A 4-day week answers one question: can this team do its work in less time? Remote and hybrid working answer a different one: where does the work happen? Confusing the two is one of the easiest ways to run a pilot nobody can learn from — and to leave staff unsure which benefit they actually have.
Two different changes
A reduced week, in the form tested in the major pilots, keeps pay, cuts time to roughly 80 percent, and asks teams to hold output by redesigning how work is done. The UK 2022 pilot — 61 organisations and about 2,900 staff — was built on that basis, as were the US and Ireland pilots of the same year. Remote working changes none of the hours. It changes presence, commuting and the texture of collaboration.
Both changes can be valuable. They are not interchangeable, and staff do not value them identically. A parent who uses a midweek day off for childcare may care little where Tuesday happens. A younger worker building a network may value office days highly and a day off differently again. Trading one for the other — “you can have Fridays off, but everyone is back in five days when they are in” — is a negotiation, not a pilot design, and it should be named as such.
Why pilots should hold location steady
If you change hours and location in the same quarter, you lose the ability to say what caused what. Did output hold because meetings shrank, or because two long commutes disappeared? Did loneliness rise because Fridays went, or because anchor days were cut at the same time? The pilots that produced usable evidence held most other things steady for the trial window and changed working patterns deliberately: fewer and shorter meetings, clearer handovers, explicit coverage rotas.
Holding location steady does not mean freezing it forever. It means sequencing. Run the time pilot on the location pattern you already have, read the results, then decide separately whether location should change. Boards find that sequence easier to approve, because each decision carries its own evidence.
Where the two interact
Interaction is real, even if you sequence the changes. Three points recur.
First, visibility. In an office, a day off is obvious. Remotely, it can become invisible: the green dot is simply off, and the worker spends the day feeling they must prove they were not slacking. Worse, the reverse happens — the day off exists on paper while messages, document comments and “quick calls” quietly refill it. Pilots that tracked success also tracked whether hours genuinely fell; in the UK trial, average working time moved from about 38 hours to about 34, not a clean 32, which is a useful reminder to measure the reality rather than the policy.
Second, asynchronous norms matter more, not less, when people are both dispersed and on different days off. A staggered 4-day pattern plus hybrid working can leave almost no hour when a whole team is simultaneously available. That is survivable — many service teams already work this way — but only with written defaults: decision logs, response-time expectations by channel, and a buddy system so no customer or colleague waits on someone’s day off.
Third, equity. Office-based and frontline roles often cannot take the location benefit, and if remote staff are seen to stack location flexibility on top of a day off while frontline staff get neither, resentment is rational. Design the offer by role family from the start: the same time reduction, delivered in the pattern each role can actually use.
A sane sequence for hybrid organisations
Start with a location audit you already trust: which days are people in, and why? Then freeze that pattern for the pilot, with one exception — fix any meeting that exists purely because diaries used to overlap on Fridays. Choose fixed or staggered days off based on customer demand, not on who shouts loudest. Publish core collaboration hours for the days that remain. Finally, agree in advance that location policy is out of scope until the pilot decision point, and write that into the trial terms so nobody relitigates it in month two.
Practical takeaways
- Treat time and location as two separate decisions, each with its own evidence.
- Hold your current hybrid pattern constant during a 4-day pilot so results are interpretable.
- Write async defaults — decision logs, response windows, buddy cover — before day one, not after the first missed handover.
- Measure whether hours really fell; a remote day off is the easiest one to fake.
- Check the offer by role family so office, frontline and remote staff each get a workable version.
Sources
- Autonomy, University of Cambridge and Boston College, UK four-day week pilot results, reported February 2023 — https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230221113132.htm
- 4 Day Week Global, US and Ireland pilot results, reported December 2022 — https://www.internationalworkplace.com/community-zone/news/four-day-week-pioneering-pilot-program-a-huge-success-new-research-reveals
- Autonomy, UK pilot one-year follow-up, reported February 2024 — https://www.hrdconnect.com/2024/02/26/one-year-on-uks-4-day-work-week-trial-has-been-a-success/
Day5Group is a consultancy that assists in the transition to a 4 day work week. More about Day5Group · All blog articles