Personal situations and business strategy matter a lot to the success of the four-day week. There are as many forms of it as there are companies, even if very few have implemented it today. If time is freed up, it is not always accompanied by a better life balance, especially when the four-day week affects only a few individuals and not a company as a whole. This may possibly explain why in the latest experiments, such as at the Urssaf in Picardy, there are ultimately few volunteers.
Let’s first remove an ambiguity: what triggers an individual’s wish to reduce their working time to four days is a mix between the search for a better balance between professional and personal life, and real personal constraints. These may be family imperatives, in the case of carers for example, or the wish of parents to dedicate time to their children. The INSEE figures are indisputable : the third child is the one that causes the employment rate of women to plunge (47.5% against 81.3% for women with children in general). By experimenting with a four-day week in the trading room in the bank, I probably did not measure all the medium and long-term consequences.
The activity continues of course in your absence, which transfers part of the work to the colleagues who have not otherwise requested anything. In a way, they undergo a necessary reorganization and an increased workload. Moreover, decisions continue to be made in your absence. Over time, your influence diminishes. Beyond the fact that the days are denser and longer over four days, there is additional work (and not least) which consists in organizing the fifth day, preparing it so that there is no hiccup, neither with your colleagues nor with customers. It is therefore an intensification of work that takes place, an extension of working hours over four days, and finally, no significant reduction in stress since it is just “reallocated” differently.
Finally, asking for a change to a four-day week can also be interpreted as a disengagement of the employee, which impacts career progression in the medium and long term (loss of chance in promotions for example). In the case of the 4/5th, which is one of the meanings of the four-day week, the salary drops by 20%.
What do we do on the “fifth day”?
It is difficult to completely ignore the work. In other words, it’s always better to stay reachable, “just in case”. The mental load persists, we are far from the disconnection which alone allows you to recharge your batteries. And to clarify my point, it is not a request from the company that the employee remain reachable, but rather a state of affairs since for the most part, it is important that the work be done well.
The fifth day is very quickly filled with various tasks, often dedicated to family organization. It’s a real lifestyle choice.
The reflection on the advisability of a four-day week brings in its wake major societal issues. On the one hand, the company remains a place where we make society, where we interact with different people. Doesn’t the company, by depriving itself of the physical presence of its employees, lose its social role? Isn’t there a risk of contributing to the “archipelization” of France? We can wonder about the place of work in our society. The paradoxes multiply. You have to work more, until age 64, and work less (four days). France is already one of the countries in Europe (in the world!) where people spend the fewest hours at work, and people are not happier. So perhaps the balance should be sought not in the quantity of work, but in its quality.
And repeat to everyone, and especially young people, that work brings a lot of joy. That it makes it possible to learn, to develop and know oneself, to interact with others in the service of causes, of convictions to shape the world of tomorrow. All of this is possible, and when it is, the four-day week is just a side topic.