The Great Resignation on the heels of COVID has led to a re-examination of the American workplace on a scale unseen since the 20th century, when milestones such as the five-day/forty-hour work week, or the large-scale entry of women into the workforce were seen as revolutionary changes. In 2021, 47 million employees left the workforce, forcing employers to evaluate new ways to make working environments tolerable, perhaps even attractive, to prospective employees.

The four-day work week has been one such method of making jobs more attractive that has gained steam since COVID, with several Connecticut towns, such as Vernon, Ellington, Mansfield and Plainville having adopted four-day work weeks of their own for municipal jobs.

Proponents of the four-day work week have heaped exorbitant praise upon the concept, citing higher employee satisfaction, lower rates of burnout, higher productivity, easier recruitment of employees and better workforce retention. Additionally, proponents have touted its fiscal potential for energy savings due to offices being closed an extra day a week, and environmental benefits in the reduction of energy expenditure and employee transit.

Opponents of the four-day work week have often come to opposite conclusions; saying that longer workdays lead to decreased productivity, that the proposed benefits are often short-lived and over-reported, that cost-savings benefits are usually insubstantial and fall far below expectations, and that any energy expenditure is simply offset by increased employee activity in their personal lives.

In the past year alone, publications such as Time, Forbes, and CNBC have published articles deliberating whether four-day work weeks will soon be seen as yet another societal change that the post-COVID world’s “new normal” has ushered into ubiquity. Despite its newfound popularity, however, the four-day work week is far from a new idea. Lessons learned from its past waves of integration, as well as recent strides in technology and workplace culture, make today’s four-day work week renaissance in Connecticut the most likely to succeed.

In 2010, Professor Robert C. Bird, a Professor of Business Law at the University of Connecticut, presented a scholarly article titled The Four-Day Work Week: Old Lessons, New Questions at a Connecticut School of Law symposium. 

“I’ve always been interested in questions of work-life balance,” said Bird in an interview with Inside Investigator. “This, I think, arose out of the need to better understand work-life balance, and to better understand different ways of working and their benefits and drawbacks.”

The article compiles and analyzes prior research on four-day work weeks and details the origins and earliest implementations of the idea. According to Bird, the four-day work week began in earnest in 1940, when Mobile and Gulf adopted four-day, 40-hour schedules for their truckers. During the 1960’s, other companies began implementing four-day work weeks of their own, and by 1969 interest in the four-day work week began to skyrocket.

In the early 1970’s, hundreds of companies began implementing four-day work weeks, with new adoptions occurring at a rate of 60 to 70 per month. Bird cites the OPEC oil embargo as a potential reason for this shift, as the peak of the four-day work week craze coincided with the oil crisis. As gas prices surged, employers and employees alike would save money by removing a day’s worth of transit and heating costs each week.

Bird states that proponents of the four-day work week at that time claimed “absurdly large” benefits; one tire company claimed a 400 percent increase in sales, another company claimed it cut absenteeism in half, and others claimed productivity gains of 10 to 25 percent.

Bird cites a 1996 annotated bibliography containing 162 articles on the topic. The vast majority of these articles, Bird writes, were published in the 70’s and early 80’s. 51 publications on the topic were made between 1980 and 1989, compared to 78 published during the 70’s. This decline in academic interest coincided with the decline of the four-day work week’s implementation. Much of the research at that time reflected positively on the concept, correlating the four-day work week with increased productivity, reduced absenteeism and increased job satisfaction.

If so, then why did it fall out of favor?

“I think back then, there was more enthusiasm than planning, and as a result, most workplaces returned to the five-day work week by 1980,” said Bird.

One study from 1975 found that while employees often reported increased job satisfaction, they also reported complaints of fatigue, dislike for the longer workdays, and feeling less value from their work accomplishments.

“It appears that a significant reason why employees like the four-day work week so much is because it gives them more time and pleasure while away from work, and not necessarily greater job satisfaction while working,” concluded Bird.

Further supporting this hypothesis, was a study Bird cited that found workers with the lowest level positions, tenure and income reported the most positive attitudes toward the four-day work week. Essentially, Bird stated, these findings imply that the workers most likely to be dissatisfied with their jobs were the happiest to find a new way to work one less day at them.

