‘A four-day working week is long overdue and this book provides a crucial roadmap. One day, we will look back in horror at the fact we worked until we dropped.’ Owen Jones, Journalist

‘Simple, effective, efficient – the best guide to increasing your, and most other adults’, leisure time by 50% – with no serious downside.’ Professor Danny Dorling, University of Oxford

‘The four-day week is an idea whose time has come. This is an invaluable guide to its benefits but more importantly how to introduce it successfully. It’s a handbook to the future of work.’ John McDonnell MP, former Shadow Chancellor

Packed with real-life case studies, The 4 Day Week Handbook can restore your colleagues’ vitality and energise your organisation. It’s time to end the five-day slog and create a more loyal, engaged and energised workforce.

Introduction

The aim of this book is to help you imagine or implement a four-day working week, with no loss of pay for workers, at the organisation you work for.

Chapters One and Two set out the case for a four-day week, highlighting existing evidence from trials that have taken place all over the world.

In Chapter Three we begin delving into the practicalities, looking at different models and approaches. Then we’ll look at the type of challenges that can arise as we go through the process: preparing for a trial, finding ways to improve business performance to help enable the shift, before finally running a trial and then measuring its success. Then, before the conclusion, there’s some information for employees interested in trying to organise for a four-day week in their workplace.

Whether you have only just started thinking about the four-day week, are interested but want to know more or are fully signed up to the idea already, this book is for you. For those of you raring to go, I hope it can guide you on your journey to a happier and more productive workforce. It is drawn from years of experience working with hundreds of four-day week organisations across the United Kingdom and evidence from around the world.

. . .

To better understand the growing momentum behind demands for a four-day working week, I want to begin by casting our minds into the past for some perspective on the way work has come to shape and dominate our lives today.

Foraging and making necklaces were the first human activities to be defined as work. The first foraging communities worked on average 15 hours a week, a far cry from today’s working patterns which see workers across the globe putting in anything from 40 hours per week to 100 hours per week (if you are unfortunate enough to find yourself working as a junior banker at Goldman Sachs.) Despite all the progress of the last few centuries, how have we managed to get the balance so spectacularly wrong when it comes to working time?

Four key developments mark the progression of work throughout history: fire, agriculture, towns and cities, and heavy industry. This is not intended to be a history book so I will skim over the history quite quickly. When humans first mastered fire – around a million years ago, opportunities that never previously existed, to cook, stay warm and create light, arose. It also reduced the amount of time needed for hunting food, giving our ancestors more leisure time. This helped pave the way for the development of language and culture, including music and art.

Around 12,000 years ago, society reorganised itself around agriculture. This was an era of scarcity when people had to work hard in the fields to put food on the table. According to James Suzman, anthropologist and author of Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time, the shift to agriculture “reveals how much of the formal economic architecture around which we organise our working lives today had its origins in farming.” It also tells us a lot about “how intimately our ideas around equality and status are bound into our attitudes to work.” Any of us who have met someone new recently will know this is accurate from the first thing we almost certainly asked them: ‘what do you do?’ – which really means ‘what is your job?’ I’ll explain why this needs to change later in the chapter.

The next big reorientation of working life happened 8,000 years ago, when people began to gather in cities and towns. “The birth of the first cities seeded the genesis of a whole new range of skills, professions, jobs and trades,” James Suzman says. The final major reorientation was heavy industry – fossil fuels unlocked new material possibilities and factories and mills sprang up in cities, causing a surge in the size of their populations. As a result, we all became a lot busier – primarily through our work.

By the 19th century, workers across the world were putting in, on average, anything between 60 to 90 hours per week. In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions urged all American workers to observe an eight-hour day after a huge mobilisation campaign by anarchists, socialists and trade unionists. Their slogan, which was initially coined by Welsh textile manufacturer Robert Owen in 1817, was: “Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.” Prior to this, a working day could range from anything between 10 to 16 hours for most people. Just over one hundred years ago, as society continued developing, most people worked six days a week – with Sunday reserved as the day of prayer. In fact, the weekend only became a concept towards the end of the 19th century.

After a major campaign led by the trade union movement and some progressive businesses, the weekend was won for all workers between the 1920s and 1940s, depending on the industry you worked in and which country you called home. The cheering crowds that can be heard every Saturday afternoon as football matches kick off across the country were another major factor in the successful campaign to win the weekend. The weekly fixture cemented the idea Saturday was a day for leisure.

