South Africa’s first four-day week pilot matters for a reason beyond its results. Most of the famous evidence comes from the UK, the United States, Ireland, Iceland, and northern Europe. A pilot run from March to August 2023 with South African employers, supported by 4 Day Week Global with Boston College and Stellenbosch University, tests whether the model travels — across a different economy, labour market, and set of workplace pressures.
The headline results were strong. We think they should be reported with their hard questions attached.
What the pilot found
Reporting in December 2023 described more than twenty-eight companies and roughly 500 employees. Weighted average revenue rose 10.5 percent in the trial window, as reported. Resignations fell 11 percent, and absenteeism fell 9 percent. Around 92 percent of participating companies said they were likely to continue or consider continuing.
Set that beside the other first-generation pilots and the direction is familiar. In the UK 2022 trial, reported in February 2023, burnout fell, sick and personal days dropped sharply, revenue rose modestly in the trial window, and most firms continued. In the US and Ireland pilots reported in December 2022, revenue rose in the trial, companies rated the experience around nine out of ten, and 97 percent of staff wanted to continue.
South Africa’s results therefore did something valuable. They reduced the chance that the earlier findings were a peculiarity of one country’s management culture.
Hard question one: who volunteered?
Every major pilot shares this limitation, and South Africa’s is no exception. Companies chose to take part. They were led by people already open to the idea, willing to redesign work and be measured. That does not make the results false. It makes them a finding about motivated firms with preparation, not a forecast for every employer compelled to follow.
This is why we resist the sentence “a four-day week increases revenue by ten percent”. The better sentence is: “In volunteer pilots where work was redesigned, revenue did not fall — and in several cohorts it rose during the trial window”. Less exciting. Much more likely to still be true when a client repeats it to a board.
Hard question two: what sits underneath the percentages?
Revenue figures in pilots often come from a subset of firms willing or able to share them, and revenue can rise for reasons that have nothing to do with the working week — a new contract, a recovering market, seasonal demand. An 11 percent fall in resignations is meaningful, but resignations start from a small base in a cohort of this size. Percentages on small denominators look dramatic quickly.
None of this is a reason to discard the pilot. It is a reason to do what good pilots do: report the base as well as the percentage, separate firms that supplied financial data from those that did not, and keep measuring after the publicity ends. Germany’s 2024 pilot is a useful model here — it reported broadly stable revenue and, commendably, no strong evidence of an absenteeism effect under a tougher comparison. Strong fields publish their inconvenient numbers.
Hard question three: does it work beyond knowledge work?
Roughly 500 employees is a meaningful human trial but a small economic sample, and early cohorts everywhere lean toward office-based employers. South Africa’s economy, like every economy, runs on retail floors, logistics, manufacturing, care, and hospitality — settings where coverage, not calendar, is the binding constraint.
The honest answer is that the pilot proved appetite and plausibility in its cohort, not universal transfer. The transfer question is answered sector by sector: staggered days, rotating coverage, demand modelling, and sometimes Gothenburg’s lesson that shorter care hours need more funded staff, not more effort.
Why we still rate this pilot highly
A first pilot in a new country does three jobs. It creates local evidence a local board cannot dismiss as foreign. It trains a cohort of managers who can mentor the next cohort. And it reveals the local friction — power supply, commuting, pay structures, sector mix — that imported case studies never mention.
South Africa did all three, with results pointing the same way as the larger northern-hemisphere pilots. Read carefully, neither inflated nor dismissed, that is exactly what a maturing evidence base should look like.
If your organisation cites this pilot, cite the questions with the numbers. You will sound less like a campaigner — and considerably more like someone whose advice can be trusted when the board says yes.
Sources
- 4 Day Week Global / Boston College / Stellenbosch University, South Africa pilot, via Allwork.Space, December 2023 — https://allwork.space/2023/12/south-africas-4-day-work-week-pilot-a-trailblazing-success-for-work-life-balance/
- Autonomy / University of Cambridge / Boston College, UK pilot, reported 21 February 2023 — https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230221113132.htm
- 4 Day Week Global, US and Ireland pilots, via International Workplace, December 2022 — https://www.internationalworkplace.com/community-zone/news/four-day-week-pioneering-pilot-program-a-huge-success-new-research-reveals
- University of Münster / Intraprenör / 4 Day Week Global, Germany pilot, reported October 2024 — https://phys.org/news/2024-10-hours-germany-wide.amp
Day5Group is a consultancy that assists in the transition to a 4 day work week. More about Day5Group · All blog articles