In 1974, a scholar named Martin J. Gannon openly questioned whether the wave of positive findings about the four-day work week could be attributed to the “Hawthorne Effect,” the belief that results recorded from studies of human behavior are often skewed by the fact that subjects know they’re being studied and alter their behavior accordingly. Gannon believed that four-day work week studies couldn’t be taken at face value because workers were simply wooed by the novelty of the idea and the increased attention the study brought them. Worth noting, however, is that the validity and even existence of the Hawthorne Effect is disputed by scholars.

Ultimately, Bird cited several studies which implied that the positive effects of four-day work weeks seemed to be fleeting. One such study compared the attitudes of four-day workers and five-day workers at the same company at 13- and 25-month intervals. At 13 months, four-day workers reported feeling more satisfied with their freedom, personal worth, job security and salary than their five-day counterparts, while also feeling less anxious and more productive. After 25 months, almost every four-day worker reported that these improvements had disappeared.

Bird’s research went beyond looking at studies focused on employee-centric metrics and also compiled the findings of studies that examined the proposed cost-savings benefits of the four-day work week.

“The predominant model for energy savings for the four-day work week appears to be the following: whenever an enterprise institutes a four-day work week, that enterprise closes its factory, office, or building for the remaining fifth day,” reads the study. “Employees drive twenty percent less, reduce congestion by twenty percent, and firms consume twenty percent less energy each day the office is closed.”

Bird’s study acknowledges that utility savings are possible, but that meeting specific savings goals is often improbable, due to the “imperfections and limits inherent in power savings.” 

“Heat and electricity must be consumed to keep a building at a minimum temperature as well as to power basic emergency functions,” reads the study. “Even when a building is free to be shut down to minimum consumption status, actually doing so may be a difficult task.”

Perhaps the largest entity to adopt a four-day work week was the State of Utah in 2008. Bird’s study mentions Utah’s experiment with four-day work weeks, saying that it fell short of reaching its goal of a 20 percent reduction in utility costs, only being able to achieve a 13 percent reduction. Ultimately, Utah returned to five-day work weeks in 2011. Reasons cited for the return to its five-day work week were complaints from the public regarding lack of access to services on Fridays, as well as underperformance in meeting its savings goals. 

Bird’s study also highlighted the various obstacles that private companies may experience in their pursuit of energy savings; companies that don’t own their offices may be limited by property managers, companies involved in shipping are beholden to the schedules of their clients, and companies with numerous departments may not be capable of implementing office shutdowns across the board.

It also casts doubt on the idea that four-day work weeks are inherently eco-friendly. Employees at home will still use gas and electricity, and employees with an extra day are likely to take advantage of it.

“One early study of four-day employees reported that the most frequently anticipated use of a three-day weekend would be to take long weekend vacations,” reads the study. “Other frequently cited activities included sightseeing, visiting relatives, and going fishing or hunting. All of these activities require significant energy use through travel and are likely the very activities that were previously not readily available under a five-day schedule.”

As studies from the first wave of four-day work weeks heeded wildly mixed results, Bird advised that those looking to revive the movement ought to proceed with caution.

“Proponents of the four-day work week can look optimistically toward the future, but they must also consider carefully the lessons of a similar movement that peaked and fizzled just a generation ago,” he wrote.

For the municipal employees of Danbury, the implementation of a four-day work week is not a side effect of COVID’s “new normal.” It’s old news.

On Aug. 21, 2008, the idea of implementing a four-day work week was passed in a 56-32 vote by members of the Danbury Municipal Employee Association. The idea was originally proposed by Mark Boughton, Danbury’s mayor at the time. Boughton didn’t propose the idea out of consideration for his employees’ work-life balance, but rather as a way to save money. By his estimate, shutting down municipal buildings one extra day a week would yield the city up to $150,000 in savings on utilities. As is reflected by the vote, the proposal was far from universally agreed upon.

“Overall, it was considered a cost saving move,” said former Danbury Mayor Dean Esposito, who was working as the city’s director of consumer protection and sealer of weights at the time. “Initially, the staff was like ‘No way!’, because they were set in their ways and they had to readjust their personal schedules.”