So the 9–5, five-day working week, otherwise known as the 40-hour week, was born. Many British people take the weekend we have today for granted, but it’s important to remember that campaigners fought hard so we could enjoy our weekends.

The 40-hour week soon spread across Europe and the rest of the world. We know very little about how much international coordination took place and through which channels it was organised, but we do know that the United States of America and Spain led the way internationally.

Closer to home, John Boot, the Chairman of Boots cosmetics company, based in England, initiated the same experiment. Again, he found that two days off each week had a positive effect on productivity and reduced absenteeism. The weekend was made official Boots policy in 1934.

Those arguing against a 40-hour week at the time made arguments such as; ‘the economy will suffer,’ ‘businesses won’t be able to afford it’ and ‘workers won’t be able to adapt.’ The same arguments we hear today against a four-day working week. But these arguments were proved wrong then and hopefully by the time you get to the end of this book you will realise they are wrong again now.

It is important to remember that the 9–5, five-day working week was primarily designed for the agricultural and industrial economy we had at the time. No one can argue that the economy hasn’t transformed since then, but for some reason – I have my suspicions – working hours have not transformed too.

Calls for a four-day working week are not new, but they have been given a new lease of life in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Most people won’t know that one of the first national figures to call for a four-day work week was former Republican President of the USA, Richard Nixon. As Vice President in 1956, he said he foresaw a four-day work week in the “not too distant future” to create a fuller family life for every American. He said: “These are not dreams or idle boasts, they are simple projections of the gains we have made in the last four years. Our hope is to double everyone’s standard of living in ten years.”

What the Vice President is alluding to here is the relationship between economic productivity and leisure time; this basic logic has underpinned the economy for centuries. The theory goes that as the economy experiences greater productivity, workers should benefit from more leisure time because the productivity gains should reduce the amount of labour time needed. This was the premise by which famous mainstream economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in his essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, that by 2030, we would all be working only 15 hours per week. A prediction, that, without some very dramatic changes occurring between now and 2030, is almost certainly going to be proven wildly inaccurate.

So what has happened? Despite all the productivity gains of the last century, why are we still working a similar amount of hours as we were 100 years ago?

The 9–5, five-day working week still remains the norm across most of the world. According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), over 60 per cent of jobs in the UK still operate using this model.

Working hours drifted down from the 1930s to the beginning of the 1980s, but then it all started going wrong. Analysis by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) shows very clearly that average weekly hours fell a lot slower post-1980. According to NEF, the UK would have been on target to reach a 30-hour week by 2040 had average hours continued to fall in line with the initial post-war trend.

During the three decades following World War Two, a combination of increased pay and productivity, strong collective bargaining and increased labour market regulation saw the average full-time week in the UK fall from 46 hours in 1946 to 40 hours by 1979. However, from 1980 onwards, this trend faltered following labour market deregulation, Margaret Thatcher’s attacks on trade union rights and slower earnings growth for low-income workers. As a result, by 2016 the average full-time week fell by just two and a half hours to an average of 37.5 hours.

What this effectively means is that most productivity gains since the 1980s have gone towards greater company profits, rather than more free time for workers. Let that sink in without trying not to get angry! When you take into account the additional labour added to the economy as a result of huge numbers of women joining the workforce, it’s even more shocking. In the early 1970s, female employment was at 52.8 per cent but by the first quarter of 2023, it was 72. Despite all of those extra hours being put in, working hours haven’t reduced accordingly.

In the UK, we now work some of the longest hours in the world. We work longer full-time hours than any country in the European Union (excluding Greece and Austria), while having one of the least productive economies. To make matters worse, we also have the fewest bank holidays. This would all be a lot easier to accept if living standards were rising but the opposite is happening – living standards are falling.

Research by Barclays Bank released in 2023 showed how British workers have missed out on a Europe-wide trend toward more leisure time and fewer hours at work. According to Barclays’ analysis, on average, working hours in the UK have only fallen by five per cent over the past four decades. This means we’re now working 27 per cent more hours on average than Germany. Over the same time period, working hours fell by 10 per cent in France, Italy and Spain.

All the evidence points to the fact that all these long working hours aren’t producing good economic results. What they are producing, however, is a workforce where millions are burnt out, stressed, overworked and not to be too dramatic but – in some cases – dying. This is no way to live and no way to run an economy. Around 18 million working days are lost every year in the UK as a result of work-related stress, depression and anxiety, according to the Health and Safety Executive.

