The idea of working four days and getting paid for five sounds almost too good to be true. And for millions of workers still grinding through five-day weeks, it probably does. Yet a growing number of companies have actually tested this idea in the real world, with results that are sometimes inspiring, sometimes messy, and occasionally a total reversal of everything they promised.
Three U.S. companies stand out in this conversation: Kickstarter, Bolt, and ThredUp. Each tried the four-day model. Each had its own story. Let’s dive in.
Why the 4-Day Work Week Is More Than a Trendy Perk
Before we get into who succeeded and who stumbled, here’s some important context. This is not just a feel-good idea floated by progressive HR teams. It’s backed by serious research, conducted at serious institutions.
Results from the world’s largest trial of a four-day working week revealed significantly reduced rates of stress and illness, with nearly three quarters of employees self-reporting lower levels of burnout and roughly two in five saying they were less stressed. There was also a dramatic drop in sick days and a steep fall in the number of staff leaving participating companies.
Company revenue barely changed during the trial period, even increasing marginally on average. And in a report presented to lawmakers, roughly nine out of ten companies that participated said they intended to continue with the four-day working week, with nearly a fifth making the change permanent.
The Global Trial That Changed the Conversation
The landmark research wasn’t a small-scale experiment. It involved dozens of companies spanning multiple industries and countries, and the findings were hard to dismiss.
Of the 61 companies that took part, 56 said they would continue with the four-day week following the pilot, while 18 confirmed the change as permanent. Around 2,900 employees participated in the trial across sectors from marketing and advertising to finance, digital manufacturing, and food retail.
A global study by nonprofit 4 Day Week Global and researchers from Boston College, University College Dublin, and Cambridge University showed that most of the companies and employees who took part were unlikely to return to a standard five-day workweek. The majority of the firms were in the United States and Ireland. That’s the foundation. Now, let’s look at the individual stories.
Kickstarter: The Success Story That Held Its Ground
Of the three companies, Kickstarter is the clearest win. The Brooklyn-based crowdfunding platform was among 33 companies that conducted a six-month pilot from April through October of 2022, testing what a reduced workweek would look like. Partnering with 4 Day Week Global, Kickstarter worked to give its employees a three-day weekend, with most workers operating Monday through Thursday.
While the company previously met around 70% of its objectives and key results in any given quarter, it now hits more than 90%. It’s easy to assume that a company might have to sacrifice ambition to implement a four-day week, but Kickstarter only increased the scale of its ambition since adoption.
Twelve months after implementing the four-day workweek, the company reported dramatic changes in key organizational metrics. Employee engagement climbed by roughly half, during a period when American workers generally were less engaged in their work than ever before. Honestly, those numbers are striking.
Kickstarter’s Secret: Treating Outputs, Not Hours, as the Measure
Kickstarter embarked on its four-day work week pilot in April 2021. The hope was to shift how the crowdfunding platform measured productivity by focusing on output rather than hours worked.
Since launching the program in 2021, the most profound impact has been on employee retention. Relatedly, employee engagement is up by roughly half. That retention boost is no small thing for a tech company operating in a fiercely competitive hiring landscape.
The transition was not without its challenges. Some teams took longer to fully adapt to the new schedule, particularly teams that were already understaffed and needed to hire or find ways to increase efficiencies. Kickstarter supported these teams through the transition, providing additional resources and guidance as needed.
Bolt: The Bold Promise That Quietly Collapsed
Now here’s where things get uncomfortable. Bolt, the San Francisco-based e-commerce payments startup, was once the loudest cheerleader for the four-day work week. Bolt garnered national headlines in 2021 when its founder publicly touted the company’s permanent four-day workweek, becoming a darling of the broader movement for fewer working days. At the time, a spokesperson said that roughly 85% of managers said their reports still hit their objectives and key results despite less time at work.
In 2022, Bolt’s founder declared that the company had adopted the four-day workweek and was “never going back.” That statement turned out to be false. A Bolt spokesperson later confirmed that Bolt no longer offers the benefit to employees and that they instead work on a five-day schedule.
Bolt has downsized considerably with multiple layoffs within the past two years and, with no more four-day workweeks, morale reportedly became abysmal. That’s a pretty dramatic fall from grace for a company that once made the four-day week its identity.
What Actually Killed Bolt’s Four-Day Experiment
Let’s be real here. The four-day week wasn’t what sank Bolt. The broader business problems were already brewing before the policy was reversed. Bolt, the San Francisco-based startup once valued at 11 billion dollars, laid off more than 100 employees in another end-of-year blow to a tech industry dealing with a mounting wave of job cuts in 2023. The company slashed 29% of its staff in its second round of layoffs that year alone.
Amid glowing coverage, Bolt weathered internal struggles in addition to wider economic challenges across the tech sector. A retail giant sued Bolt for delays and a faulty rollout of its checkout system, a case that was eventually settled out of court.
