The five-day workweek can feel inevitable. But it was designed for an industrial economy—and may no longer make sense for how work gets done today. In this episode of Work Matters, Thomas Bertels speaks with Joe O’Connor, CEO of Work Time Revolution and co-author of Do More in Four, about the four-day workweek as a catalyst for redesigning work.
Joe argues that reducing working time should not simply be treated as an employee benefit. When tied to clear performance expectations, it can create the incentive organizations need to eliminate low-value activity, rethink workflows, adopt new tools, and focus people on outcomes rather than hours. Thomas and Joe also explore what the rise of AI means for productivity. Will organizations use AI to accelerate an already overloaded workplace—or to remove clutter and give people more capacity for creativity, judgment, and meaningful work?
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why the five-day workweek may be poorly suited to knowledge work
- How a four-day week can create employee engagement in work redesign
- Why hours worked are an increasingly unreliable measure of productivity
- Why autonomy must be paired with accountability
- Why organizations need a clear narrative about the purpose, boundaries, and benefits of AI
Key themes
Work design, operating model redesign, future of work, AI adoption
Key Takeaways
- The five-day week is a Henry Ford-era design choice, not a productivity law — built for factory output, not knowledge work.
- A shorter week works as a forcing function: the promise of it motivates redesign, the process breaks time-based habits, and the recovery compounds performance afterward.
- The AI backlash toward 996 schedules and presence-as-commitment misreads where value is headed — volume-based work is what’s being automated, so leading for value beats leading for hours logged.
- It only sticks when autonomy and accountability are both present. Freedom without ownership, or ownership without the power to remove blockers, and it collapses.
- Most organizations don’t have real measures for knowledge work. A shorter week forces that overdue conversation instead of letting it stay overdue.
Guest Bio
Joe O’Connor is CEO and co-founder of Work Time Revolution, a consulting and research firm focused on redesigning work for the AI era. He pioneered the world’s first coordinated four-day workweek pilot in Ireland in 2020, then led the large-scale trials across the UK, North America, and Australasia as CEO of 4 Day Week Global. He is co-author, with Jared Lindzon, of Do More in Four (Harvard Business Review Press, January 2026). He also advises on AI adaptation with Splendid Torch.
Website: worktimerevolution.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joeoconnor990
Episode Overview
00:00 Is AI here to speed up work, or slow it down?
03:03 The five-day week is a habit, not a law
04:16 Why hours and output no longer correlate
07:11 The productivity case for a shorter week
09:39 Case study: how Unilever made it stick
11:16 The 996 backlash — and what it misunderstands
15:58 Is the four day work week a one-way door?
18:22 What has to change in how the work gets done?
21:30 The knowledge-work measurement problem
24:48 What does it take to implement?
26:46 When four-day pilots get reversed
30:25 How to get started this quarter