In 2021, the first global study of its kind showed that long working hours are killing hundreds of thousands of people around the world every year. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), long working hours led to 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease in 2016, a 29 per cent increase since 2000. The study, conducted with the International Labour Organization (ILO), showed almost three-quarters of those who died were middle-aged or older men. Most of these deaths were in South East Asia and the Western Pacific but the data had implications for the UK as well.

For the first time in my lifetime, the Covid pandemic shone a spotlight on many of these issues. It goes without saying that the pandemic was an awful time for everyone but it undoubtedly generated sweeping changes to the world of work which were long overdue and may have never taken place without a pandemic. It also left the door open to more radical ideas like a four-day working week.

As campaigners for a four-day week, we define a four-day week as a reduction in working hours to 32 or less, with no loss of pay. This means workers don’t take a pay cut when reducing their hours, the same as when moving from a six-day week to five, 100 years ago. On the face of it, this can seem counterintuitive but Chapter Six – on improving business performance by working smarter, not harder – should give you a better understanding of how this is achievable.

What happened in the workplace during Covid was nothing short of remarkable. Almost overnight, most of the population began working from home, a shift which would have been completely unimaginable before the pandemic. At the scheme’s peak, 30 per cent of the workforce were having their wages directly paid by the Government – otherwise known as Furlough.

Workers all across the country had their first taste of more freedom and autonomy at work, and it felt good. It’s important to note that of course not everyone experienced this. Key workers and those that couldn’t work from home went into work as normal. Others lost their jobs. But for those that did see their working life dramatically changed overnight, it had a profound effect. Workers saw for perhaps the first time in their lives that when we want the world of work to change, it can happen very fast. What the move to remote working also showed is that workers can adjust to new ways of working fairly quickly and with relatively little pain. Many with long journeys to work got two hours or more back from no longer having to commute each day.

It was already the case before Covid that workers could request more flexible working and the popularity of this has certainly grown since the pandemic. The right to request flexible working was first introduced under the Flexible Working Regulations Act 2014, giving workers the legal right to request flexible working from their employer. This act has recently been updated to give workers the right to request flexible working from the very first day of employment. The organisation Pregnant Then Screwed and tireless campaigner Mother Pukka deserve much of the credit for that recent change in the law.

Under the existing guidance, types of flexible working include: job sharing, working from home, part-time, compressed hours, flexitime, annualised hours, staggered hours and phased retirement. We know that flexible working can benefit both employers and employees as it has been shown to increase job satisfaction and improve job recruitment. However, I would argue that the currently accepted forms of flexible working do relatively little to improve productivity and mental wellbeing. Because what they don’t do is get to the root cause of the main problem in the British workplace: we’re working too many hours.

Some people misinterpret the four-day week as a compressed hours four-day week, where workers work their normal amount of hours over four days rather than five. For example, a worker putting in 40 hours a week moves to doing 40 hours over four-days rather than five with four 10-hour days. I want to be absolutely clear on this – this is not what four-day week campaigners mean by a four-day week and there is a real danger of four very long working days exacerbating problems such as stress, overwork and burnout which a true reduced hour four-day week is seeking to address.

When human resources practitioners and wellbeing leads speak of mental health webinars, ping-pong tables and massages to improve wellbeing, the elephant in the room is always long working hours. The expectation to work a 9–5, five-day working week – and in many cases even more than that – puts way too much pressure on people and, in many ways, creates a society that sets itself up to fail. This model just doesn’t allow enough time for everything else in life, especially for parents already struggling to juggle childcare responsibilities.

The fundamental question we need to ask ourselves here is: why is being busy and working all the time seen as a badge of honour in today’s society? Until this changes, society will not be able to move en masse towards a shorter working week. But there are signs of hope this culture is beginning to shift and change.

In the UK, support for a four-day week with no loss of pay is higher than ever before with polling consistently showing more than two-thirds of the public behind it. It’s popular across the board but, when you break down the demographics, it’s even more popular with Gen-Z and Millenials. The signs here are that younger generations do not want their lives to be defined by work in the same way they’ve seen it has been for their parents and grandparents’ generations. The burgeoning number of viral social media posts on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok lamenting the amount of time we are forced to spend at work is further proof of this.

