Media mogul defends end to work on Fridays: “It’s useless”

As the four-day week, hybrid work, and daylight saving time become increasingly popular, Friday has become the de facto day to take time off from work. Even media mogul Simon Cowell stopped working on the last day of the work week because “it doesn’t make sense.”

The 66-year-old billionaire revealed he’s ditched the traditional work week and hectic lifestyle of working nearly 20 hours a day while fronting shows like The X Factor — and Cowell is enjoying his new work-life balance so much that he’s evangelizing everyone to switch to a four-day week, too.

“Actually, the first thing is to take off Fridays. Don’t work on Fridays, because you don’t have to,” the ‘America’s Got Talent’ creator told British newspaper The Sun — and reiterated it more recently on The Diary of a CEO podcast.

“I’m not kidding about Fridays,” insisted the British businessman. “I don’t think anyone should work five days a week. It just doesn’t make sense.”

Now, his Fridays are filled entertaining his son Eric, doing things like driving “25 miles to buy a Pokémon card.”

After decades on the run, Cowell also revealed that he has some non-negotiable habits to maintain his work-life balance.

“Have dinner at five o’clock. Don’t answer calls after 5:30. Don’t read emails after 5:30. Watch a happy movie. And stay outside,” he added.

Why it doesn’t make sense to work on Fridays

While Cowell hasn’t revealed why he thinks working on a Friday “doesn’t make sense” — as opposed to, say, working on a Monday — research shows that most people are either working from home or avoiding work altogether on the last working day of the traditional work week.

Millions of workers have been called back to the office post-pandemic, with even the staunchest advocates of remote work, like Meta and Zoom, imposing in-person work. But Fridays are rarely included in these return-to-office (RTO) mandates.

Placer.ai’s Nationwide Office Building Index has been analyzing footfall in U.S. office buildings since 2019 and found that the majority of workers are at their desks Tuesday through Thursday. But on Fridays, employees are notably absent. Despite the rise of five-day-a-week office mandates, last year only 12.4% of weekday office visits took place on the last workday of the week.

Similarly, Steven Roth, president of New York-based real estate giant Vornado Realty Trust and one of the city’s largest office owners, has declared that Fridays at the office are officially “dead for good.”

Meanwhile, billionaire and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg went so far as to claim that remote workers are all playing golf every Friday — and he may have a point. By 4pm on weekdays, golf courses are full, according to a Stanford University study. Studies echo that workers appear to have lower productivity on Fridays — some estimate a 20% to 35% drop in task completion compared to a Monday or Tuesday.

If you can’t beat them, maybe you’d better join them: For those who are actually working, the lack of colleagues around means that it’s become impossible to schedule a meeting on a Friday and emails are unlikely to get read — so, as Cowell pointed out, working on a Friday can seem pretty pointless.

The success of the four-day week

Cowell isn’t the only fan of the four-day week: Many other employers, including Samsung, are adopting a shorter work week.

The move to adopt a three-day weekend comes as pilots of the “100:80:100” working model — 100% pay for 80% of the time, in exchange for 100% productivity — prove a huge success around the world.

Following in the footsteps of Iceland, New Zealand and Japan, when the UK completed the world’s largest trial of a four-day work week, the country saw a 65% reduction in the number of sick days, maintained or improved productivity and a 57% drop in the likelihood of an employee quitting, dramatically improving talent retention.

The results also showed that reducing employees’ working hours had a positive impact on the financial result: companies’ revenue increased by 35% when compared to the same six-month period in 2021.

Meanwhile, in Iceland, where the four-day week was piloted between 2015 and 2019, workers represented by unions — nearly 90% of the workforce — have now won the right to request a shorter work week.

Similarly, in 2021, the Japanese government’s annual economic policy guidelines included a recommendation for companies to allow employees to opt for a four-day work week.