Burnout, the rise of artificial intelligence and pressure from employers to return to the office may lend momentum to the campaign for a four-day working week, according to an Irish behavioural scientist.
Dr Dale Whelehan said that 2025 would be the year when small businesses could "radically experiment" with a four-day week to recruit and retain staff.
The 28-year-old is chief executive of 4-Day Week Global, an advocacy group that offers services to companies making the switch to the shorter working week, and he has been named one of the Time 100 Most Influential People in Health and in the social impact category of Forbes 30 Under 30.
Speaking to the Press Association, Dr Whelehan said: "When I was named on this Time 100 list in particular, I saw a sentence which said 'the youngest person on this list is Dr Dale Whelehan, and the oldest person is [the late] Jimmy Carter.' I thought: I'm never gonna see that sentence or anything like it again."
"There's something so humbling about the whole thing as well, because I've had a really cool year," he added.
"I got to speak at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Summit about a four-day week, and also went to New York's Fast Company Most Innovative Companies Summit.
"[I met] these 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 started his career as a physio, and although he said he was not very good at biology and physiology, he discovered he 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.
He later looked at merging behavioural science and wellbeing just as the concept of a four-day week was emerging.
"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," he explained.
"I 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 four-day week is rooted in the idea of allowing the brain sufficient time to recover before returning to work.
Dr Whelehan said that in 1911, when six-day working weeks were commons, analysis of every task done by factory workers in Pennsylvania was completed to try to improve efficiency, ultimately leading to worker fatigue and errors that cost some people limbs.
"Human attention is much more limited than physical muscle. We know 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," said Dr Whelehan.
He added that "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 our unique selling point is in the world of AI," he said.
"If we're exhausted or burned out we're never going to have a fighting chance of figuring out what that is."
(Pic: Getty Images)
