A 32-hour workweek with 40-hour pay? It’s happening at some US companies

Video game makers in Kentucky are cranking four days a week on a new title based on the classic slasher movie “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

The twist? Workers making the horror game are getting paid the same salaries they used to get for working five days a week.

As disruptions to standard workplace practices caused by the pandemic continue to ripple through the economy, some companies are adopting 32-hour workweeks at formerly 40-hour pay that effectively make every Friday a paid holiday.

The shortened week has been a winner for Gun Interactive, Chief Executive Wes Keltner said, as employees stay focused to complete their tasks on time and return to the office on Monday with a full head of creative steam because they’ve had sufficient downtime.

“You have a finite well of creativity in your body. When it’s tapped, it’s tapped,” he said. “After that you do subpar work.”

A four-day workweek at five-day pay sounds exotic because so far it is. Few companies have formally adopted the practice, but it’s on the menu for some as employers cast about for ways to set up hybrid work schedules that will appeal to pandemic-weary workers they want back in the office or, at least, fully engaged in their jobs.

Many white-collar companies are already partaking in what look like four-day weeks, even if bosses are expecting workers to put in 40 hours of work at times of their choosing. Fewer than 20% of U.S. workers come to the office on Fridays these days, said Mark Grinis, leader of EY’s real estate practice in the Americas. The weekly average is nearly 50%.

“You are already edging toward a vacancy on Fridays,” he said. “It’s not a big leap” to block them off the work calendar.

More than 20% of companies are already implementing some version of a four-day workweek, while another 46% are planning or considering the shorter week, EY reported after a November survey.

EY didn’t attempt to break out which companies are committed to 40-hour pay for 32 hours of work, and the number of such companies still appears to be small. But historic notions about how workers should perform their jobs have been upended before — and will be again.

The accepted number of hours people should work in a week has evolved over time, with factory laborers in the Industrial Revolution clocking as much as 100 hours a week. Henry Ford popularized the eight-hour day in the 1920s, but 40-hour weeks didn’t become the norm until the Great Depression, when the government saw shorter workweeks as a way to spread jobs among more people. That standard has stood strong for over 80 years.

But the pandemic was a strikingly disruptive event that forced companies to find new paths to get their business done and tangibly demonstrated alternatives, workplace experts say.

COVID-19 supercharged use of technological advances made in recent decades that made it possible to work anywhere. Executives knew remote work was feasible, but the pandemic forced them to put it into practice at a wide scale.

Few workers want to go back to office practices built around landlines, typewriters and snail mail that chained people to their company workstations.

“We broke the mold on how it’s supposed to work,” Grinis said, “and we’re not going back.”

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The government is unlikely to make four-day weeks a rule for employers any time soon.

National legislation introduced in Congress last year to mandate overtime after 32 hours of work also failed, but its sponsor Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., has vowed to try again.

“People continue to work longer hours while their pay remains stagnant,” he said in a statement. “We cannot continue to accept this as our reality.”

A recent pilot study of four-day weeks for five-day pay unsurprisingly found that workers loved the concept, but also found that many bosses ended up on board too. In the international study, 33 companies with nearly 1,000 workers agreed to a six-month tryout of shortened workweeks. Most of the study participants were in the U.S. and Ireland.

“The companies are extremely pleased with their performance, productivity and overall experience,” the report said. They reported that revenue rose over the course of the trial, sick days and absenteeism were down, and resignations fell slightly.

None of the 27 companies that completed the final survey said they were leaning toward going back to five-day weeks, and 18 said they would definitely continue their four-day schedules.

“The benefits are significant,” Gun Interactive’s Keltner said. “I have yet to see a prominent con.”