I just returned from 10 days in Amsterdam and I came home with more than inspiration. I have family living there now so this was the first time I saw the city through the eyes of a resident rather than a visitor and I was simply amazed.
The Netherlands is one of the most productive economies in Europe. Its unemployment rate sits at a remarkable 3.6%. 82% of working-age Dutch people are employed compared with 75% in the UK and 72% in the US. Dutch children consistently rank among the happiest in the world on UNICEF’s global index.
And yet, the average Dutch worker puts in just 32.1 hours a week; the shortest workweek in the entire European Union.
Walking the canals, having tea at the Conservatorium, stopping by De Roos for a protein shake, watching people finish work at 3pm and head off to pick up their children by bicycle — it was clear the country figured something out that most of the world is still debating.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the five-day workweek, a structure Henry Ford standardized in 1926 for factory workers in the industrial age. One century later, that same structure remains the default operating model for the knowledge economy. Amsterdam made me wonder: why?
The Dutch Didn’t Legislate This. They Lived It.
A friend who works in HR for a large company in Amsterdam painted the picture. There is no government decree in the Netherlands enforcing a four-day week. Instead, it is the product of decades of incremental policy decisions aimed at supporting family life, gender equity in employment, and flexibility across sectors — many dating back to the 1980s and 1990s. Over time, working fewer hours stopped carrying a stigma. It simply became how things work.
Most full-time workers in the Netherlands compress their hours into four-day workweeks rather than spreading them over five. The result is a society where work and life are not in competition. The benefits the Dutch have built around work reflect that same philosophy. To an American audience, they may sound extraordinary. To the Dutch, they are simply the baseline.
What Dutch Workers Actually Receive And Why It Works
Here is what the Dutch system offers that most Americans have never experienced:
Two years of paid sick leave. If a Dutch employee becomes ill, their employer is legally required to continue paying at least 70% of their salary for up to two years. They cannot be dismissed during this period. The philosophy is straightforward: a person who is genuinely ill needs time to recover fully — not pressure to return before they are ready, only to relapse and cost the organization more in the long run. I could have really used this benefit when the workaholic me almost died in the late 1990s!
Maternity leave paid at 100% of salary for a minimum of 16 weeks, fully funded by the Dutch government. Partners receive one week at full pay, plus five additional weeks at 70% all within the first six months of a child’s birth.
26 weeks of parental leave per child, available any time before the child turns eight. Parents can spread this across years, allowing families to adapt to the rhythms of early childhood rather than forcing children to adapt to the rhythms of corporate calendars.
Care leave for family illness. Employees can take paid leave to care for a sick spouse, child, parent, friend, or even neighbor because the Dutch recognize that a worker whose family member is in crisis cannot focus, innovate, or contribute fully. Sending them back to their desk doesn’t solve the problem. It just relocates it.
A minimum of 25 vacation days per year — in addition to public holidays — with most collective agreements granting 25 to 30 days.
To be clear: these are not perks. They are not recruitment gimmicks. They are a structural investment in the premise that people perform better when they are whole and that the cost of not supporting human beings is ultimately higher than the cost of supporting them.
The Research Is In And It’s Hard to Ignore
The Dutch model is not just philosophically appealing. It is empirically validated and a growing body of global research is now catching up to what Amsterdam has been quietly demonstrating for decades.
A landmark international study published in Nature Human Behaviour, tracking nearly 3,000 employees across 141 organizations in six countries, found that income-preserving four-day workweeks boost job satisfaction and mental and physical health, while easing burnout with gains driven in part by better sleep, reduced fatigue, and improved work ability.
It was the largest study yet on the four-day workweek and 90% of companies that piloted it chose to keep it.
The numbers across multiple global trials are consistent:
- 71% of employees reported reduced burnout. 41% reported better mental health. 38% reported improved sleep.
- Microsoft Japan saw a 40% jump in productivity. 83% of employers said hiring became easier.
- One major study found a 57% decline in the likelihood of employees quitting and a 65% reduction in sick days.
- Businesses report 30% lower absenteeism and approximately 20% lower operational costs with a shorter workweek.
- 85% of employers found that productivity stayed the same or improved.