Danbury was not the only early adoptee of the four-day work week in Connecticut. Redding made the switch in 2008 and Tolland in 2009. Like the City of Danbury, these adjustments were not born out of a journey to find better work-life balance, or to make their towns more attractive in a competitive market, but rather to save on energy costs.

Like the first wave of four-day work weeks that coincided with the OPEC gas crisis, this second wave of four-day work weeks coincided with a surge in gas prices as a result of the Great Recession of 2007. 

Esposito said that for many employees, especially those who had to pick up young children from daycare, the schedule change was seen as a potential headache more than a heady idea to increase employee happiness.

“But once they did that, they’ll never give it up now,” said Esposito. “It’s working out very well. Once they got acclimated to the schedule change, they were all for it.”

According to the Danbury Municipal Employee Association’s latest bargaining agreement, City Hall employees working 35 hours do 8-hour shifts on Mondays, either from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. or from 9:00 a.m. to 6 p.m. From Tuesdays through Thursdays, they work 9-hour days, either from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. or 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. 

Employees working 37.5-hour weeks work 8.5 hours on Mondays, either from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. or 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, they work 9.5-hour days, from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., while Thursdays they work 10 hours, 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Both 40 and 37.5-hour employees get one-hour lunches every day.

Esposito said that pushback to the change has since been minimal and mostly political. On a Friday in September 2009, Boughton’s challenger for mayor at that time, Gary Concalves, took to Danbury City Hall to criticize Boughton. As was reported by the Danbury NewsTimes, Concalves put the four-day work week in his sights.

“As we’ve stood here a number of people have tried to pull open a locked door,” said Concalves. “It’s not too much to ask to have City Hall open five days a week.”

Ultimately, though, Boughton was re-elected in 2009, winning approximately 66% of the vote.

“In the end, there were so many positive results from that move,” said Esposito. “Of course, the staff and local union for municipal employees were always incorporated in any municipal discussions and at that point they were all in favor of it so, it worked out for the better.”

Danbury’s current mayor, Roberto Alves, says he is unaware of what cost-savings benefits have been provided by the switch, but acknowledged the popularity of the program amongst municipal employees.

“The four-day work week is immensely popular,” said Alves. “They all enjoy it, they get their jobs done in the four-day work week, and they to get go and get that work-life balance.”

As a result of Danbury’s successful history of four-day work weeks, it has become a point of interest for other Connecticut municipalities interested in implementing four-day work weeks of their own. Esposito estimated that anywhere from six to eight Connecticut municipalities contacted Danbury during his time working for the city, asking for information or guidance on the topic. Vernon Town Administrator Michael Purcaro was one such interested party.

Purcaro said that the Town of Vernon implemented the four-day work week in July 2022, to make the town more competitive in hiring. Vernon is one of several Connecticut municipalities that have adopted the four-day work week post-COVID, including the towns of Plainville, Ellington and Mansfield.

“There’ve been interviews that we’ve had, where candidates have said, ‘Hey, do you have a four-day work week?’, or ‘Can I work from home?,’” said Purcaro. “These are major questions that are becoming deciding factors for many good quality candidates. So we realized we needed to make a change in our approach.”

Unlike the previous waves of four-day work week enthusiasm, this third wave is not coinciding with an energy crisis, but instead a labor shortage. According to a 2024 report released by ManpowerGroup, the third-largest staffing firm in the world, 70% of American employers surveyed reported difficulty in filling open positions. Connecticut municipalities have had particular difficulty filling civil engineering and zoning enforcement roles. Civil engineers have been hard to come by not only for towns and villages in recent years, but for the state and country at large. Purcaro lost two municipal officials of his own in these sectors in 2022, the year preceding Vernon’s shift to the four-day work week.

“You know, five or six years ago, you’d get dozens of applicants,” said Michael Paulhus, Town Manager of Plainville. “Now we’re lucky if we get a dozen applicants, and so the numbers have really trailed off in terms of applications across the board. Zoning enforcement, planning, finance directors, it’s almost like you could fill in the blank, whatever department, it’s that competitive at this point.”

