Iceland’s four-day work week is a huge success – Is the four-day working week becoming less of a pipe dream? Almost every company in every country that has so far trialled the shorter working week has deemed it successful, with higher productivity, greater job satisfaction and less stress reported across the board.

Iceland’s four-day work week is a huge success:

Iceland’s economy is outperforming most European peers after the nationwide introduction of a shorter working week with no loss in pay, according to research released Friday.

Between 2020 and 2022, 51% of workers in the country had accepted the offer of shorter working hours, including a four-day week, two think tanks found, saying the figure is likely to be even higher today.

Last year, Iceland logged faster economic growth than most European countries and its unemployment rate is one of the lowest in Europe, noted the Autonomy Institute in the United Kingdom and Iceland’s Association for Sustainability and Democracy (Alda).

“This study shows a real success story: shorter working hours have become widespread in Iceland… and the economy is strong across a number of indicators,” Gudmundur D. Haraldsson, a researcher at Alda, said in a statement.

Iceland embraced a shorter work week. Here’s how it turned out:

In 2023, Iceland’s economy expanded by 5%, a growth rate second only to that of Malta among rich European economies, according to the International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook, published earlier this week. That is much higher than the country’s average growth rate of almost 2% in the decade between 2006 and 2015.

However, the IMF forecasts considerably slower growth in Iceland this year and next.

“Growth is expected to decline … in 2024 on further softening domestic demand and decelerating growth in tourism spending,” the agency said of the tourism-dependent economy in an assessment in July.

Iceland’s low unemployment rate is “a strong indicator of the economy’s vitality,” the Autonomy Institute and Alda also said.

According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, that rate stood at 3.4% last year, just over half the average for advanced European economies. The agency expects it to tick up slightly to 3.8% this year and next.

There have been a number of experiments with the four-day week around the world. This includes a successful trial in 2022 across 33 companies, with the majority based in the United States and Ireland.

All in all, the four-day week has been a major success in Iceland. But will other European countries follow suit?

Well, that’s tbd. Various countries have tested it out, including the UK, which ran a huge trial in 2022 that has since seen almost every company involved permanently adopt the shorter working week. Countries including Ireland, Spain and Germany have also participated in trials, but Belgium is currently the only European country outside of Iceland to have officially legislated the four-day week. Visa applications at the ready…