The Endless Riddle of the 4-Day Work Week

It is the tale as old as time itself. Why not just make ye olde 5-day work week a 4-day work week instead?

• I mean – the technology automation is making work less manual.
• You have to do a lot less busywork and a lot more productive trial and error.
• So why not just cut the fat and spend less time at the job?
• It seems it has a lot of upsides – good for morale, good for health, good for retention.
• Nah, it’s complicated, pal.

The 5-day work week is our heirloom from the aftermath of the second industrial revolution. It was (check notes) over a century ago.

One might say it is still the best possible approach. It has the best overall balances. But it is a far bigger fish to fry if you think about.

• And yes – it is about money. 

This article breaks down the pros and cons of implementing the 4-day work week. The next one breaks down the Ukrainian side of things.

• If you need consulting regarding the switch to 4-day work week – contact us.

So what’s the gist of it?

There’s this idea called humanism, and it comes with some interesting principles. One of them is that work exists to serve human flourishing.

From this perspective:

• Work isn’t just about extracting labor. It’s a platform for a creative, cognitive agent.
• Productivity isn’t a vague measure of “time invested”; it’s the output of a healthy, autonomous mind in a mutually beneficial relationship with the employer.

Notice the key words: healthy and autonomous. To maintain both—and to sustain intellectual performance—a worker needs rest and recovery. This is what Aristotle called eudaimonia: living in accordance with your best self.

For a long time, this was more wishful thinking than practical reality. Technology simply hadn’t caught up. But the third industrial revolution changed that—and now it’s plausible.

Tech companies operate on very different terms than other industries:

• Deliverables matter more than time spent.
• Part of employee compensation is tied to value creation, usually in bonuses rather than base salary.
• Employees are incentivised to maximise impact per hour.
• Productivity measurements are granular and data-driven.

The very structure of a tech company depends on inventive and non-linear output to remain competitive. That’s the mutually beneficial relationship I mentioned. Naturally, supporting this kind of output requires more rest and recovery.

So why doesn’t it happen? Often, it’s because if you can finish your work in less time, you can do more work overall.

Which brings us to our next topic.

The Eternal Bane of Jevons Paradox

Jevons Paradox is what happens when you get really good at something. You don’t set out to create it—it just happens. By the time you notice, it’s already in motion, and there’s no turning back.

Formally, Jevons Paradox is defined as:

• Increased efficiency in the use of a resource often leads to higher total consumption of that resource, rather than a decrease.

In simpler terms, in the world of work it looks like this:

• Work Compression
• Intensity Inflation

Here’s the chain of events:

• Better technology → greater efficiency
• Greater efficiency → cheaper use
• Cheaper use → more demand
• More demand → higher total consumption

It’s a vicious circle—and it happens all the time, especially in labor relations.

This is why making your work more efficient often just means doing more work overall.

The paradox rests on three pillars:

• Higher efficiency
• Higher expectations
• More work done with higher efficiency

In short, the promise of reducing workload rarely materializes. New and better tools often increase the amount of work expected, instead of decreasing it.

The tech company Jevons paradox looks like this:

• Productivity tools, AI, and Agile/Lean processes all make work more efficient.
• Tools reduce the time and effort per task.
• Less time per task means more tasks can be added to the queue, with higher throughput expectations. You know the drill: more ambitious sprint goals, tighter timelines, expanded feature scopes, higher OKR targets, more parallel initiatives… and all the other fun stuff.
• The result? A net increase in employee workload.

In short: it’s more beneficial to the employer, not the employee.

Let’s reiterate:

• Efficiency improvements increase company output, not employee autonomy or pay.
• Employees may work fewer hours on paper, but their cognitive load and throughput rise.
• The “new productivity level” becomes the minimum expectation.
• The same amount of work gets compressed into shorter cycles, producing stress and burnout.

If you think this is counterproductive, you’re absolutely right. But… what can you do?

Which brings us back to the 4-day work week.

4-Day Work Week is Peril in Disguise

The 4-day work week started out of the simple assumption that work, the productivity itself, is not proportional to hours. Henry Ford thought you can maximise worker throughput by tight scheduling.

However, this approach neglects the key aspect of work:

• value comes from insight, problem-solving, creativity and coordination (you know, management).
• Therefore, more hours do not guarantee more productivity or innovation. In fact, it can gradually do the opposite.

So on the surface, it seems like 4-day work week versus 5-day work week is not even a discussion. Hell yeah, 4-day all the way.

But there is a catch.

• The 4-day week aims at reducing burnout and improving work-life balance.