Paulhus attributes these troubles to an increase in longtime employees reaching retirement age and a decrease in interest in municipal jobs among young people, both of which have driven increasing competition between municipalities and state government.

“I think all of those combinations have sort of collided and just created a shortage of employees and shortage of candidates in the field, so we’re doing what we can to be competitive,” said Paulhus. 

Plainville began its six-month pilot program for the four-day work week in August of 2023, starting with the town hall, recreation center and youth services. Paulhus indicated that the town is moving towards permanent implementation of the four-day work week and is looking to potentially expand its implementation to the town’s library. 

“Retention of employees and recruitment, I think, were really the motivating factors,” said Paulhus of the decision to implement the four-day work week. “Trying to have another tool, another resource to address those two items.”

The town of Ellington, which began its four-day work week trial in August of 2022, implemented it for the same reason. 

“It’s one of the things that actually attracted me to come and work here,” said Matt Reed, Ellington’s Town Administrator.

Reed, who began working for Ellington in August 2023, said the idea was originally implemented by longtime first selectman Lori Spielman. He said Spielman had been contemplating the change for “quite a while,” as the town had already worked half-days on Fridays and had noticed Fridays typically yielded the lowest citizen turnout. Spielman, aware of Vernon’s successful four-day work week, decided then to pilot a four-day work week of her own.

“The test was successful, there was no uproar from the community, and so that’s why they were able to make the permanent transition in October of 2022,” said Reed. “If you’re someone who comes into town hall during regular business hours on Mondays, we’re here until 6:30, which is a good thing. So we found that seemed to be more beneficial than being open those hours on Friday.”

It’s become somewhat of a no-brainer for municipalities; by closing town hall on Fridays, days which every town official interviewed said they see the least citizens requesting services, they can provide extended hours on other days of the week, allowing employees an extra day off and citizens access to town services outside of their own working hours. A “win-win”, as Ryan Aylesworth, Town Manager of Mansfield, described it. Mansfield began its own pilot program in January 2023.

“What we have found is more satisfaction from the public, because now they’re not rushing to get out of work or have to leave work early or get to work late in order to pay their taxes if they want to show up and do that,” said Purcaro. “It’s been more convenient for the public by having those expanded hours.”

Each town’s four-day work weeks are set up similarly but have their differences. In Vernon, the first of the four towns to make the shift, 20 of 24 departments are now running on four-day schedules. Four-day workers work 35-hour schedules, working 8-hour shifts on Mondays and Wednesdays, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. 8.5 hours on Tuesdays, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and work 10.5 hours on Thursdays, from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. They take 30-minute lunches every day, and every town department except for its emergency services has Fridays off. 

In Plainville, four-day workers work 35-hour weeks; 8.5 hours from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Wednesdays and work 9.5 hours from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Thursdays, with thirty-minute lunches each day. 

In Ellington, Reed said that its participating 35-hour week departments work 10.25 hours on Mondays, from 7:45 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., and work 8.25 hours Tuesdays through Thursdays, from 7:45 to 4:30 p.m. 

Consistent with each town is a lack of four-day work week implementation in their emergency service departments, departments of public works (DPW), libraries and senior centers. Ellington’s and Plainville’s senior centers work half days on Fridays, while Mansfield’s and Vernon’s work full days. Vernon’s DPW works a five-day schedule, Ellington’s DPW have half-days on Fridays, Plainville’s DPW has Fridays off entirely, and Mansfield’s DPW has a split between four and five-day workers. Libraries, which typically have open hours 7 days a week, have also been a challenge to incorporate, but Ellington and Plainville have both indicated they are considering ways to implement four-day schedules for their library workers as well.

If making sense of the scheduling intricacies and discrepancies between each town’s various departments seems confusing, that’s because it is. Every town administrator reported putting a lot of time and thought into the development of their schedules, and all of them have made tweaks and shown a willingness to continue adapting their department’s schedules as needed.

Reed, Paulhus and Aylesworth said that the implementation of the four-day work week in their respective towns (Ellington, Plainville and Mansfield) has been mandatory for their eligible departments, but each town has created their own systems to accommodate the specific scheduling needs of their employees. Reed said that during the beginning of Ellington’s implementation, there were some kinks that had to be sorted out.

