15 Realistic Arguments In Favor Of The Four-Day Workweek

As a boss, you might not like the idea of a four-day workweek. After all, you pay those employees good money (or, at the very least, money), and you want to know they’re selling their souls on Slack at least five days/week. However, as Gen Z continues its efforts to throw off the shackles of capitalism, the four-day workweek is coming for you, whether you like it or not. And there are some upsides. Consider the following realistic reasons you should embrace it:

No one was working Fridays anyway: Let’s just be honest — Fridays are a wildly unproductive day, and it makes absolutely no difference to your bottom line if you stop making people pretend to work.

It cuts down on total costs: Specifically coffee costs, since most of the office was hungover on Friday and therefore doubled consumption. Also, toilet paper costs. You’re convinced your employees have been hoarding it, and Friday’s the easiest day to get away with theft, since everyone is too hungover to pay attention.

It helps the Adderall shortage: Giving people Friday off saves about 400 milligrams of Adderall a week. Be Rosie the Riveter; do your part.

It’s tough to hire new employees when other companies are offering four-day workweeks: Be honest with yourself. The one pingpong table you got for 500 total employees has nothing on a four-day workweek. If you want to attract talent, you’ve gotta be promising new candidates that by 4 p.m. on Thursday, they’ll be 50 miles outside the city on their way to a weekend of fly-fishing.

It’s a good excuse to cut vacation days: And vacation is where the real productivity gets lost. No one can pick back up their PowerPoints and Excel spreadsheets after a full week of skiing.

Just in case karma is real: You’ll want to hedge your risk. In this economy, there’s basically no money for bonuses, so you might as well do one nice thing for your staff. You know that before long, Mark Zuckerberg’s going to transition Facebook to a four-day workweek, and there’s literally nothing worse than looking like a bigger tool than Mark Zuckerberg.

All your employees have already quiet-quit: This is possibly connected to the bonuses. Or maybe the country’s general “vibe.” If everyone is being lazy anyway, you may as well let them do it only four days/week.

Which doesn’t really matter because you realized that this company you founded 10 years ago isn’t that useful: You do customer relationship management software. Each word less appealing than the last. What does it mean? Seriously, though.

In fact, the total amount you add to society is about zero: Four-fifths of zero is still zero. That’s basic math.

You didn’t really want to be a boss anyway: You were just a kid with a dream who got a private equity firm to give you $5 million. You didn’t ask for everyone on your team to hate you! You didn’t want it to be like this!

You really thought you were going to change the world: Or, at the very least, be a customer relationship management software company with a philanthropic arm.

You only planned to run this company for a couple years: It just paid too well. Everyone talks about unions; no one talks about golden handcuffs. The mortgage on that Hamptons place isn’t going to pay itself!

What is the point of your company? Remember the TV show The Office? Some days, your job feels like that. Except Michael Scott was more likable.

What is the point of any of it? You should have become a painter. You had such dexterous fingers as a child. This life is exhausting. You’re completely burned out.

A four-day workweek means you, too, get Fridays off: You need a break. You deserve a break.