The company can do that by:

• Reducing meetings, eliminating waste, restructuring workflows.

Quantitatively employees deliver the same value in 32 hours as they deliver in 40 hours. And then it all comes down:

• Management sees improved velocity and recalculates capacity.
• OKRs, sprint goals, or strategic plans are adjusted upward.
• Employees end up producing more overall output than before.
• The 4-day week becomes a compressed 5-day week with higher pressure.

See, best intentions pave the way straight to hell.

As a result,  efficiency savings are recaptured by the company.

• Meanwhile employees get a day off to stare at the wall because the exhaustion is so overwhelming and requires even more continuous decompression.

Now let’s talk about money.

4-Day Work Week Is About Money

Basically, a 4-day work week forces recalibration of the value of one hour of labor. Because that’s how salary is calculated.

The perfect world of 4-day work week looks like this:

• The salary remains the same.
• Work hours decrease from 40 to 32.
• The effective hourly wage increases by 20–25%.

See the problem now?

• You can talk all you want about how the real value is not time invested but the actual results – insights, innovations, etc.
• The salary is calculated per time invested. So shut your gob and get back to work. Or go find another one in this economy.

The funny part is that it is a good thing.

• Because if you were to get paid per “insights”, or “innovation” – you’re getting screwed even more. And by a lot.
• Employers will dig heaven and earth to find a way to devalue your contribution to the lowest possible monetary definition. You’ll get paid by the swerve of atoms. Literally.
• You know how streaming does royalties for artists? Well, that’s basically what it is.
• And there will be no malicious intent behind it. Just some roundabout common sense and principles of business logic. And you can’t really argue with that. Well, you can, but you’ll get fired. That’s the catch.

Reduction in paid hours while maintaining salary transfers a portion of surplus value from employer to employee.

• That’s what is unacceptable for employers. Can’t have that. That’s communism right here (it is not, but that’s how companies react to such things).
• But at the same time, that’s the mutually beneficial relationship companies love to talk about it – brought to a semblance of life.

Company needs to decide whether:

• this transfer of surplus value is justified by retention gains.
• improved morale outweighs cost.
• productivity efficiencies offset the lack of the 5-th day.
• retention pressures require matching such benefits.

The answer is NO.

What We Get Instead?

So it devolves into – less time invested, less money paid. And the whole thing turns into this macabre trade off.

Employees give up:

• a portion of income;
• financial stability;
• long-term earning.

In contrast, employee gains:

• apparently more time.
• presumably better work-life balance.
• seemingly potentially better health and lower burnout.

I seem to be overusing the word “seemingly”. Probably because you still end up in the Jevons Paradox but with less money paid for your trouble.

At the same time, the employer reaps the shallow rewards:

• Saves some money out of reduced wage burden.
• Gets more predictable staffing costs.
• Productivity gains from temporarily happier employees and then because Jevons Paradox kicks in.

Is there a way to avoid Jevons Paradox of the 4-Day Work Week?

Kinda. We did some consulting on switching from 5-day to 4-day work week for Ukrainian startups during 2024-2025.

The main observation is that the ramp up occurs naturally and everyone notices it way after it has taken full effect.

The most effective exploitation mitigation techniques that management can implement that has proven effects are the following:

• fixed workload ceilings. 
  • You can delineate it per sprint or per month or even per quarter.
  • Formal commitments that efficiency gains must be return to employees as time instead of  extracting them as performance. Anything that goes beyond – company either pays for it or the employee is in the right to decline extra workload per mutual agreement (and then they get fired for being bad team players – I’ll get to that).
  • This aspect includes management training on risk of “capacity creep”. It ends up being “we’ve educated ourselves and now understand our wrongdoing, we will proceed to do it more discreetly”. But if you take it seriously, it might work.
• periodic audits of load, velocity, and stress indicators. 

• • • The problem is that it requires having actual HR managers in the company which almost never the fact so good luck with that.
    • It usually turns into “we’ve investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing”.
    • But if you treat this seriously – it actually works.

• rules preventing the expansion of scope inside newly optimized workflows. 

• • • explicit prohibition on raising expectations for output per hour.

• frequent employee wellness checkups with regular recreation breaks

• • Once again you need real HR to do that. And also responsible team leads.
  • Basically, you need to check if someone is going to get fried and stage timely intervention.
  • This approach also works for 5-day weeks and you don’t even need to pull rabbits out of a hat to cram it somewhere.

Coming up next – how 4-day work week is doing in Ukraine! Stay tuned!