“You can imagine, if you had a daycare situation and you’re supposed to pick your child up at 5 o’clock, it’s difficult if you have to work until 6:30, right?” said Reed. “So there were times where we had to allow that person to work the extra time on Friday, but again, that’s all in the past.”

Reed said that during specific times of the year, employees in certain departments will still bend the rules if there’s extra work to be done.

“Obviously there’s times when the budget is a crunch,” said Reed. “And assessing, having your fingers at the ready for budget preparations and stuff like that. If somebody needs to work or come in on Friday mornings for a couple of hours or something, we allow that to happen, or if someone needs to flex their time because they need to leave a little early.”

Aylesworth said that employees can request alternate work schedules if they wish to continue with their five-day schedules, but that it needs to be approved and is dependent upon the needs of their specific department.

Paulhus said that it reached out to other municipalities, such as Vernon, Mansfield and Windham to inquire into their four-day work weeks before implementing their own. While Paulhus said there were “a few” scheduling issues in the beginning, the town has been able to overcome them. 

“Friday was already a half day, so it wasn’t really a huge adjustment,” said Paulhus. 

Unlike the others, Vernon’s switch to a four-day work week wasn’t mandatory, but something employees could opt in or out of. Purcaro said that the majority of employees have opted in.

“We don’t have a cookie-cutter format,” said Purcaro about the opt-in system. “It kind of reflects how much thought we put into our strategy and our test program.”

Michele Hill, Vernon’s Director of Youth Services and the Assistant President of the Town’s Directors’ Chair, spoke positively of the town’s scheduling flexibility.

“When there’s some flexibility to meet people’s needs best, they’re happier, they’ll work harder,” said Hill.

Hill said one of her employees in the Youth Services department works in the town’s high school, and decided to stay on the five-day schedule to make sure she was always available during school hours.

Another Vernon employee who has foregone opting into the four-day work week is Matt Hellman, Vernon’s Director of Social Services. Hellman said that he likes to exercise during his lunch breaks, something that’s a lot easier to do during hour lunches than half-hour ones. He also enjoys working Fridays for the solitude it provides him.

“It’s quiet,” said Hellman. “You can get a lot of work done.”

Three other employees work in Hellman’s department, all of whom have opted into the four-day work week. Hellman said that for most of the week, their variation in schedules is slight, with them getting in a half hour earlier and leaving a half hour later Mondays through Wednesdays and working two-hour longer days on Thursdays. Hellman said he appreciates the flexible nature of Vernon’s four-day work week, and that his department has had no issues with scheduling during the transition. 

While Hellman didn’t see the benefit of the four-day work week, his fellow department employees have.

“They very much welcome having the three-day weekend,” said Hellman.

All in all, every official indicated that the four-day work week has had a positive impact on employee morale.

Speaking on her own experience with the four-day work week, Hill said that she feels more recharged with an extra day off, allowing her to be more focused on the days she does work. Hill said that she loves to run, and that having an extra day allows her to better take care of the chores and errands of her personal life so that she can run more.

“I get to do more of the things that I enjoy and love doing personally, instead of things I have to do,” said Hill.

Aylesworth said that one Mansfield employee who loved to ski was, “very excited, because for him, this turned every two-day ski trip into a three-day ski trip.”

Ultimately, the four-day work week allows workers an extra day to address their wants and their needs. For Aylesworth, he can spend more time with his kids and cut down on a day of childcare expenses each week during the summer. For Reed, he’s spent his Fridays cleaning out the basement in preparation for having his home’s foundation replaced, but also uses them for appointments and other chores around the house.

Aylesworth said that he’s even seen once skeptical employees come around to the idea.

“I think the overwhelming, overwhelming, overwhelming majority of the employees that have done it, if a change was proposed to take it away and go back to something else, I suspect there’d be push back” said Aylesworth. “They’ve really come to appreciate and agree that this is providing them work-life balance.”

Officials also report that it has helped on the retention and recruitment front. Hill believed it helped her recruit an open position in Vernon’s Youth Services Department earlier this year.

