Why four-day workweeks may be better for your career and health

The concept of shortened workweeks is gaining traction since the pandemic upended schedules and gave many workers a glimpse of how flexibility could improve their lives. — Coffee work photo created by Racool_studio - www.freepik.com

When employees can slash their traditional five-day workweek to four days, they tend to allocate their new free time to one surprising activity: sleep.

Workers who shifted to 32-hour workweeks logged 7.58 hours per night of sleep, nearly a full hour more than when they were keeping 40-hour workweeks, according to lead researcher Juliet Schor, a sociologist and economist at Boston College who is tracking over 180 organisations globally as they shift to truncated schedules through six-month pilot programs.