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Below, co-authors Jared Lindzon and Joe OConnor share five key insights from their new book, Do More in Four: Why Its Time for a Shorter Workweek. Jared is a freelance journalist who has been reporting on the future of work for publications like Fast Company, Time magazine, and the Globe and Mail for over a decade. Joe is the CEO and cofounder of Work Time Reduction, a global consulting and research organization that helps organizations find innovative ways to reduce working hours. Over the last eight years, it has helped hundreds of companies and thousands of employees pilot a four-day workweek in North America, Europe, the U.K., and Australia. Whats the big idea? Working less time and generating better results is about as counterintuitive as it gets. Logically, it shouldnt work. And yet it does, time and time again, across industries, geographies, company sizes, and cultures. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Jared and Joebelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. There is no good reason for the workweek to be five days long It isnt backed by science, ancient wisdom, or divine decree. Nobody sat down to conduct an objective analysis of the optimal number of days for humanity to work and rest, and determined that the current 5-2 split was right, fair, or necessary. Our conventional workweek was instead shaped by a period of rapid economic and technological change that concluded over 100 years ago, during the Industrial Revolution. For 95 percent of human history, we worked an average of 15 hours per week, and that work was typically fluid, flexible, and quintessentially human. Then the early industrial era changed both our relationship with work and the kinds of skills needed to thrive. In the early industrial era, there were no evenings or weekends; those who showed up were paid for the hours they worked, and those who didnt were replaced. That was until the early 19th century, when Christian groups successfully lobbied the American government to close the post office on Sundays so that workers could attend church, and gradually other employers followed. Jewish workers were instead given Saturdays off to accommodate their sabbath, but that didnt sit right with the Christian groups, who insisted on having both days off for all workers. That is ultimately how we arrived at our current workweek, but it wasnt even codified into the American Fair Labor Standards Act until 1940, well after the 40-hour standard was adopted by most major employers. While that standard served us well for the last 85 years, work has changed dramatically in that time. As we undergo another period of rapid disruption, we are once again in a unique position to reimagine work in ways that better suit todays realities and tomorrows opportunities. 2. Using industrial-era metrics in the digital age is proving unsustainable Since the Industrial Revolution, we have been calculating productivity in hours, which is a useful tool for measuring output on an assembly linenot so much in a knowledge economy. There are many ways to fill an hour at work, but not all contribute equally to the businesss bottom line. Quantifying productivity is no longer as simple as counting hours. It has become a much more complex, holistic equation that includes hard work as well as the quality of rest and recovery, time off, nutrition, exercise, sleep, and much more. There is a strong argument to be made that there is now a greater correlation between worker well-being and productivity than there is between hours worked and productivity. Productivity will be all about digital efficiency plus human effectiveness. In a fast-approaching reality in which digital labor, in the form of agentic AI, can infinitely scale a repeatable process, racing against the machine will be a dead end for the human workforce. Productivity will be all about digital efficiency plus human effectiveness. These increasingly valuable capabilities rely heavily on leveraging well-being, motivation, energy, and recovery. Like our pre-industrial ancestors, work is evolving to leverage our most human skills. Those abilities can be optimized through a four-day workweek, in which, instead of seeking to do more in less time, we use AI to do fewer, high-impact tasks better. 3. A four-day workweek only works under the right circumstances You cant just march into the office on Monday, announce a four-day workweek, and expect workers to magically fill the gap. Much like the transition to hybrid or remote work, the switch to a four-day workweek must be thoughtfully designed and implemented. It requires strategy, discipline, and a willingness to challenge everything you thought you knew about productivity. Rather than an extra weekly vacation day, the four-day workweek should be leveraged as a powerful incentive to rally staff members to completely overhaul their work processes and adopt new technologies to accomplish more in less time. Such changes are often difficult to implement on their own; if you ask your staff to be 20 percent more productive, they probably wont respond positively. If, however, you tell them they can work one less day each week if they can find ways to be 20 percent more productive, they will likely be more than happy to take on the often difficult but potentially game-changing tech adoption and work redesign efforts that can help them achieve it. The four-day workweek is about using time as a shared reward for better performance, engaging your staff on a collective mission to reduce hours without compromising outcomes. 