“The four-day work week was very appealing to the applicants, and they’ve been vocal about that,” said Hill. “So I think it did help me to recruit for the opening that I had in my department, and fill it relatively quickly, and I still have that person.”

Reed believes Ellington’s four-day work week has played an integral role in attracting employees as well.

“A number of people got here right before I did, and all of them talk about the fact that Ellington’s four-day work week was a big motivator to get them to leave their prior job and come here,” said Reed. “I think we’ve managed to get two people from South Windsor, both of whom I think were very happy to move into a four-day work week situation from what they had, even though the money may have been comparable.”

Paulhus said the four-day work has helped him retain two municipal employees who considered leaving, by switching them into departments in which the four-day work week was implemented.

“It differentiated us from the other towns that they were considering, and I think it made the difference,” said Paulhus. “What we’re finding is, it’s not always wages or salary, that these other benefits do weigh in on the decision-making process.”

Purcaro has made similar observations when interviewing candidates.

“Sometimes people ask more about the work week,” said Purcaro. “They’re asking, what I would call quality of life questions, [about] the work week, work schedule, before they even ask about pay. That says a lot.”

By and large, officials said there has been little pushback from the public either. 

“We don’t have people come in here saying, ‘Why aren’t there staff here on Friday? Why can’t I get a business transaction on a Friday?’” said Reed. “We have not heard those complaints.”

Aylesworth said that Mansfield has continually asked for public feedback through the sending of monthly emails to citizens subscribed to the town’s newsletter asking for input, by posts on the town’s social media channels, and through the establishment of physical comment boxes. He said that the majority of feedback has been positive, with “only a couple” criticizing the loss of Friday hours.

“Interestingly, the criticism was never about how the loss of Friday hours actually created a hardship, because ‘Friday was the only day I could get there,’” said Aylesworth. “It was more just on the principle of, ‘Well, I think Town Hall should be open five days a week because we as taxpayers should have the ability to go to Town Hall five days a week.’”

Paulhus indicated that there has been “a little bit” of public opposition, but that the town is working on bringing more of its functions online to remediate it.

“So what we’re trying to do is push postings that we’re moving to try to get as much as the services, like paying your taxes or looking things up, online,” said Paulhus. “Whatever transactions that we can perform online, we want to be able to offer for our residents.”

Even in Danbury, a city that has ran on a four-day schedule for over a decade now, Alves said he still sees the occasional resident find out that Fridays are closed the hard way.

“There’s been times where I’ve just been standing, pacing on the phone, and I see somebody park and come up and then get frustrated,” said Alves. “Not everybody knows even though it’s been since 2008 and we have signage.”

Important to note is the lack of study or empirical data provided by both the Towns of Vernon and Ellington. Purcaro said the town hasn’t been conducting any studies, but instead noted the close relationship the Town’s administration has with municipal employee union and non-union groups and has implemented their feedback.

“Obviously there’s a lot of communication about what’s working, and we’ve tweaked it,” said Purcaro.

Reed said similarly that Ellington hasn’t conducted any in-depth studies either.

“I’m not aware that we’ve taken the time to do any measurements to say that this one way is better than the other way,” said Reed. “Of course, I don’t know that there are any studies that ever said the five-day work week was a good thing either.”

Paulhus said that prior to the town’s adoption of its four-day work week pilot, Plainville surveyed its employees to assess their thoughts surrounding the idea and has continued surveying as part of its pilot process. 

“It was overwhelmingly positive, so that’s why we went forward with the pilot,” said Paulhus. “We surveyed again at the end, and again, [we found] roughly the same result.”

While officials had much to say about the benefits provided in terms of work-life balance, few had made any meaningful conclusions about the potential for a four-day work week to save on utility bills. The City of Danbury was unable to produce any surveys or studies done in terms of cost-savings, and it is unknown whether Boughton’s goal of $150,000 in annual savings were ever realized.

Alves said he doesn’t know if the “numbers still hold true” and that he still sees people in municipal offices when he comes in each Friday. Other officials made similar observations.

“In theory, we’ll be saving some, but we’re just not sure how much that will be, and we haven’t measured it yet,” said Paulhus.

