Careers I Take four Could four days become the standard working week? With evidence mounting, one agency shares the results of a shorter week for them A t the start of this year, there was a flurry of excitement when media outlets around Europe reported that the Finnish prime minister, Sanna Marin, was planning to introduce a four-day working week policy. The story turned out to be a lesson in how false information can spread Marin had merely floated the idea during a panel before she even became prime minister. However, the working population is increasingly drawn to more flexible approaches, and economic arguments for a longer weekend have been gathering steam for a few years. New Zealand trust management company Perpetual Guardian implemented a four-day week for its 240 employees after successfully trialling it in 2018, and Microsoft trialled it with its 2,500 employees in Japan, finding that productivity increased by 40% after a month. In Spains Valencia, the regional government has commissioned economists to draw up a strategy to move to the model without paying workers less. The shorter working week is also favoured by the public, as long as it doesnt negatively impact the economy 63% of Brits support the idea, according to YouGovs Eurotrack (March 2019). But what is the reality of implementing a four-day week for businesses? We asked Tash Walker, founder of research agency The Mix London, to reflect on the impact of shortening the working week. 70 set up The Mix in 2012, as an agency focused on understanding human behaviour. Three years ago, we were encountering the same kind of problem with every person we spoke to in our research projects for clients a feeling of being stressed and too busy to do all the things you want, or spend time with the people you want. Technology has made this worse. A dizzying array of email, social media and an expectation to always be available mean our brains feel overwhelmed. At the same time, my business partner and I were having debates about how to work. Our email seemed to be threatening to overwhelm us, and relentless video meetings and travel meant time to think was limited. My husband once jokingly said he had developed a great relationship with my forehead it was all he could see in the evenings, visible above the luminous glow of my laptop. Behind every joke is an element of truth, however. We had to reassure people that they would still be paid the same and that we werent expecting five days of work in four The joy of running your own business is that you get to decide how to do things and, in 2016, we embarked on some research into other working practices. How did other people do it? Some companies had half days on Fridays, some gave their team Wednesday afternoons for doing sport, and others had a broad flexible approach. But none seemed to fundamentally challenge their working practices. What we were looking for was an overhaul in our relationship with work, not just tinkering at the edges. In Scandinavia, we found multiple companies that had trialled four-day weeks, and most seemed to have had really positive experiences. From the minute we read about it, it seemed like the only option radical enough to force us to change our behaviour. Working in research, you become uniquely accustomed to the challenges of behaviour change, so we knew it would have to be pretty innovative to succeed. The next step was to trial it. The teams response was more muted than I had anticipated I wrongly assumed that people