A 4-day week pilot is underway in Ireland. Organizers hope that it will act as a template for trials elsewhere.

• Twenty companies have signed up to a six-month pilot to trial a four-day work week in Ireland.
• The trial, organized by the Four Day Week Ireland campaign, is happening alongside a US pilot.

The coordinator of a four-day week pilot in Ireland said he hopes the scheme can act as a template for further pilots around the world.

Joe O'Connor is Four Day Week's global pilot program manager. The scheme officially launched in Ireland in June.

So far, 20 companies have signed up to the six-month pilot, which will involve them trialing a reduction of working hours from February 2022. It's being coordinated alongside a similar pilot in the US and Canada, starting in April 2022.

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"We're hoping that in both of those jurisdictions this will be a kind of first phase trial," O'Connor told Insider. "Then we are hoping to use that as a template to adapt to other areas."

Businesses that sign up to the trial will receive access to training and mentoring support from international experts, who have implemented similar schemes before.

Boston College and University College Dublin will support research into the impact on carbon emissions, productivity and wellbeing, compared with a standard five-day work week.

O'Connor said he is still hoping for more organizations to join the pilot before it starts in February.

The pilots have been organised as part of wider work by Four Day Week Global, a collaboration of businesses, academics, and trade unions that are campaigning for a reduction of working hours, without an overall loss in pay. This is a concept commonly labelled as the four-day work week.

Private-sector companies are the main focus, but O'Connor said that if the six-month pilot is successful, the aim is to expand it to public-sector firms, as well as some civil community organisations.

So far only two companies - Yala, a recruitment company and children's medical manufacturer Soothing Solutions - have publicly announced that they have joined the Ireland pilot, said O'Connor.

Kickstarter and healthcare information firm HealthWise Inc have joined the US pilot.

Covid-19 has accelerated calls to shorten working hours.

The momentum behind calls for the reduction of working hours is growing at both business and state level.

This month, for example, politicians in Belgium hinted at plans to condense the work week into four days. Likewise, Lee Jae-myung, a presidential candidate in South Korea, suggested to voters that he would implement shorter working weeks, should they back him.

The results from a series of well-publicized trials in Iceland showed that wellbeing improved among local government and service workers when they cut between one and five hours from their working week.

The Spanish and Scottish governments have also pledged to set aside millions to fund trials.

Meanwhile, a bill aimed at cutting the threshold at which workers in California get paid for overtime, introduced by Mark Takano, is under scrutiny in the US.

Ireland's pilot is not state-backed and only covers private-sector roles. But the Irish government has separately announced $173,000 funding for research into a four-day week.

The COVID-19 pandemic has played a part in growing that momentum, O'Connor said. On the one hand, it has raised workers expectations of what is possible, he said.

"The remote working revolution has forced companies into a space where they've had to design much better metrics for actually measuring what people are getting done," said O'Connor. "That opens the door for this idea that 'can you work less hours?'"