Top image: Stephanie Lee / RICE file photo
According to The Straits Times, 7 in 10 employers say a 4-day work week is ‘feasible’ in Singapore.
Unfortunately for us, 95 percent of employers say no to actually implementing it.
If you’re surprised by these numbers, you really shouldn’t be. Every year, we are on the verge of implementing a 4-day Work Week. Every year, despite many enthusiastic articles, we are left disappointed by the reality of more interminable Friday meetings.
This is quite a curious paradox if you consider the research, which certifies 4-Day Work Weeks as an ‘overwhelming success’.
The largest UK-based pilot of the 4-Day Work Week resulted in a near-universal uptick in mental and physical well-being. 71 percent of participants experienced ‘reduced burnout’ during the experiment while 60 percent found caregiving easier with the new schedule.
The benefits extend to employers. Revenues remained stable during the pilot, while staff attrition fell by 57 percent. Individual company results can be even more effusive. Microsoft Japan–which trialled the 4-day schedule in 2019—reported a 40 percent spike in ‘productivity’.
“You have no idea how much this will mean to my family—the amount of money we will be able to save on childcare,” said one grateful participant.
Hype VS Reality
If such outcomes can be believed, we should already be living in a 4-workday utopia. Instead, the situation has only become murkier and more confusing with each passing year and each breathless LinkedIn post.
HR consultancy ADP Singapore reports that 21 percent of Singaporean workers already enjoy a 4-day work week arrangement. Yet, the global database partnered by 4-Day Week Global—the movement’s leading advocate—shows exactly one Singapore-based role on the list.
Career portal Indeed lists The Learning Lab and PropertyGuru as companies with a 4-day work week. However, this information is misleading at best. According to employees working within these companies, they offer flexible working hours rather than a 4-day work week.
At The Learning Lab, you might get 4-day work weeks as a teacher, but it depends on your schedule, who you are covering, and if you’re okay with weekend shifts. As for PropertyGuru, the company confirmed that it doesn’t operate on a 4-day work week basis.
The list of contradictions goes on. The nearly decade-long series of trials and pilots worldwide have produced merely more trials and pilots. If we are measuring the PR value of talking about The 4-day Work Week, this is surely one of the greatest successes of the late 2010s.
However, if we are talking about actual implementation on a large scale, the results can only be described as anti-climactic.
Two years after the largest and most successful 4-day pilot in the world, UK workers were given the right to ‘ask’ for a four-day work week while companies were given the same right to reject them.
Two years after Panasonic announced its own 4-Day Work Week initiative, the Associated Press discovered that only 0.23 percent of its 63,000 employees were on the new schedule.
Locally, it’s even more difficult to find a success story that matches the hype.
“While companies in Singapore acknowledge the potential benefits of a 4-day work week in uplifting employee well-being, many remain hesitant or find this work model unlikely to be implemented in the near future,” says Kirsty Poltock, Country Manager at recruitment agency Robert Walters Singapore.
“One of the major concerns is the potential increase in workload as employees are expected to complete the same amount of work in fewer days.”
This concern rings true for Katherine, 29, who used to work for an advertising agency which offered one 4-day work week every month. Unfortunately, the company’s creatively named ‘Fuck-Off Fridays’ failed to live up to its promise.
“I think I took it twice in my three years there LOL… because the work never seemed to end, and we didn’t feel right taking it,” she recalls.
Ten Years of a Failed Experiment
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of this charade. It’s past time we called out this 4-Day Work Week project for what it is—a giant PR exercise for companies eager to appear progressive and open-minded without making any real commitment to progress.
Like the open-plan office and the unused ping-pong table in your ‘breakout’ room, it’s a cosmetic gesture designed to spice up the company press release and LinkedIn bios.
This may sound cynical, but we have every right to be. The headlines simply do not reflect the reality. I’m not implying, of course, that 4-day work weeks don’t exist. Many people do find flexible arrangements that work—and many companies are no doubt sincere in offering better work-life balance.
However, I wouldn’t bet my CPF on its current iteration, which is fundamentally flawed in all the ways that most modern benefits are.
Avid proponents of the 4-Day Work Week are eager to stress that ‘productivity’ does not suffer due to working four days instead of five. Many are also keen to highlight how revenue rose despite the reduced work days.
This argument is not a slam dunk—it’s a massive red flag. Productivity is a slippery metric, and revenue is highly dependent on the economic cycle. When you tie the 4-Day Work Week to ‘productivity’, you’re making rest and downtime conditional on the company’s performance. Essential caregiving needs and mental health become contingent upon the bottom line.
What happens when the profit margins begin to falter? Our recent return-to-office mandates offer a clue. Remote work—once celebrated as the future—is now a perk of the recent past. Companies which once prided themselves on remote ‘flexibility’ have now flipped over to the mantra of in-office ‘collaboration’.
Are We There Yet?
This is a terrible shame because shortening work hours really does work here.
Way back in 2004, a fresh-faced PM—Lee Hsien Loong—reduced the civil service working hours from 5.5 days to 5 days. Granted, most MNCs were already working five days a week, but it was a bold move by Singaporean standards. Public services did not collapse overnight, and with the benefit of hindsight, our nation seems none the worse for sleeping in every Saturday.
It’s hard to imagine a similar coup de grace in 2025. Without an edict from the prime minister or someone of a similar calibre, The 4-Day Work Week will likely be trapped in perpetual beta-testing.
It is simultaneously a ‘proven success’ and a project forever deferred. There is universal support for the idea, but also zero steps taken after the ‘fruitful’ discussion.
Its biggest beneficiaries thus far are TED talk speakers, LinkedIn clout farmers and lazy clickbait writers like me, who make their living by talking in abstractions.
In this case, we should leave the 4-Day Work Week behind. The world of workplace well-being has more pressing issues and more attainable goals than the 4-day fever dream, which preoccupies us so much.
There should be a stronger Right to Disconnect law to protect our existing workload. There should be additional caregiving leave for those with sick parents or kids in need. There should be more stringent anti-discrimination measures for sexual orientation and gender identity beyond generalised statements of intent.
If these other ways become a reality, I’ll happily spend my Fridays in the office, diligently pretending to work.
