On September 26, 2023, the Shift Project community came together for the first monthly meeting of the fall semester to hear Julie Yen present her research on 4-day workweek.
Julie Yen is a doctoral candidate in the Organizational Behavior program jointly offered by Harvard Business School and the Department of Sociology. Her research investigates how organizations pursue social objectives, with a focus on how organizations can better support worker well-being.
Julie talked to us about her paper, “Navigating Tensions Between Well-being and Productivity: How Win-Win Framing Contributed to the End of a 4-day Workweek Trial”. This paper draws on an ethnography of “TableTech,” a company that piloted and later rolled back a 4-day workweek. In this paper she investigates how interventions to supporter worker well-being are negotiated and contested to shed light on why they can be difficult to sustain.
