Embrace the Four-Day Workweek

Canada is facing a national productivity crisis. One counterintuitive solution? Give workers more time off.

- Joe O'Connor

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP in Roscommon, a community in rural Ireland, my family wasn't particularly well off. My mom had some health challenges, which meant my dad was often the sole earner. He spent crazy hours on the road in his main job at a local seafood company. To supplement that income, he also managed a couple of pubs on weekends. For many people of his generation, long hours simply came with the territory. My dad is no longer with us, but, to be honest, I think he'd probably turn over in his grave at the idea of a four-day workweek. Funnily enough, helping others to work less is now my full-time job.

After earning my master's in business strategy from Atlantic Technological University, I got a job as the director of campaigns for Fórsa, Ireland's largest public-sector labour union. Based on the success of similar initiatives coming out of Scandinavia and New Zealand, I launched Ireland's first-ever four-day workweek pilot during the pandemic. It was relatively small in scale-about 12 small and medium-sized businesses took part-but the trial showed such positive results that we later expanded it to hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of employees around the world. In 2022, I came to Canada to start my current company, Work Time Reduction, which helps organizations transition to shorter workweeks. This usually involves some combination of reducing distractions (and meetings), streamlining decision-making processes and, sometimes, upgrading technology. In the end, workers aren't simply doing the same number of tasks at a more intense pace; they're achieving better outcomes more efficiently in less time, in exchange for the same pay and, ideally, more balanced lives.