In Chapter Two we’ll hear about the numerous pilots and trials that have taken place across the world. What they show is that a four-day week with no loss of pay can be a win–win for both workers and employers. There are many, many, many benefits including:

• Improved work–life balance: By working four days a week instead of the standard five, employees have more time for personal pursuits and family time, resulting in better work–life balance and reduced stress levels.

• Increased productivity: Research has shown that longer hours do not necessarily lead to increased productivity. In fact, working too many hours can result in burnout, reduced motivation and decreased productivity. A four-day week leads to increased productivity due to higher morale,improved job satisfaction and the ability to work more efficiently.

• Reduced carbon footprint: With one less day of commuting and energy consumption, a shorter working week can have a positive environmental impact.

• Increased employment opportunities: By shortening the working week, employers in some sectors may have to hire more staff to maintain current levels of productivity. This could potentially create new job opportunities and decrease unemployment rates.

• Better employee recruitment and retention: Offering a four-day week is an attractive perk for potential employees and increases job satisfaction and retention rates among current employees.

As campaigners for a four-day week, we often struggle to define our key messages as the myriad of benefits makes it difficult to choose the most popular. But this is a welcome problem to have. If implemented more widely across the economy, which we hope it eventually will be, there are many more ways in which society would benefit. One of the less talked about potential impacts would be greater gender equality as a result of men and women sharing paid and unpaid work, such as childcare, housework and caring responsibilities, more equally.

According to the Women’s Budget Group14, shorter working hours have been associated with a lower gender gap in unpaid hours of work, paid hours of work and wages. In England and Wales – 38 per cent of employed women work part-time, compared with 13 per cent of men. With men taking a greater share of domestic responsibilities, implementing a four-day week across society would mean women wouldn't have to keep missing out on career opportunities.

Dr Sara Reis, Deputy Director and Head of Policy and Research at the Women’s Budget Group, said, “We know that care is more evenly shared when men are working fewer paid hours. A shorter working week can lead to men being more involved in child-rearing and therefore distribute care more fairly between women and men.” She also gives a warning: “If women are spending their extra time on domestic labour while men spend it relaxing, we’ll never see parity in how we share care.”

On climate change, research has shown that a four-day week could reduce the UK’s carbon footprint by up to 127 million tonnes per year, which is the equivalent of taking 27 million cars off the road – effectively the entire UK private car fleet. A report by environmental organisation Platform London found that a reduction in working hours correlates with more sustainable energy and household consumption, reductions in carbon-intensive commuting and would enable people to draw more value from ‘low-carbon’ activities such as rest, exercising or community-building. Essentially, if people have more time on their hands they will have more time to engage with living a more environmentally sustainable lifestyle.

From 2008–2009, a large-scale experiment in the American State of Utah shifted most public-sector state employees to a four-day week to save energy and carbon. The experiment showed that when eliminating Fridays as a work day, huge energy savings could be made by reducing the use of office lighting, elevator operating, heating or air conditioning.

Another study by independent think tank Autonomy found that by simply making Friday a day off, UK carbon emissions stemming from electricity production could drop by up to 24 per cent – reducing the entire energy sector’s emissions by five per cent. Assuming a four-day week would effectively replace a workday with a weekend day, our energy consumption for that day could potentially reduce by 10 per cent and this lower electricity consumption combined with a lower carbon intensity of up to 15 per cent, could potentially lower emissions by as much as 24 per cent. Autonomy says this reduction in electricity use would be compounded by the amount of carbon-intensive commuting eliminated by a four-day week (or three-day weekend).

Reduced electricity use and fewer cars on the road would make a serious dent in our carbon footprint. Shorter working hours are one of the swiftest and easiest ways to take action on the climate. By simply working less, workers and companies can limit their environmental impact; and they don’t need to sit around waiting for the Government to act.

To help with the cost of living, Autonomy also calculated potential savings to workers from reduced commuting and childcare costs that would arise from moving to a four-day, 32-hour working week with no loss of pay. They found that a parent with two children would save, on average, £3232.40 per year across both costs, or roughly £269.36 per month. A parent with one child would save £1789.40 on average per year across both costs, or roughly £150 per month.

A four-day week would also give people more time to volunteer in their local communities, care for loved ones and take part in local democracy. In many ways, this isn’t dissimilar from what former Prime Minister David Cameron was advocating through his ‘Big Society’ mission. There were lots of problems with the ‘Big Society’ agenda and it never really came to full fruition, but communities taking back control over their lives would be eminently more possible under a four-day working week for all.