“It’s a benefit, but it’s not a compelling reason to do it,” said Aylesworth of potential utility savings. Aylesworth said that while one less day-a-week in the office does reduce employee commutes, he doubted its ability to make a meaningful environmental impact. 

“Maybe they drove to the beach,” said Aylesworth. “We only know the miles driven that they’re saving on their commute, and obviously, what they do with their time off, may or may not result in more.”

Although past literature on the four-day work week has been mixed, the world is a much different place in 2024 than it was in the 70’s and 80’s, a reality admitted by Bird himself. While the tone of his 2010 research seemed cautious, if not skeptical, Bird views the current resurgence in four-day work weeks as one that has a much higher likelihood of sticking.

“Post-COVID and the rise of remote working makes the possibility of a four-day work week even stronger,” said Bird. “There’s more technological resources that are available to implement a four-day work week, there’s more research and understanding of work-life balance and its consequences, and employees are more aware that there are more ways to work besides the 9-to-5 job.”

One discovery made by Purcaro during his research into the four-day work week was the fact that for the first time in American history, five generations are working concurrently: The Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials, and Gen Z. 

“Now usually, that creates an interesting, conflicting dynamic,” said Purcaro. “What’s really unique about this is that there’s one thing that has united all five generations, and that is quality of work-life balance.”

Purcaro’s observation has data to support it. Per a report released in 2022 by Oyster HR, a multinational San Francisco-based human resource firm, 42% of employees polled considered work-life balance as more important to them since the pandemic and 38% considered it far more important. Work-life balance ranked as the number 1 most important factor on average for the 2,151 workers surveyed.

Beyond strides in technology and an increased priority placed on work-life balance, Bird also noted a shift in power dynamics in the modern workplace.

“Workplace culture and attitudes have changed since the 1970’s,” said Bird. “I think employees have a much greater voice, work schedules have become much more flexible. There’s less of a top-down hierarchy today than 15 years ago.”

Bird believes this change in workplace culture has created “a climate where a four-day work week can succeed.” 

Among everyone interviewed, however, there was also an understanding that the four-day work week’s compatibility varies per job. While Connecticut’s municipalities have responded positively to the adoption of four-day work weeks, municipal administration jobs represent only one slice of the nation’s workforce. Townships also have their own unique set of circumstances that have made four-day work weeks more appealing. One such circumstance is the fact that seemingly all the departments that have implemented four-day work weeks run on 35-hour schedules. 

Dawn Maselek, Vernon’s Assistant Town Administrator and head of its Human Resources department said that there hasn’t been the same desire from the town’s 40-hour departments to implement a four-day work week.

“It is a longer day, and they’re not interested in working ten-hour days,” said Maselek.

Vernon’s 40-hour non-emergency departments, which are its IT, water pollution, garbage disposal and public works departments, have found a happy medium by working longer days on Thursdays and taking half-days on Fridays.

Every study compiled by Bird in his scholarly article was done on businesses working 40-hour weeks, which could account for the increasingly mixed results that were often found in contrast to the uniformly positive experiences reported by Connecticut’s municipal officials. A 2016 study done on the four-day, 40-hour work week showed increased fatigue among participants, despite increased employee satisfaction, similar to the findings of some of the studies Bird compiled in 2010.

While there is certainly growing interest among companies in reducing their working hours, it may still prove a bridge too far for the majority, and forever an impossibility for sectors that require around-the-clock coverage such as healthcare, law enforcement or first responders. This interest may continue to grow, however, as studies on the subject find increasingly positive results.

4DayWeekGlobal, a New Zealand-based non-profit that has conducted multiple four-day work week studies in collaboration with interested businesses around the world, mandates that businesses participating in their studies “maintained pay at 100% and gave employees a meaningful reduction in work time.” Its North American study released in 2023 studied 31 American companies and 9 Canadian companies while they piloted four-day work week programs over the course of a year.

After the study concluded, 89 percent of companies surveyed reported they were “definitely or planning on continuing” their four-day work weeks, while 11 percent reported that they were “leaning towards continuing their four-day work week.” 69 percent of employees experienced reductions in burnout, 40 percent felt less stressed, and 74 percent were more satisfied with their work-life balance.

