City of Cambridge Considers Implementing Four Day Work Week

Members of the Cambridge City Council are considering implementing a four day work week for city employees — or, at least, some experts think they should.

Councilors and city planning experts discussed the benefits of a four day work week at a meeting held by the Neighborhood & Long Term Planning, Public Facilities, Arts & Celebration Committee Thursday afternoon. The conversation focused on the potential to improve employee well-being and reduce overtime costs.

Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler said that because of remote work policies dating to the pandemic, Cambridge City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 “expressed interest” in considering a further shift to a four day work week.

“When I’m in City Hall on Fridays, it’s already pretty quiet because that’s a day folks choose to work remote,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said. “So in one way, it seems like it would be pretty easy to switch to a four day work week.”

Ronald B. Hogan, chief strategy and innovation officer for the neighboring City of Malden — which has a four day work week, said that since the shift, the employees are “universally happy” and turnover has decreased to “almost nothing.” In addition, the shift has helped the city hire and retain more workers.

“They all tell me that even when they’ve had calls from other cities — and it may be more money than what we can pay — that the four day work week plays a huge role in them wanting to stay here in Malden,” Hogan said of his conversation with Malden’s city department heads.

The meeting also featured Juliet B. Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College who studies workplace environments, who presented on the cities of South Cambridgeshire, U.K. and Golden, Colorado — two cities that have implemented four day work weeks.

According to Schor, these cities are “thrilled with what’s happened.”

“It’s saving them money. They have happier employees. They’re losing them at a much slower rate,” Schor said.

According to Schor, her study showed that the four day work week lowered staff turnover rates, and improved recruitment and performance. A four day work week can also be better for the environment because of reduced commuting, according to her study.

But Councilor Patty M. Nolan ’80 pointed out that not all of the survey respondents in Schor’s study were satisfied with the reduced work week.

“There were 25 percent of employees who said that there was a decrease in positive emotions and a decrease in job satisfaction, so do we have any theory on those?” Nolan said. “Because it’s clearly overwhelming support, but it would almost be surprising that, given this, there wasn’t — across the board — an even higher increase in job satisfaction and emotions.”

Councilor Catherine “Cathie” Zusy expressed concern that the size of the cities in Schor’s study were not comparable to the size of Cambridge.

“I was looking at the groups that you have been monitoring, and they’re all quite a bit smaller than us, and this big city that is a center for innovation — we’ve got Kendall Square and Harvard and MIT,” Zusy said.

At the end of the meeting, Sobrinho-Wheeler said that he is “looking forward” to future discussions about Cambridge’s four day work week future, but did not mention any concrete next steps for the city.

“Well, this has been a super interesting conversation,” he said. “Looking forward to continuing discussions on this.”