In 2011, Simon Ursell and the three other co-founders of newly born environmental consultancy Tyler Grange based in Gloucestershire, UK, decided to give all their workers a day off a month to volunteer.

They had found that many of their new employees already spent their free time volunteering in wildlife trusts. “Our ecologists have always loved being ecologists,” Ursell says.

But last year, Tyler Grange took what some would see as a far more radical step towards workers wellbeing by trying out giving all employees a fifth of their workweek off.

The company joined the world’s biggest ever four-day workweek trial, which took place in the UK from June to December 2022. The pilot aimed to assess whether companies could maintain productivity with a reduced working time – and, importantly, with no loss in pay for employees.

Are four-day workweeks really viable?

Managers and workers at Tyler Grange celebrated the breakthrough with enthusiasm, with their results showing daily productivity rose by 22%. But Ursell was also keen to measure another outcome: the impact of the shorter workweek on the company’s carbon footprint. And the four-day workweek turned out to be surprisingly good for this too, he says.

“On average we saw a 21% reduction in the number of miles travelled by car,” he notes with a cheerful smile. Tyler Grange cut out meetings and travel that were unnecessary. Many employees used their additional days off to become even more involved in climate volunteering.

The conversation around the four-day workweek is gaining momentum all over the world. The non-profit which coordinated the UK trial, 4 Day Week Global, had already carried out pilots in the US and Ireland, while the public sector in Iceland and companies in Spain, Sweden, Belgium, Japan and New Zealand have all tested the impact of a shorter workweek. 

But the UK trial was the biggest yet, involving more than 60 firms and organisations. The final results were published on 21 February, and some of the companies are making bolder claims supporting what previous studies suggested: a shorter workweek could help the planet.

Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College and lead researcher at 4 Day Week Global who worked on both the UK and US pilots, argues that a shorter working week is key to achieving the carbon emissions reductions the world needs.

“Although climate benefits are the most challenging thing to measure, we have a lot of research showing that over time, as countries reduce hours of work, their carbon emissions fall,” she says. A 10% reduction in hours is associated to an 8.6% fall in carbon footprint, according to a study co-authored by Schor in 2012.

A 10% decrease in commuting time was seen by the companies which took part in the UK trial, and a bigger 27% decrease was seen in the US trial (Credit: A W Helin/Getty Images)

Both the UK and US trails also found that many people spent the time saved from not commuting or working engaged in low-carbon activities, such as hiking or stay-at-home hobbies. The UK data also showed that the shift to a shorter workweek led to an increase in pro-environmental behaviours: participants in the trial spent more time volunteering for environmental causes, and were more careful with recycling and buying eco-friendly products. 

“When people work less, they have more free time for sustainable activities which are often more time-intensive,” says Stefanie Gerold, a researcher at Brandenburg University of Technology in Germany, not involved in the UK or US trials who has developed various working time reduction models implemented in Austrian companies. 

You might also like:

• Can the unborn have a say on climate?
• The cities built to be reusable
• The surprising benefits of blue spaces

Volunteering increased among the employees of both Waterwise, a UK non-profit which participated in the UK trial, and crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, which took part in the US trial. Jon Leland, vice president and head of sustainability at Kickstarter, says he observed workers in the company becoming more engaged socially and civically.

And, sometimes, surprises show up. An unforeseen effect caught the eye of Tyler Grange during the UK trial: carbon emissions related to the sending and storage of data significantly dropped. Big data-storing centres can each consume the same amount of electricity as 50,000 homes, so that was another significant win. “The lack of [online] business traffic on Fridays could have a substantial impact on emissions, possibly even more important than the drop in commuting,” Ursell sa