“Findings are positive across the board, with this new evidence helping to counter concerns that previous successes were down to novelty and couldn’t be sustained long-term,” concluded the study.

The companies that participated were primarily in the professional services and marketing, non-profit, and IT sectors, giving a potential glimpse at which private sectors could be the most adept at making such a shift.

“I think it would be the flexible service industries, ones that aren’t dependent upon constant physical presence, that will be more likely for a four-day work week,” said Bird. “Companies that have a record of work-life balance, with flexible scheduling, will be more able to adopt a four-day work week than those that haven’t.”

On the flip side of the coin, the success of the four-day work week in Connecticut’s municipalities proves an excellent case study for its implementation working in industries that don’t traditionally provide schedule flexibility and that are dependent upon the physical presence of their employees. Municipal administration is a public-facing sector, often requiring on-site and in-person service providers. As a result, it doesn’t have the same ability as other sectors to fully shift gears into remote work, making the four-day work week a more reasonable work-life benefit to provide its employees in lieu of remote work models.

Aylesworth said that Mansfield began considering four-day work weeks after interviewing candidates that had decided to take positions elsewhere. Aylesworth said the town decided on a four-day work week not so much because it was specifically demanded by those he interviewed, but rather because it was a work-life benefit that he knew Mansfield could realistically provide.

“I think it’s more of a situation where, if we couldn’t give X or Y or Z because of the nature of the work that we do, this was something we could do,” said Aylesworth.

Reed came to a similar conclusion.

“If you can’t offer people 100 percent working from home or hybrid work, and you’re going to require them to come into an office, I think you have to look for a way to make that attractive to people because we’re seeing that people want to work under their terms, not your terms,” said Reed. “I think it’s certainly one of the strategies you can use to attract and retain people, having them in the office fewer days a week and allowing them more time for their home life.”

As a result, four-day work weeks should be viewed as only one of several tools in an employer’s arsenal to increase the happiness of its employees, alongside remote work and other flexible scheduling methods. 

Bird advised any employers looking to shift to a four-day work week to consult closely with their employees to work out a system that works best for all parties. 

“It requires scheduling coordination, it requires planning of demand,” said Bird. “And also, you know what’s so easily forgotten, is what do your employees want? What would benefit them most for work life balance?”

Every town official highlighted the amount of time, departmental cooperation and effort that has gone into perfecting and adapting their scheduling to meet the needs of both their employees and the public. While for some companies it may prove the biggest barrier to implementation, providing employees with schedules that help them achieve better work-life balance without compromising on the needs of the business is key to any four-day work week’s success.

“It’s hard,” said Paulhus. “It can be done; it just depends on how detailed the scheduling is and whether or not you can come up with an equitable schedule.”

Alves said that companies or municipalities looking to implement four-day work weeks should be patient in their implementation, and cognizant of the fact that drastic changes take time to assess.

“These are experiments that you want to have a longer time to make a fair assessment on,” said Alves. “Whenever you make a big systematic change like that, don’t let the first few months, first few quarters determine its success or failure.”

Regardless of the obstacles that implementing four-day work weeks may bring, some officials noted interest among their peers in implementing four-day work weeks of their own; Alves spoke to a friend who works at a college considering implementing a four-day work week and Reed has heard rumblings of South Windsor considering alternate work schedules for some of their contractors.

Alves thinks that the four-day work week will only be further normalized as more companies implement it.

“There’s the culture that we’ve all been accustomed to that business is Monday through Friday, and that’s what people used to, and it takes a long time to change cultures,” said Alves. “The more municipalities that do it and the more private organizations that do it, the more people would become accustomed to it.”

Ultimately, the four-day work week has come a long way since the 1970’s. Employers have old research and new technology to lean upon, and employees themselves have newfound power to dictate change in the workplace. While only time will tell how prevalent the four-day work week becomes, the idea seems more poised to sustain itself now than it was during any previous attempts to implement it.

“I don’t think it will become the dominant standard for some time, but I think we’re seeing a gradual movement there as individual companies adopt it as it meets their needs,” said Bird. “I don’t think the four-day work week will become the norm just yet, but it will no longer be the exception, and will no longer be as unheard of as it was in the past.”

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