Thousands of public employees in Lyon now have the option to work four days a week instead of five, without taking a pay cut. The south-eastern city, one of France's biggest, is experimenting with a shorter work week in the hope of reducing absenteeism and narrowing the gender gap.
Since the start of September, employees of Lyon Metropole, the local authority responsible for running the city and its main suburbs, have had the choice of three alternatives to the traditional five-day week: working four days a week, or four and a half, or alternating weekly between four and five days.
The idea is to ensure that all full-time staff continue to do the 35 hours that make up France's standard work week, while giving them more flexibility to decide how to fit them in.
The scheme, which is getting a one-year trial run, is being offered to more than half the administration's 9,600 employees – some 5,500 – on a voluntary basis, though others on fixed schedules, such as waste collectors, are not eligible to take part.
"It means you get a real Saturday and Sunday, instead of spending Saturday rushing around and having only Sunday to rest," Séverine Bernard Barret, who works in the human resources department, told FranceInfo.
Flexibility
Now she takes every other Friday off, working the other weekdays from 8am to 5pm with 45 minutes for lunch.
That makes for a longer work day than her colleagues who've stuck to the five-day week – one hour and 15 minutes longer, to be exact, meaning an earlier start and shorter lunch break.
And there are other trade-offs: employees who go down to four days earn back fewer rest days under France's RTT scheme, which compensates workers with paid time-off in exchange for overtime.
Laurie-Lou Lebre, an executive assistant at Lyon Metropole, chose not to shorten her working week. As she explained to Franceinfo: "On a four-day week, even if you get around 50 days off a year, they're fixed and don't allow you to be flexible. And I needed to be flexible for my child."
Gender gap
Yet the scheme was introduced partly to benefit working mothers, who often take part-time positions in order to manage childcare.
"They're part-time by obligation. We want to allow them to return to an equal level of income," said Zémorda Khelifi, councillor for human resources on Lyon's left-wing council run by the EELV green party, when the administration announced the trial back in May.
According to its estimates, the option of a four-day week could enable some 900 female staff to return to full-time work – and full-time pay.
Lyon Metropole also hopes it will reduce avoidable absences and help recruit and keep staff who might otherwise be lured into the private sector, especially in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.
Future of work?
Lyon's experiment, which could be expanded if it proves successful, is one of France's biggest trials yet of the four-day week.
A handful of other public bodies have offered it on a smaller scale, including the national pension fund Cnav and a regional branch of the social security agency Urssaf in Picardie, northern France.
In both cases uptake has been very limited, French newspaper Le Monde reported earlier this year, with some employees fearing that working for longer four days a week would end up more exhausting.
By contrast, computer retailer LDLC opted to reduce the number of hours expected of its employees when it became one of the first French private companies to adopt a four-day work week for all staff in 2021.
The Lyon-based group, which employs around 1,000 people, went down to 32 hours over four days in January that year. According to CEO Laurent de la Clergerie, the company saw its rate of absence decline, staff turnover drop and business flourish – all without having to hire significantly more workers to make up for lost time.
"This way of working is the future," de la Clergerie, who has written a book evangelising for the four-day week, told French news agency AFP in June.
Research in other countries seems to back him up. A six-month trial involving 61 organisations in the UK found that reducing working hours by 20 percent – while maintaining wages – significantly cut burnout, stress, sick days and turnover, without hurting revenues.
In Iceland, meanwhile, trials proved so successful that more than 85 percent of the working population now works less than the 40 hours a week that used to be standard 10 years ago, or has the right to do so.
But while polls consistently show a large percentage of French workers favour shorter weeks, unions are more cautious: they warn that condensing the same number of hours into fewer days, like at Lyon Metropole, is counterproductive – "a false good idea", as the prominent CGT union puts it.
The administration and its unions will carry out a first assessment of the scheme in early 2024, says human resources councillor Khelifi.
