faster, and become more common? I see the opposite in most startups that have a 6 day work week to get ahead of the "slowly moving" 5 day work week competition.
- ktallett 5mo agoIn what metric do they get ahead? I think this is the key. What many visualise as getting ahead primarily seems to be fund raising or having a higher monetary value. Especially in startups where the largest mouth, the biggest blagger, or the quickest to mention a buzz word gets you more funding. Being closer to your end goal, with an adoptable product that improves society, is really the only metric that matters.
- latexr 5mo agoThink of it like a sprint versus a marathon. If you run at full speed you can get farther than someone keeping a steady pace in the same amount of time, but you’re going to tire yourself out and become slower. You’ll lose in the long run despite looking very “productive” at the start. Similarly, have you ever been “in the zone” and worked non-stop on a fun project, being super-productive for a full week or even multiple weeks, but then “crashed” (or even burned out) and your output got worse? New companies are on a race against the clock. At the beginning everything is a cost, you’re constantly losing money. So you plough through to survive until you become stable. Then you need to scale back and take it slower to allow yourself to recuperate and keep going. Also, keep in mind that small companies can often be very productive simply by having fewer employees and “red tape”. You can have an idea, send a message to someone else, get an immediate OK and get going. When a company gets too big and has lots of processes to keep things running, a lot of effort is wasted on even getting started.
- dbetteridge 5mo agoIn a perfect free market, like a spherical chicken in a vacuum. Maybe. Problem is there's no such thing, monopoly powers, government subsidies, inter-company issues, contracts. All these things can mean that a less functional, more wasteful and less productive organisation performs (in the sense of the metric that companies care about , line go up) better than a 4 day week startup.
- aeternum 5mo agoPapers 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.
- latexr 5mo agoEdit: It’s becoming ever more increasingly common on HN to get downvotes for innocuous respectful posts. If you’re downvoting, I’d genuinely appreciate if you explained what is it that you find offensive about this post. You’re not going to hurt my feelings, I sincerely want to understand what it is that you see as transgressive so I can learn from it. Thank you. Another example which baffled me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222383#48227701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222383#48227701 > As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science. I appreciate Feynman’s contributions—and in fact have been recently revisiting the Messenger lectures—but that seems like an unnecessary jab. The use of “usually” is also a convenient cop-out which makes the remark meaningless because the speaker can pick and choose in any conversation so they always win.¹ I thought about it and picked the first thing which came to mind: Natural science. From Wikipedia²: > Natural science or empirical science is a branch of science concerned with the description, understanding, and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and reproducibility of findings are used to try to ensure the validity of scientific advances. Seems pretty scientific to me. But alright, let’s check the article to give it a fair shot in context. The only time the word “science” comes up is “Social Sciences”. Again from Wikipedia³: > Social science (or the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. It now encompasses a wide array of additional academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, sociology, culturology, and political science. That’s a wide range. Are all of those “not science”? ¹ Assuming your rephrasing is accurate and not missing important context. ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_science ³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science
- yshamrei 5mo agoWon’t we face an economic decline if we continue reducing the work week even further?
- lacerrr 5mo agoDepends on the type of job. I suspect that creative work (not art, but also things like software development) have a threshold after which more work brings diminishing returns while simultaneously worsening future output. No idea what that threshold is. Also, manual labor unfortunately doesn't seem to share this property to the same degree.
- B1FF_PSUVM 5mo agoI remember one business class anecdote, where the conclusion of changing workplace conditions (light, music, etc. both ways) was that productivity studies increase productivity ...
- gchamonlive 5mo agoOnly if you do bad science experiments without a control group, otherwise you'd see the control group productivity boost as they'd also be under the same scrutiny. I didn't read the study methodology, so I'm not comparing to that, only responding to your comment in isolation.
- miohtama 5mo agoIt's Hawthorne effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect Related to it we have novelty effect and bunch of other psychological effects that are hard to isolate in human science. In this sector, a lot of studies cannot be repeated.
- cluckindan 5mo agoBut how will a consulting company bill for the 20%?
