The 4-day workweek died at some point in the 2020s, and now it’s spread out over 6 days

Frank Weishaupt did not expect to be workshopping heavy metal album titles with me 15 minutes into a press call about his own survey data.

But that’s where the conversation about Owl Labs’ 10th annual State of Hybrid Work Report landed, after I told him that what he’d put together sounded like “kind of a nightmare fuel report.” Weishaupt, a thought leader in the field of remote work thanks to his role as CEO of the Boston-based video-conferencing company, pushed back — just a little bit.

“I don’t know if I see it that way,” he said, before immediately cataloging the ingredients: job hugging, career minimalism, employees strategically “billboarding” themselves in the office one day a week while working six.

“I just said a bunch of things that don’t sound really good in that mixture,” he said.

“So your soup is definitely there, right?” Acknowledging that the report is “stress-bound” and at times “sounds like a terrible recipe,” Weishaupt insisted there are more nuances to the story.

Owl Labs popularized the phrase “coffee badging” to describe the strategic practice of badging into your office building just long enough to have a cup of joe and some face time with your boss before heading back home around 3:00 pm, but that has expanded into what Owl Labs calls “billboard days.” I suggested that it adds up to a “ panopticon ,” a conceptual prison from the Victorian age developed by Jeremy Bentham, in which essentially everyone is surveilling everyone else, leaving no room for escape.

I pointed out that it’s the title of an especially gnarly progressive-metal album by the unfortunately named Isis ( Pitchfork gave it an 8.4 ).

Weishaupt laughed and said he’s a Metallica fan himself, before agreeing that his latest Hybrid Work Report is pretty “heavy metal,” nowhere more so than the disappearing four-day workweek.

The four-day workweek’s six-day afterlife For years, the four-day workweek was the aspirational endpoint of every hybrid-work conversation.

Owl Labs’ data shows that’s dead, Weishaupt said: “We have completely shifted away from a conversation about the four-day workweek,” he said, “and it’s now becoming more of a question of, is Saturday your only day off?” In fact, 74% of employees say they do some kind of work on a typical Sunday, and 21% call it a full or near-full workday, according to the report.

Rather than compressing hours into fewer days, workers have simply had their week stretched into a sixth day, breaking the day into non-linear blocks around parenting, energy levels, or personal errands.

Weishaupt frames this as flexibility given back on employees’ own terms.