The 4 Day Week Campaign is demanding that a four-day week become the normal way of working by the end of the decade. This may sound unrealistic but the public believes it is possible. According to polling by Survation in 2023, 58 per cent of the British public expect a four-day week to be the normal way of working by 2030, with only 22 per cent believing it won’t. The polling also found that 65 per cent of the public support the Government exploring the introduction of a four-day week.

If you’re not convinced by now, then remember that a new wave of technology could mean a four-day week is inevitable anyway. With more automation, new technology and artificial intelligence on the way, many have argued moving to a shorter working week will be a necessity for

sharing a diminishing amount of work. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Christopher Pissarides – a professor at the London School of Economics – said in 202318 that as a result of artificial intelligence: “I’m very optimistic that we could increase productivity. We could increase our well-being generally from work and we could take off more leisure. We could move to a four-day week easily.” Rather than being scared of artificial intelligence taking our jobs, a shorter working week could allow us to embrace this new technology.

Workers, employers, the economy, our society and our environment all stand to benefit from a four-day week. With automation and artificial intelligence, it’s probably inevitable anyway. But now let’s turn to the evidence that it actually works in practice.

4 Day Week Campaign, 24,70

40-hour week, 11,13

9-5, five-day working week, 13, 76

A

absenteeism, 57

accreditation, 116

advocate, 82

agency, self-employed, zero-hours contracts, 69

Agriculture, 9

amendment, 124

annual leave, 57,60

annualised, 49

arguments, 118,122

artificial intelligence, 25,72

assessment, 115

Atom Bank, 110

automation, 25,71

average employee, 83

B

balance, 88

Balance, 8

bank holidays, 61

add bank holidays to annual leave entitlement, 61

three-day week during bank holiday weeks, 61

treat bank holidays as nonworking days, 61

beer, 53

benefits, 25

Benitez, 45

billable hours, 61

combination of the above, 62

find efficiencies within the billable hour structure, 62

maintain billable hours by finding efficiencies in non-billable overheads, 62

move from hourly billing to value-based or project-based fixed-fee billing, 61

board, 57,109

board approval, 115

Boots cosmetics company, 13

bosses, 119

brewers, 52

burnout, 21

business, 57,110

busy, 20,53

C

calls, 115

campaign, 117

carbon footprint, 21,24,52

care, 22

child-rearing, 22

care sector, 70

case, 118

charities, 46

Charlie Young, 69

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), 14

chronic burnout, stress, overwork, 70

cities, 9

Citizen’s Advice, 113

clients, 114

climate change, 22

carbon footprint, 22

carbon-intensive commuting, 22

sustainable energy, 22

CMG Technologies, 111

colleagues, 119

collective approach, 85

collective effort, 53

Community Integrated Care, 73

compressed hours, 19

conditional, 50

construction sector, 68

consultation, 77

contracts, 57

contracts and work hours, 69

contractual changes, 62,115

core funding contracts, 46

cost of living, 24

childcare costs, 24

commuting costs, 24

craft beers, 51

culture, 126

customer impact, 110

D

decentralised, 48,84

deep work, 87

democratic, 83

departments, 84

desperate for its implementation, 69

Different Approaches and Models to Implementation, 42

Productivity Driven: The 100-80-100 Model, 43

distractions, 83

E

economic productivity, 13

efficiency, 21,82,114

efficient, 57

eight-hour day, 10

electricity production, 23

carbon intensity, 23

electricity consumption, 23

employee recruitment, 22

employee retention, 112

employees, 83

employer, 116

employment contracts, 62

employment opportunities, 21

empty gesture, 85

energy savings, 23

evidence, 25

extra support, 88

extra work on day off, 63

F

factory, 44

Fair Labor Standards Act, 12

Fifth Day Stoppage, 47

fifth-day stoppage, 48

Fire, 9

fitness approach, 45

five models, 47

flexibility for NHS staff, 70

flexible work policies, 64

flexible working, 18

focused, 57

Ford Motor Company, 11,123

Edsel Ford, 12

Henry Ford, 11

founders, 51

Four-day week, 121

32 Hour Working Week Bill, 122

Number of businesses, 121

Policymakers, 122

