WORK LIFE

Employees working 4-day week at Irish companies devote new free time to sleep

Workers who shifted to 32-hour work weeks logged nearly an extra hour of sleep per night

The concept of shortened workweeks is gaining traction since the pandemic upended schedules. Picture: Getty

When employees can slash their traditional five-day workweek to four days, they tend to allocate their new free time to one surprising activity: sleep.

Workers who shifted to 32-hour workweeks logged 7.58 hours per night of sleep, nearly a full hour more than when they were keeping 40-hour workweeks, according to lead researcher Juliet Schor, a sociologist and economist at Boston College who is tracking over 180 organizations globally as they shift to truncated schedules ...