4. The four-day workweek can address specific organizational challenges Organizations that adopt a four-day workweek typically use it to address significant challenges related to employee well-being, recruitment, or tech adoption. Many organizations have leveraged it to address each in a way that would be difficult or impossible otherwise. For example, we offer case studies featuring a nonprofit organization and a family law firm that both struggled with high absenteeism and burnout due to the intense nature of the work. Both ultimately found that any cost of moving to a four-day workweek, which they reported as minimal, was more than offset by sharp reductions in turnover and absenteeism. Research shows that many employees are actively sabotaging their organizations attempts to adopt new AI tools out of fear of being replaced by them. We also share the stories of midsize tech firms struggling to compete with industry giants offering salaries they could never match. Rather than trying to win the recruiting game on the same terms, they decided to change the game by offering a perk that none of their competitors would. As one firm told us,the difference between an A player and a B player is much greater than the 20 percent in lost time. Another also shared how the simple practice of auditing how staff spend their time at work revealed a disconnect between what employees thought mattered to the business and what actually improved its bottom line. Having a roster of all-stars, all squarely focused on the metrics the business cares about most, has enabled each to be more successful in four days than they were in five previously. The four-day workweek can also be an effective way to rally staff around internal projects that they might otherwise resist. Research shows that many employees are actively sabotaging their organizations attempts to adopt new AI tools out of fear of being replaced by them. If an employees only reward for learning new skills and adopting new ways of doing things is more work, less job security, or the opportunity to earn more money for shareholders, theyre probably not going to make that transition easy for the company. In the book, we share the stories of an American architectural firm, a British environmental consultancy, and the New Zealand office of global consumer goods behemoth Unilever, each of which used the four-day workweek to motivate major operational improvements by letting staff share in the rewards. 5. The four-day workweek can help address some of our greatest societal challenges The four-day workweek can offer measurable environmental benefits by taking more cars off the roads and more workers out of office towers during the week, and by encouraging more sustainable behaviors. In Joes four-day workweek pilots, participants reported recycling more, volunteering more, and spending more time in nature. They also suggested that the four-day workweek gave them time to engage in more sustainable habits, like cooking instead of ordering takeout, or biking instead of driving. The four-day workweek is also being looked at seriously by jurisdictions around the world to help address declining birth rates. According to pilot studies, the four-day workweek not only makes it easier for women to balance their careers and home lives but also encourages men to chip in more, while saving on childcare costs and allowing families to spend more time together. Perhaps the greatest impact, however, is in the workplace itself. By including caregivers and non-caregivers under the same companywide policy, those with greater responsibilities at hometypically working motherswere more likely to be seen as equal contributors and considered for advancement opportunities, rather than feeling singled out for needing a shorter schedule. While the four-day workweek cant solve all of societys challenges, it provides an opportunity to make meaningful progress in a way that gives people something of value, rather than a personal sacrifice. Perhaps the greatest impact, however, is in the workplace itself. The shift to a five-day workweek began as a grassroots movement long before it was signed into law, and we believe the same will be true for the four-day workweek. Although ongoing political efforts from the United States to the U.K. to South Korea help bring attention and credibility to the four-day workweek, change is most likely to originate in academic papers, picket lines, break room chats, and Slack channels long before the conversation is brought into the boardroom, and even longer before it reaches the legislative floor. When it comes to setting a new standard for working hours, history has shown that leaders, business owners, and employees have more power to drive lasting change than politicians. The future of the workweek isnt up to them; its up to you. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