Survey, 121

Transition policies, 124

US legislation, 124

Four-Day Week, 8

four-day week, 19,25,53,68,74,82,114,117

ethical and innovative reputation, 55

innovation, 54

productivity, 54

talent attraction and retention, 55

teacher burnout, 74

teacher retention, 74

workload, 75

four-day working pattern, 62

four-day working week, 13,17,110

fund, 124

Future of work, 121

Employer accreditations, 122

Legislation, 122

Mini-Manifesto, 124

Productivity, 121

Shift in working hours, 121

Support for four-day week, 124

Work-life balance, 121

Working Time Regulations Act, 122

G

Gary Conroy, 86

Gen-Z, 20

gender equality, 22

government, 46

gradually introduced, 86

grumpy employee, 62

H

health and wellbeing, 57

holiday, 112

household, 115

housing association, 83

HR-related issues, 57

I

implementation, 68,77

implementation strategy, 46

individual performance, 44

inefficient and dangerous, 69

innovation, 84

innovative, 57

J

job opportunities, 21

job recruitment, 76,114

job retention levels, 70

job satisfaction, 21

jobs, 9,44,51

John Maynard Keynes, 7

K

key people, 117

L

labour market deregulation, 14

limitations, 44

long working hours, 15–16,19

loss, 57

M manager, 52

manufacturing, 52

measuring success, 108

productivity, 108

profits, 108

successful campaigns, 108

mental health, 19

Millennials, 20

moral objections, 57

motivate staff, 46

motivated, 57

motivation, 57,82

mum, 114

N

NGOs, 46

NHS hospitals, 70

NHS staff shortages, 70

nine-day fortnights, 86

nursing staff, 73

O

operational perspective, 46

opt-in agreement, 62

organisational leadership, 45

organisational prioritisation, 45

output, 112

output-focused working, 56

P

paid work, 22

part-time workers, 59

adjust annual leave entitlement, 60

allow part-time staff to accrue extra days/time off, 60

combination of the above, 60

exclusion of part-time workers, 60

increase pay, 60

reduce part-time hours, 60

pay, 20

paying staff, 57

performance, 44,82

personal, 82

persuade, 63

persuading the board, 53

petition, 119

pilot, 124

poorer outcomes for patients, 71

practical concerns, 57

pre-established targets, 44

preparation, 80,83

presenteeism, 57

Pressure Drop Brewery, 51

problems, 81

process, 45

production, 52

productive company, 86

productivity, 18,21,57,83,114

productivity gains, 14

productivity-focused approach, 44

professions, 9

Professor John Ashton, 70

prospective workers, 68

prostate surgeries, 72

pure productivity, 57

Q

qualitative research project, 51

qualitative team basis, 46

quality of workmanship, 68

R

reduction, 124

refreshed, 115

remote working, 18

rested, 57

retained existing workers, 68

retention rates, 22

revenue, 57

routine, 114

S

sales assistant, 44

sales-based tasks, 44

school week, 75

schools, 70,74

sectors, 44

self-employed, 64

senior care providers, 73

senior leaders, 46

service-based tasks, 44

services, 46

shift patterns, 111

shifts of up to twelve hours, 71

shorter working week, 20

shut down operations, 47

sickness levels, 114

skills, 9,53

society, 19,125

staff knowledge, 85

staff morale, 57

staff retention, 114

staff surveys, 108

staff turnover, 57

staggered, 48

buddy system, 48

staggered four-day week, 52

strategic priorities, 46

stress, 44

stress levels, 20

successful examples, 118

support, 20

supportive partner, 114

T

team collaboration, 46

team member, 115

teams, 84

technology, 25

artificial intelligence, 25

automation, 25

three-day weekend, 47

time-saving ideas, 85

toxic recipe for worker stress, 71

trade union representatives, 119

trades, 9

trial, 77,88,107,115–116,119

customer service, 107

metrics, 107

staff, 107

trial period, 107

check-ins, 108

handover process, 108

trials, 57

turnover, 57

typical challenges, 59

U

underground of people, 85

unemployment rates, 21

union representation, 120

unpaid work, 22

unusual approach, 86

V

value, 46

volunteer, 24

W

wages, 22

wasted time, 83

weekend, 10

weekly hours, 51

well-being, 44

wellbeing, 109

Work, 8

work performance, 115

work value, 44

work-life balance, 20,71,112

work-related physical and mental

health problems, 68

work-related stress, 16,71

workforce, 57

working hours, 10,13,15,19

working life, 9

Working Time Council, 125

working week, 75

teacher working hours, 75

work-related stress, 75

workload, 57,81

workshops, 84

world, 57

Z

zero-hours contracts, 64