- umpalumpaaa 5mo agoYou increase prices by 20%
- micromacrofoot 5mo agowhat consulting company on earth pays 100% of their revenue to employee salary — I've worked at a number of them and it's not unusual for my pay to be half of the hourly rate charged
- ENGNR 5mo agoAustralia 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!
- Mordisquitos 5mo agoSo you're saying that four-day-workweek companies saw no decline in their productivity, in contrast to the Australian average productivity which went down overall‽ That means the four-day-workweek is even better than we thought it was!
- BLKNSLVR 5mo agoTax changes that have been overdue for twenty-odd years to address house prices and attempt to level the playing field between labour and capital. Pity they didn't also change the gas tax.
- ENGNR 5mo agoHouse tax changes... strong yes Share tax changes... ugh My hope was cashed up bogans would start betting on shares instead of housing/crypto. At least it could be funnelled into something productive
- sysworld 5mo agoYeah, housing tax changes were needed, but seems weird to also do Shares. NZ, like always is lagging behind AU, and also needs house tax changes. The housing situation in NZ dire.
- panny 5mo ago>scienceaim >!! Junk science slop blog. Nice. 87.3% AI GPT zerogpt.com https://i.imgur.com/9lT1VSp.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/9lT1VSp.jpeg
- oompydoompy74 5mo agoSpeaking 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.
- christophilus 5mo agoThat would be ok in a non-globalized world. In our world, any country that implements those laws will see a lot more offshoring.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- idle_zealot 5mo agoHey, if fuel gets expensive enough this will be much less of a problem! Let's all thank Trump and Iran for their great work on bringing the four day work week closer to fruition. This isn't how I would've imagined bringing industry back to the States, but it's a promise made, promise kept.
- paulryanrogers 5mo agoHas the promise been kept? Is industry on-shoring in any significant sense? Or just making photo ops for Trump and fam, then slow walking the implementation until it's quietly canceled or scaled back to a token effort?
- idle_zealot 5mo agoThe joke is that onshoring will be forced to occur when global trade becomes prohibitively expensive for most goods. A promise kept despite not planning to, and with catastrophic consequences.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- claudiug 5mo agoUSA: So what I hear, is we need to work 6 days per week + AI? Correct?
- paulryanrogers 5mo agoWith all these comparisons to the industrial revolution, I do wonder if employers are salivating at the thought of getting 12x6, per human. Perhaps more if one sees the AI as a productivity boast.
- sublinear 5mo ago> 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.
- Pacers31Colts18 5mo agoCorporations really dont care about productivity. Wfh has shown we are more productive
- userbinator 5mo agoNow 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.
- goda90 5mo ago3 days off is infinitely better than moments of stress induced slacking spread throughout the week, so I don't see the downside.
- pizzly 5mo agoWorking 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.
- goda90 5mo agoWhat's the actual problem? Most people don't live for work.
- recursive-call 5mo agoThe actual problem is that workers want to make the most money possible with the least effort possible. Until we have a system where people do work that they want to do, perverse incentives will always be an issue.
- pizzly 5mo agoAgree. The problem is the incentivization. If a painter paints a roof in 5 hours but could do it in 1 hour just to get paid for the 5 hours its not the worker at fault but the system. If the painter got paid for the 5 hours but only did 1 hour of work then everyone wins. The painter can have more time off work or work more for more money, their choice. Likewise the office worker working 40 hours per week, five days a week. If on some days the worker can come home early because they completed what actually needs to be done then that is better for the worker. But instead companies have a fixed 40 hours + overtime expectation. On the weeks with less work, people do busy work but instead could be using that time doing what they want. Again the problem is the incentivization.
- passive 5mo agoFour-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.
- pinkmuffinere 5mo agoOh no, I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, lol
- passive 5mo agoIt's a little bit snark, but I do think it would be an interesting experiment. Wish I had lots of money to try it out.
- tedk-42 5mo agoa lot of AI is just wasteful like this. there are a lot of parallels with crypto 'mining' a transaction and AI slopping a functional output.
- gsinclair 5mo agoIf I had the “lots of money” required, I’d try out a zero-day work week instead!