Artificial intelligence has shifted from an experiment to an expectation. Boards push CEOs about ROI. CEOs launch enterprise rollouts. Leaders invest in tools, platforms, and governance. Yet adoption still stalls. Work-arounds spread. Risk grows. Value lags. The failure rarely sits with the technology. The breakdown sits in adoption design. Many organizations treat AI as an IT rollout or a standard change initiative. Tools gain approval. Policies circulate. Training launches. Whats missing is the rigor leaders apply to external products. Employees receive tools without a clear value proposition. Managers face delivery pressure without added capacity. Governance favors control over learning. The result is predictable. Hesitation rises. Burnout grows. Execution fragments, especially in the middle of the organization. Dana, a VP leading AI enablement at a global business-to-business services firm, lived this firsthand. The mandate was clear: deploy approved AI tools across marketing, sales, and customer success within eight months. Legal and PR aligned. Training sessions were launched as well as dashboards to track usage. On paper, the rollout looked disciplined. Usage dashboards showed logins, prompts, and license activity. In practice, teams struggled to use the tools in live client work. Approved platforms added steps, limited outputs, or failed to match real workflows. Under delivery pressure, some teams tested briefly and moved on. Others complied superficially. Many shifted core work to external tools that felt faster and more flexible, while using approved systems only enough to register activity. Dana ran into what we call the mandate trap. Leaders mandate AI from the top. The work of making it usable lands in the middle. We didnt have a resistance problem, Dana reflected. We had a design problem. Her experience reflects what we see across organizations and in AI adoption workshops with C-suite and senior leaders. Teams revert to familiar workflows. Learning time disappears as daily delivery targets crowd out capability building. Worse, often, leaders label this gap as a resistance to AI, rather than identifying the underlying problems and solving them. Through our advisory work and research, Jenny as an executive coach and learning and development expert, and Noam as an AI strategist, we see three practices separate the organizations that are able to scale AI within their organizations from the ones that have stalled rollouts. Reframe ‘Resistance’ as a workflow problem Leaders often label hesitation as a mindset issue. In reality, hesitation reflects risk. Employees disengage when expectations are off, outputs feel unattainable, or policies feel unclear. Under delivery pressure, people choose speed and safety. When AI complicates execution rather than simplifying it, adoption stalls. Middle managers absorb the strain. They must deliver faster, coach new behaviors, manage risk, and hold uncertainty, without changes to incentives, capacity, or decision rights. Adoption breaks where pressure concentrates. The issue is not motivation. It is an internal product-market fit problem. Internal product market fit exists when a tool solves a real workflow problem well enough that teams keep using it under real constraints. This insight shifted Danas rollout. She stopped pushing compliance and paused deployment to focus on solving the problems internal teams were running into. What leaders can do: Diagnose hesitation: Identify where trust breaks. Unreliable outputs. Unclear revision paths. Slow approvals. Fix friction before pushing usage. Start small: Focus on one workflow, one outcome, one team learning together. Name the fear: Address job loss concerns directly. Clarify what stays human-led and how AI fits workforce plans. Psychological safety creates engagement. Relieve pressure: Protect learning time. Reset targets or adoption stays surface level. When leaders treat resistance as a design signal, adoption moves from compliance to progress. Treat Employees as ‘Customer Zero’ Leaders who succeed stop deploying AI and start selling it internally. Strong AI adoption follows a different playbook. Leaders anchor change in outcomes, redesign workflows, involve employees as cocreators, and invest in learning as a core capability. Dana pulled in platform teams, product marketing, communications, and functional leaders. Teams receive a clear value proposition tied to real workflow friction, not feature lists or policy decks. Trust grows when people understand how outputs form, how risks are managed, and where human judgment remains essential. Early wins rarely show up as profit. They show up as faster cycles, higher-quality work, fewer errors, and less rework. Tools gain traction when they simplify work. Dana ran short discovery sprints with marketing, sales, and operations. She stopped asking whether teams used the tools. She asked where work slowed, where rework piled up, and where judgment mattered most. What leaders can do: Anchor on outcomes: Define what should feel faster, easier, or more reliable. Build trust early: Set clear governance and human-in-the-loop guardrails. Reimagine workflows: Integrate AI into existing systems and execution moments. Cocreate with employees: Involve teams in discovery and testing. Treat learning as core work: Protect time to experiment and build confidence. When leaders treat employees as customer zero, adoption shifts from compliance