The four-day work week may be gaining traction in sectors like tech, marketing, and even some corners of law – but in Canada’s insurance industry, it remains a rarity.
According to Joe O’Connor (pictured), CEO of global consulting firm Work Time Revolution, there are very few insurers experimenting with this model in any meaningful way. While small gestures toward flexibility are becoming more common – such as summer hours or half-day Fridays – the full adoption of a condensed workweek is still largely absent from the insurance sector’s agenda.
“When it comes to shorter work weeks and innovative working models, the legal sector is not one of the areas where we’ve seen the biggest level of adoption,” O’Connor told Insurance Business. “The insurance industry is probably even further back than that.”
While O’Connor has supported organizations in the UK and Europe through pilot programs, he says well-known Canadian insurers have yet to show serious momentum toward a four-day model.
Interestingly, O’Connor recalls that, a few years ago, a handful of mid-market Canadian insurance firms were seriously considering shorter workweek models – not out of a desire to innovate, but as a strategic response to shifting employee expectations.
“These weren’t the top-tier insurance giants, but they were still sizable enough to be impactful within the industry,” he noted. The motivation, he explained, was tied to the return-to-office (RTO) push following the pandemic.
Many firms wanted to reestablish in-person work as the norm, but feared that doing so without offering something in return would risk attrition and damage their employer value proposition. At the time, a four-day work week was viewed as a potential bargaining chip – an incentive that could counterbalance stricter office policies. But as labour market conditions have changed, so too has the urgency around talent retention.
“Insurance, which already tends to lean more traditional in its approach to work models, probably feels like its RTO policies don’t need to be coupled with innovations in working time the way they might have a few years ago,” O’Connor said.
As a result, he suggests, that moment of opportunity – when firms might have been most open to experimenting with shorter work weeks – may have passed, at least for now.
O’Connor believes that one of the key reasons a four-day work week has yet to gain a foothold in Canada’s insurance industry lies in the sector’s deeply rooted norms – not only at the organizational level, but among clients as well.
“I think that, because the industry itself (and in turn the customer expectations that exist within the industry) have tended to be a little bit more on the traditional side – even for those who are innovators within the industry, something like a four-day work week potentially feels like a step too far against that baseline,” he said.
The culture of insurance, he explains, continues to emphasize availability, responsiveness, and client service as paramount values. And while these principles are not inherently incompatible with reduced working hours, O’Connor notes that the perception of reduced availability can create hesitation, even among progressive firms.
That said, he hinted at a subtle shift in conversations he’s been having with insurers. While they may not be ready to fully embrace a four-day schedule, some are beginning to ask more nuanced questions about productivity, focus time, and new ways of organizing work that move in the direction of more balanced models – even if they don’t carry the “four-day” label.
While few insurers are actively pursuing a four-day work week, O’Connor says conversations are beginning to shift in interesting ways. Increasingly, leaders in the industry are reaching out to explore not just how to reduce working hours, but how to reorganize them – particularly in response to the rising pressure to adopt artificial intelligence.
“We’ve been hearing from insurers who aren’t necessarily looking to shorten the workweek, but who are asking how they can make time within the week for learning, upskilling, and experimentation,” he said.
Rather than focusing purely on employee wellbeing or flexibility, many of these conversations are framed around enabling staff to meet the demands of sweeping AI initiatives. The challenge, O’Connor notes, is that organizations often invest heavily in the technology itself while underestimating the time and space employees need to actually adopt it.
In that context, building in focused time – perhaps through a restructured Friday – could be a more realistic first step for insurance firms looking to modernize their work models. And while it may not be a four-day week, it’s a shift that could still mark meaningful progress, O’Connor said.
