I think you have misunderstood the reason behind the move towards the 4 day workweek across Europe.
It's literally more productive for less hours.
It's literally more productive for less hours.
If this is free productivity, why don't companies already do this?
It takes a leap of faith to make big changes like this. Sometimes the decision makers don't have the courage to try.
For instance, there are many companies that have taken the pandemic as an opportunity to enable permanent remote work even post-pandemic. It would have been a massive recruiting improvement to have had that pre-pandemic. (And it was, I worked at a place that was like this). But in the end, it was better to just focus on the business itself. There’s only so many things it’s worth not standardizing on.
As someone who prefers both in-office and more than 40 hrs of work, I find this whole thing interesting
The government doesn't know how to run businesses better than the businesses themselves.
The postwar era status quo of people travelling hours each way to their job, then to spend most of it in meetings or in an open plan office (chosen for managerial oversight, not productivity, which is a clue we will come back to) with too much noise to be productive are being challenged (cv19)
The research is clear, most white collar workers report much less productive work time compared to their work hours.
Reporting and data collection in this ever increasing era of cognitively demanding work is becoming far more accurate. In previous times, people's fear of redundancy has caused false overreach of business hours, and competitive presenteeism. Between this, and micromanagerial institutions like the open plan office, there is plenty of activity that doesn't accurately report productivity up to the business. Assuming the business has perfect information here is the fault. There are forces shaping these standards that are beyond the reach of produtivity, cultural normalisation of unhealthiness is rife. Look at China.
The reality is that people spend some percentage of their time being productive. During the day they take coffee breaks, chat with coworkers, check Twitter, etc.
Assume people are productive for 20 hours now. If you reduced the work week to be 20 hours, productivity would go down. There would still be meetings, coffee breaks, etc that eat into those 20 hours. Now people are only productive for, say, 15 hours a week.
I mean, I and most of my colleagues did that when my employer had 4 day work weeks during the summer. Instead of “summer hours” we called it “some of the hours”.