The company conducted three layoff rounds within a 12-month period. The latest took place when around 50 employees were laid off, representing about 10% of the remaining staff. Bolt’s employee rating on Glassdoor dropped sharply as a result. The four-day week didn’t fail because it was a bad idea. It failed because the company underneath it was under enormous strain.
ThredUp: The Complicated Middle Ground
ThredUp is the most nuanced case of the three. The Oakland-based online resale platform for clothing adopted the four-day model and has stuck with it. But the picture is more complicated than simple success.
Online consignment and thrift store ThredUp, a public company with around 300 corporate employees, made the shift to four days permanent after a successful one-year experiment. Co-founder and CEO James Reinhart told CBS MoneyWatch that the shorter workweek improved employee morale and increased productivity.
In an employee survey conducted one year after implementation, nearly all respondents agreed that the four-day workweek improved their productivity. Voluntary turnover among corporate staff decreased by more than half compared to 2019, and more than half of new hires said the four-day workweek tipped the scale in their decision to join the company. That’s impressive on paper.
ThredUp’s Hidden Tensions: When the Theory Meets the Warehouse Floor
Here’s the thing nobody talks about enough. ThredUp’s four-day model applies primarily to its corporate and salaried employees. The real friction lies in operations and logistics, which is the backbone of any company that physically processes millions of secondhand clothing items.
Getting work done in four days can be intense and stressful. ThredUp employees said it can be challenging to fit everything in so they can keep their Fridays free, and even then, several employees said they still work a bit on Friday.
According to insider accounts, ThredUp has a technical four-day work week where it publicly describes a 32-hour week, but internally there is a culture of working on that fifth day because teams are understaffed. During holiday weeks, the Friday off can become a work day, and there have been reports of special sessions introduced once a quarter requiring people to work the fifth day. It’s hard to say for sure how widespread this is, but the tension between perception and reality is real.
The Research Warning That Companies Ignored
Here’s something the headlines usually skip past. A compressed workweek is not automatically a lighter workweek. The research is clear on this. A four-day model does not suit all industries. Some sectors require a seven-day-a-week presence, which can make a shorter working week impractical, including emergency services, public transport networks, and logistics.
Some trials expanded to include a wide range of workplaces and job sectors. Managerial staff, in particular, experienced more stressors than others, with some managers citing increased pressure to meet deadlines and more difficult scheduling. However, the majority still indicated broadly positive outcomes overall.
Researchers found a clear connection between the amount of time saved and the benefits gained. Employees who reduced their work hours the most reported the largest improvements in well-being, a pattern that was particularly strong for burnout and job satisfaction. The implication? Half-measures produce half-results, or worse, more stress in less time.
What the Employee Engagement Crisis Tells Us
Even with all the promising trial data, the broader American workplace context remains sobering. The four-day week is being tested against a backdrop of deep disengagement that runs far deeper than scheduling.
A 2024 Gallup report found that employee engagement in the U.S. fell to just 30%, highlighting ongoing challenges in workplace satisfaction that flexible work experiments alone cannot fully solve. That is an almost shockingly low number. Fewer than one in three workers actually feels engaged with their job.
Research from Microsoft’s Work Trend Index updates in 2023 and 2024 shows that well over half of employees say they struggle with workload intensity. This is a critical finding. A reduced-hour model can easily collapse if work expectations are not genuinely restructured alongside the schedule. Simply cutting a day without cutting the workload means workers absorb the same pressure in less time, which is arguably worse than the original five-day grind.
The Bigger Picture: Why Failures Are About Execution, Not the Concept
Looking at all three cases together, a clear pattern emerges. The four-day week is not inherently a failure waiting to happen. It is a policy that demands structural commitment, cultural investment, and honest expectation-setting from leadership.
In a report of findings presented to lawmakers, about 92% of companies that took part in the UK pilot said they intended to continue with the four-day working week. That’s not a fragile experiment. That’s a near-universal endorsement from companies that actually lived through it.
Bolt’s story is really a story about a startup that overpromised, hit severe financial turbulence, and abandoned a policy when survival became the priority. ThredUp’s complications are really about the gap between corporate office culture and operational reality on the ground. Neither failure was really about the four-day week itself. They were about execution, honesty, and how deep the commitment actually went.
Conclusion: The Future of the Work Week Is Still Being Written
The four-day work week is not a magic solution. It is a framework that works brilliantly when companies design their work culture around outputs and trust their employees. It falls apart when it becomes a marketing headline without structural support underneath it.
Kickstarter proves the model can be genuinely transformative for the right kind of company. Bolt proves that no progressive workplace perk survives a company in financial freefall. ThredUp proves that even committed companies deal with the messy gap between policy and practice.
The data from global trials is remarkably consistent. Researchers found a significant drop in staff leaving participating companies, and company revenue barely changed during the trial period, even increasing marginally on average. The vast majority of companies that took part said they intended to continue with the four-day working week. The concept works. The real question is whether the companies adopting it are actually ready to do the deep organizational work that makes it sustainable.
What do you think? Does your company have what it takes to make the four-day week stick, or would it quietly collapse under pressure? Tell us in the comments.
