45 German companies and organisations are testing the benefits of a four-day working week for six months, with employees still getting paid in full, according to Bild.
The initiative is led by consulting firm Intraprenör in cooperation with the non-profit organisation 4 Day Week Global (4DWG). Its supporters argue that a four-day working week would increase productivity and, as a result, help alleviate the country’s shortage of skilled labour.
Germany is considered a hard-working and efficient country, but labour productivity has fallen in recent years.
Labour efficiency is measured by dividing economic output by hours worked. Over the past few years, high energy costs have hurt the productivity of companies, with Germany facing a lower productivity index as a result.
Advocates of the initiative argue that employees who work four days instead of five are more motivated and therefore more productive. The model also has the potential to attract more people by appealing to those who do not want to work five days a week.
Since 2019, 4DWG has been running pilot programmes across the globe, from the UK and South Africa to Australia, Ireland and the US. Over 500 companies have participated in the pilot, with initial results seeming to confirm the effectiveness of a shorter working week.
Studying an experiment involving nearly 3,000 workers in the UK, researchers from Cambridge and Boston discovered that nearly 40 per cent of participants reported feeling less stressed after the experiment, with a 57 per cent drop in dismissals.
Sick days have also dropped by two-thirds. Recent figures from German health insurer DAK indicate that workers in Germany took an average of 20 sick days last year. Absence from work due to illness led to a total loss of real income in Germany in 2023 worth 26 billion euros ($28 billion), the German Association of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (VFA) reported.
Only companies whose work is based on a four-day working week can apply to participate in such an experiment, therefore the results cannot be seen as applicable to the economy as a whole. Moreover, reduced working hours are likely to lead to more concentrated work at the expense of the social and creative elements of work.
Sceptics point to the difficulty of measuring productivity, arguing that reduced working hours could lead to structural changes that have a greater impact on productivity rather than on employee engagement. Economist Bernd Fitzenberg of Germany’s Institute for Employment Research (IAB) believes that a four-day week could mean higher costs for companies if “spreading working hours over just four days is not offset by productivity gains.”
“It becomes challenging in fields where services have to be provided in the here and now, at fixed times, for customers, or people who are being cared for. If we were to rigidly implement such a regulation across all industries in the same way, it could hurt competitiveness.”
Despite counter-arguments, the four-day working week still remains attractive. The German trade union IG Metall has been in favour of shorter working hours for some time. For instance, the steel industry currently employs only 35 hours per week.