- passive 5mo agoOh, I don't want mean for myself, I mean as an experiment at the other end of the four-day work week spectrum. Though for myself, I like having time to think about ideas in between when I collaborate with folk on them, so I have a lot of optimism about the success of the experiment. :)
- rr808 5mo agoAs someone working on a Sunday on a rainy memorial day weekend. Bring back the 5 day week!
- stego-tech 5mo agoGiven 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.
- mmooss 5mo agoHere's the paper, with no paywall. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x 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 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07536-x
- sensanaty 5mo agoHere 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.
- jpollock 5mo agoGlancing 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.
- optiWorker 5mo ago[flagged]
- dools 5mo agoSounds like your employer would definitely be better off paying you to stay home …
- optiWorker 5mo agoFaultless reasoning there darling xD
- meander_water 5mo agoNot the first study, and they all largely report the same results: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02259-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02259-6 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/19/four-day-week-trial-study-finds-lower-stress-but-no-cut-in-output https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/19/four-day-week-... https://www.4dayweek.com/research https://www.4dayweek.com/research
- brokenmachine 5mo agoWhat 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.
- declan_roberts 5mo agoI 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.
- archagon 5mo agoQuite a leap to attribute corporate greed to H1B. Think again: this is entirely homegrown.
- shermantanktop 5mo agoIs there not a connection between the two? You'll have to spell out what you're suggesting here. "Think again" only works on LLMs, and then only sometimes.
- Tadpole9181 5mo agoThe top comment seems to insinuate the 996 (or any overwork scheme) is being brought over because of H1B visa workers. The responder is saying that domestic American capitalists do not need foreign influence to abuse or exploit labor. The H1B visa program has absolutely nothing to do, for example, with Walmart telling their full time employees how to apply for government assistance programs because they refuse to pay a livable wage.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- declan_roberts 5mo agoSoftware talent doesn't compete against Walmart greeters. That's the connection you're missing for h1b.
- Tadpole9181 5mo ago
- farhanhubble 5mo agoIf 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.
- thegrim33 5mo agoAn 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.
- jkldotio 5mo agoIt's 15 companies that adopted a technique and it's part of a broader constellation of experiments in this area which have been confounding the traditional logic that productivity would decrease. https://www.4dayweek.com/research https://www.4dayweek.com/research The people representing the businesses in the preprint hold titles like co-founder, CEO/founder, COO, General Manager, and CEO. The size of the business and sector are also noted. I think your framing of them as "unidentified people" is therefore off, it is certainly not the same as a journalist conveniently using "unnamed sources", this is standard academic practice. Different companies measure different things, but they do measure and that is addressed in the paper. "revenue (DM10), profit (DM4), other financial targets (DM2, DM6), customer/client satisfaction ( DM8, DM6), story points (DM14), sprint goals (DM7), billable hours (DM12), capacity ( DM4), response rates (DM10), standard operating procedure metrics (DM9), sick leave (DM1, D M 4. DM9, DM15), lodgements (DM12), employee happiness (DM6, DM15), projects delivered on time (DM15), and net promoter score ( DM4)". There were also other benefits like hiring and retention. So this is not what "unidentified people" "thought" about productivity, this was founders and the c-suite using their existing favoured metrics. On those metrics a large number of them reported an increase in productivity, and a larger group reported no deleterious effects on productivity. This is broadly consistent with the trends in the wider research into this area globally, which continually go against the predictions that productivity will drop. Is it universally applicable? I don't think anyone is claiming that. I've followed this area for a while and, sorry to be impolite, it is your summary that is less accurate than the the one you accuse of being AI-generated.
- 46493168 5mo agoI 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.
- yowo 5mo ago4-day work week is one of the fastest ways to distribute AI productivity gains back to public
- insane_dreamer 5mo agogiven all the gains in productivity over the past 50 years thanks to technology, we should naturally have a universal (in developed countries at least) 4-day work week by now. Otherwise, what was the point of all those gains in productivity? capital, not labor, captures almost all those gains
- solomonxiexie 5mo agoI expect when it applies to more company, we should see employees got 3 days off will simply find a second job to increase income. When that happens, you will see the productivity drop.