These are not marginal gains. They are structural competitive advantages rooted in how the human brain actually works.
The Neuroscience of Rest, Recovery, and Innovation
Here is what most organizations still don’t understand: rest is not the absence of productivity. It is the condition for it.
When the brain shifts out of focused task-mode, it activates what neuroscientists call the Default Mode Network (DMN) — a set of interconnected brain regions that light up during rest, mind-wandering, and inward reflection. Neural activities including divergent thinking, hippocampal function, and neural replay all occur during this default mode which is precisely why rest promotes memory consolidation, learning, and the formation of innovative thoughts.
Creativity arises from a mental state that balances spontaneous thought and cognitive control corresponding to functional connectivity between the brain’s Default Mode Network and its Executive Control Network. In plain terms: the brain needs both focused effort and genuine rest to generate breakthrough ideas. You cannot think your way to innovation through uninterrupted output. The insight requires space.
This is why the most creative breakthroughs happen in the shower, on a walk, or upon waking not during a fifth consecutive day of back-to-back meetings.
A chronically stressed nervous system floods the body with cortisol, which over time impairs the prefrontal cortex — the seat of complex reasoning, emotional regulation, and high-stakes decision-making. The leaders and employees organizations need most are being neurologically impaired by the very schedule designed to maximize their output.
Workers make around 13% more sales in weeks when they report feeling happy compared to weeks when they are unhappy. Happiness is not a soft metric. It is a neurological state that directly determines cognitive performance, creative output, and the quality of every decision made.
What the Five-Day Week Is Actually Costing Organizations
Over 45% of workers who left their jobs did so due to inflexible work hours. 39% left because they worked too many hours. In a talent-scarce environment, that is an entirely preventable loss.
About 80% of workers surveyed by the American Psychological Association believe they would be happier and just as effective with four days at work.
According to Gartner, the four-day workweek improves talent retention by 57% and boosts revenue by 1.4%.
And the Dutch data shows that none of this comes at the expense of economic performance. Dutch workers generate €45.3 in output per hour — outperforming Spain and keeping pace with major economies like France and Ireland. Average hourly wages stand above the European average. Workers are putting in less time and still earning and producing competitively.
It is the kind of data that forces a fundamental rethink of the “more hours equals more output” assumption that has governed organizational design for a century.
Innovation Requires Space Not Just Speed
In the age of AI, the most valuable human contributions are the ones that cannot be automated: judgment, creativity, emotional intelligence, genuine connection. As we heard at the recent TIME100 Summit, these are the irreplaceable differentiators and they do not flourish under chronic pressure. They flourish when the nervous system has adequate recovery.
Clearing personal obligations — health appointments, caregiving, rest — from the workweek improves focus and reduces what researchers call “time poverty,” enabling better performance during actual work hours. When people are not managing the spillover stress of an impossibly full week, they bring more of themselves — and more of their cognitive and creative capacity — to the work that matters.
Design thinking, systems thinking, and genuine innovation all require what neuroscientists call incubation time — the mental space between encountering a problem and the emergence of a novel solution. The five-day week leaves almost none of it.
The Leadership Imperative
Sitting in Vondelpark — watching people move through their city unhurried, present, and engaged — I thought about how different that energy is from the relentless pace most of us accept as normal. The Dutch didn’t get there through a mandate. They got there through a collective, decades-long commitment to the idea that people are the asset and assets require care to perform.
The organizations that thrived in four-day week pilots were not the ones that simply shortened time. They were the ones that rethought processes, redesigned workflows, and actively protected the extra day from work intrusions. The four-day week is not a passive scheduling change; it is an active leadership decision.
This is the essence of Embodied Success®: the recognition that sustainable high performance — for individuals and organizations — requires aligning how we structure work with how human beings are actually designed to think, create, recover, and lead. With the explosive growth of AI, the time is ripe for a re-imagination of work.
One hundred years after Ford gave us the weekend, Amsterdam reminded me that it may be time to give our people, and our organizations, one day more.
Have you experienced a four-day workweek, or does your organization offer one? What has been your experience? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. You can also comment directly on LinkedIn.
→ Explore the Embodied Success® framework for human-first leadership
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