Matariki celebrations are just around the corner with the new and very much needed national holiday on June 24 and another 4-day work week to add to the calendar. But what about a 4-day work week every week? Kiwi non-profit Autonomy thinks it’s the way to go. The group has started the world’s biggest 4-day work experiment in the UK with more than 70 companies trialling 32-hour work weeks for six months, without cutting pay. Where do we sign up! 🙋

The idea sounds great, in theory. In practice, a 4-day work week can come with gnarly challenges. For service companies like Starbucks (SBUX) or Burger King (QSR) that need to stay open throughout the week, a 4-day work week means hiring extra staff or paying more in overtime. At a time when companies are already suffering severe worker shortages, and inflation hitting 40-year highs, that seems especially… tricky? Let’s just hope we can work it out before the robots take over. Sales of industrial robots in North America rocketed 28% in the first quarter of 2022 and as Google’s AI becomes creepily human, could they soon be filling the gap?

Meanwhile, a lot of corporate managers have been demanding their human employees march back to the office like lemmings, something the managers themselves don’t appear to want to do. #zerochill. Perhaps that’s why Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has threatened to sack Tesla executives who don’t show up for 40 hours a week in the office. Musk can’t have seen the memo from Airbnb (ABNB) CEO Brian Chesky whose ‘work from anywhere’ policy has seen the company flooded with more than 1 million visits to their job website. At least Apple’s trying to find a balance between the two. CEO Tim Cook says Apple (AAPL) is running ‘the mother of all experiments’ and trying to find a happy middle ground between WFH and WF-UFO. 👽