to sustained change. Protect the Middle to Unlock Learning AI adoption breaks most often in the middle. Managers must change how work gets done while hitting the same targets. Meanwhile, managers drive most team engagement while carrying the heaviest strain. When learning competes with delivery, delivery wins. Effective leaders redesign these conditions. They reset expectations to protect time to learn. They reward experiments that reduce risk over time. Before scaling, they ask two questions: Does this remove real workflow friction? Do people trust it enouh to use it? Dana acted on this insight. She gave managers protected time to test workflows and share findings. Early wins became simple playbooks. Only proven practices scaled. Managers moved from firefighting to coaching. Governance shifted from gatekeeping to enablement. Dana narrowed focus instead of widening it. Teams submitted real workflow tests. Dana selected only those with clear impact and protected a full quarter to run them end to end. Some tools removed friction and earned trust. Others added noise. She scaled the winners and retired the rest. What leaders can do: Spot what works: Identify teams who are already using AI to reduce friction. Turn those efforts into repeatable practices. Reward learning: Recognize managers for building capability and sharing insights, not tool usage. Run disciplined experiments: Require clear hypotheses, small pilots, and documented learning. Hold the bar high: Reward honest reporting of failures so scale stays credible. AI transformation is an organizational design challenge, not an IT rollout. The mandate trap is avoidable. Leaders escape it when they stop pushing adoption and start earning it.
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E-Commerce
The biggest accounting firm in the U.S. just announced a major structural reset: PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) will now only hire new associates in its advisory division to work out of 13 offices, down from 72. Yolanda Seals-Coffield, chief people and inclusion officer for PwC US, confirmed the decision to Business Insider, explaining that the move aims to foster a sense of community among workers. “The idea is that we want to bring people together in a connected way for those first couple of years,” Seals-Coffield said. “You may start in Atlanta and then say, ‘Great, I’ve got my two years of experience. I want to go work in Alabama, which is where I’m from and where I really want to work,” she said. The slimmed-down choice of locations isn’t the only major change hitting the company. In recent years, PwC has delayed start dates for some entry-level consulting hires. And in 2025, it became clear that landing a job at the firm straight out of college would become more difficult; it announced it would recruit a third fewer new graduates by 2028. The company has also been making major shifts toward upskilling its workforce in the era of artificial intelligence. On February 5, PwC announced the launch of its “Learning Collective,” a workplace training initiative that it describes as “an ecosystem for accelerated growth built for the possibilities of the AI age.” Learning can no longer wait for the right time, place, role, or ladder, Seals-Coffield said in the announcement. It needs to be a full-immersion experience that accelerates people and their organizations forward with speed. Despite the positive spin on the company’s clear gear shift, it’s hard to imagine that the recalibration doesn’t signal an age of growing uncertainty within the industry. Some experts say it’s a response to economic uncertainty, as well as an ever-changing world that’s grappling with how to best integrate employee capabilities with AI advances. Deepali Vyas, global head of data and AI at global talent partner ZRG, tells Fast Company that in the AI age, “firms have to double down on what technology cannot easily replicate, including judgment, client presence, collaboration, and problem framing.” She adds that they must become “far more intentional about how they manufacture talent.” Overall, that seems to mean entry-level roles are seriously shrinking as tasks typically done by first-year hires are increasingly being handed to AI. For Gen Zers who are hoping to get a foot in the door, the problem feels unavoidable, as some reports estimate that entry-level job postings are down by 35% since 2023. PwC maintains that in a time when so many individuals work remotely for a good portion of the workweek, the move really is about employees getting back to learning from one another in a dynamic environmentwhich has become increasingly relevant during this post-COVID-19 era. Fast Company spoke with a PwC representative who pushed back on the narrative that the shift signifies an industry slowdown and said that employees and the company alike can make big strides with a more collaborative approach. Still, as searching for a job has become a truly anxiety-inducing part of lifeeven for the most competitive of college graduatesany amount of company downsizing is still going to read as a bad omen. When it comes to PwC, the major cut to office space is a highly visible one at that.
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E-Commerce
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