Aisha Khan confirmed that she is not sure about her ability to return to traditional work after switching to a four-day work week. Her company adopted the new plan last March, and since then, every Friday, the Milton, Ontario resident has time for simple personal things like trimming her nails, which she says, as a mother of two, she used to take months to plan for.

Khan, who works in customer service for a Toronto-based software company, added, "How will I go back to the five-day life? It will be extremely difficult to be able to focus on my physical and mental health, and just having the time to do that has been invaluable."

Khan is one of hundreds of employees in North America who now work four days a week after participating in a pilot project organized by the nonprofit advocacy group "4 Day Week Global" and researchers at Boston College.

According to results released last week, of the 41 companies that participated in the survey, 35 said they are maintaining, planning, or leaning towards keeping the new work scheme, while one company reported that the time employees spend on personal and sick days has decreased, without any impact on revenue.

Joe O'Connor, the former CEO of the "4 Day Week Global" initiative, which helped lead the study, said it is the largest experiment of its kind in North America to date and the first involving "fairly strong" participation from hundreds of Canadians across nine companies.

O'Connor, who is the director and co-founder of the Centre for Excellence in Reducing Working Time in Toronto, added, "We see that shorter work weeks lead to happier and healthier employees, they also put organizations in a better position to attract and retain talent, and they also lead to more productive organizations."

The study was conducted on companies, most of which employ between 11 to 25 employees, experimenting voluntarily with a four-day work week for six months between February 2022 and April 2023, allowing companies to choose the best way to reduce hours as long as they maintained 100% pay.

For the 15 employees at "L'Abri," based in Montreal, this means working 35 hours between Monday and Thursday. Architect Pia Hoeshneider says the change has made her and her colleagues more focused during work hours and has already encouraged after-work gatherings to make up for any social contact lost during the day.

Maureen Juniper, co-founder and partner at a public relations firm, said that after a series of workshops and webinars with the initiative's founders before the transition, the company adopted a split approach: half of its 27 employees take off on Mondays, while the other half takes off on Fridays to ensure someone is always available for customer service throughout the week.

She noted that the change has paid off without any impact on revenue; in fact, she said internal results show the company has seen a 25% drop in personal and sick days and a 15% decrease in the time spent on internal and administrative tasks.

She added, "It's a life-changing initiative, and the company is operating more efficiently than ever."

However, Winnie Shen, an assistant professor of organizational studies at York University in Toronto, says that while the positive results of the study align with previous literature, they are limited in that they mostly come from companies with relatively few employees, and that it might be more challenging to scale this in a larger company with many people and much complexity.

She said, "There is a need for more study among random companies and those with more blue-collar workers, and for those companies trying to implement a four-day work week, she says there is always a risk that employees will resist if it is not made permanent, pointing out that a similar movement in workplaces is trying to enforce a return to the office post-pandemic."

Shen added, "I think there is a lot of potential here, but I think before we somewhat say that this is useful in all circumstances, I think we need to do more work and investigate it."