Irishman leading calls for four-day work week reflects on ‘really cool year’

An Irishman leading global calls for a four-day work week has said that burnout, the use of AI and companies pressuring employees to return to the office may fuel momentum behind the campaign.

Behavioural scientist Dr Dale Whelehan said 2025 is the year where small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can “radically experiment” with a four-day week in order to attract and retain employees.

The 28-year-old is the chief executive of 4 Day Week Global, an advocacy group that now offers services to companies looking to make the switch.

Dr Whelehan was named on the Time100 Most Influential People In Health and the Forbes 30 Under 30 in the social impact category, capping off an incredible year for the Kildare man.

“When I was named on this Time100 list in particular, I saw a sentence which said ‘the youngest person on this list is Dr Dale Whelehan, and the oldest person is Jimmy Carter’. I thought, I’m never gonna see that sentence or anything like it again,” he told the PA news agency.

“There’s there’s something so humbling about the whole thing as well, because I’ve had a really cool year, and I’ve got to go to some very cool places.

“I got to speak at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Summit speaking about a four-day week and go to New York to the Fast Company Most Innovative Companies Summit, and meet the direct creative director of Mattel, these really multi-millionaire, super successful people, and I’m here in the countryside in Kildare with grass growing down the middle of the lane.”

Dr Whelehan began his career as a “pretty shoddy” physio, where he said he was not “very good” at biology and physiology, but had a real interest in people’s wellbeing and mental health”.

“I went and I did a PhD after that looking at sleep deprivation in surgeons and that changed my career,” he said.

Dr Whelehan moved to look at merging behavioural science and wellbeing.

“A four-day week was emerging as this idea that at the beginning of my PhD, Ireland had just launched its first pilot of the concept with the Four Day Week Ireland campaign, and so I was volunteering with that at the time, and got more and more interested in it, saw the benefits of it, not just for people but for businesses, for society, for our planet, and ultimately, then joined as CEO of the organisation two years ago.”

The idea of a four-day week is rooted in allowing the brain to recover fully before going back to work.

He said that in 1911, when people were working a six-day week, analysis was done of every task of factory workers in Pennsylvania to try to improve their efficiency.

This led to a huge surge in productivity during the industrial revolution, but also to worker fatigue and errors that led to people becoming injured and losing limbs.

The five-day work week gave the time for a very physical workforce to recover.

Dr Whelehan notes: “Human attention is much more limited than physical muscle, so we know that actually you probably only get about three-and-a-half to four hours of good work done any given day.

“So the four-day work week is actually here, it’s just buried under a lot of unproductive time.”

He said the switch to a four-day work week is not as simple as just removing a day’s work, but instead changing the work you do to become “very deliberate” and “outcome-based”.

This involves looking at the tasks you want completed by the end of the year and working backwards from that, organising tasks during the week in order to achieve it.

“When we think of people who work hard, we typically mean people who work long hours, but we don’t necessarily delve deeper and understanding what is the level of quality output by those people,” Dr Whelehan said.

He said that staff of a company shifting to a four-day week can go through a series of emotions, as with any change: from the “huge excitement” at the start to the realisation that it is not as simple as “clocking off on Thursday evenings” and a shift in work habits that can be exhausting.

“You must be cognisant of if you are implementing it in one area, what are the ramifications of that if you’re not introducing it in another area?

“Or similarly, if you’re introducing different types of reduced working hour schedules, so your frontline staff are actually going to be working five shorter days, versus your back in staff working four days.

“That might cause some tension… if not communicated and managed properly.”

A shift towards trying a four-day work week might be fuelled by the need to address burnout, by companies wanting employees to return to the office post-pandemic, and by the advent of AI.

This December, the city of Tokyo announced it was introducing a four-day week in an attempt to tackle low birth rates.

Dr Whelehan said: “That was from a conversation that I had with the Japanese Ministry two years ago – they called me just when the UK results (of a pilot of 60 companies) came out.”

He added: “There is a real risk with a lot of these tech billionaires, it’s in their inherent interest to reduce overheads and they will naturally use AI over humans in order to achieve that.

“So really there is a huge responsibility on humans now to figure out what is our unique selling point in the world of AI, and if we’re burned out and exhausted, we’re never going to have a fighting chance of figuring out what that is.”