President Lee pledges to experiment with a 4.5-day work week... ”Only Fridays have changed” - South Korea

If people lose focus on their work on Friday afternoons before the weekend, which is known as a "decline in productivity," then why not just work hard on Friday mornings?
If workers can maintain productivity while also maintaining a good work-life balance, and are able to work more enthusiastically because they have had a good rest, this should be a positive thing for both workers and organizations.
The reduction of working hours has already been attempted in some countries, particularly in Western welfare states, and in South Korea, the government is also intensifying discussions on the matter with the goal of implementing a 4.5-day work week next year.
Amid concerns about declining productivity and the cost burden on companies, a paper analyzing the case of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has already introduced a 4.5-day work week, has been published and is attracting attention.
According to a quasi-experimental analysis on the decline in productivity on Fridays published in the quarterly academic journal Economic Analysis by the Bank of Korea Economic Research Institute at the end of last month, workers' concentration levels drop just before the weekend.
The paper was written by Jeong, a doctoral student at the University of Florida.
In order to confirm the phenomenon of productivity decline just before the weekend, the paper examines whether the UAE will change its weekend from Friday and Saturday to Saturday and Sunday in 2022, and whether the public sector will
In the Arabian Peninsula, the birthplace of Islam, Friday prayers were traditionally held as weekend days, with Friday and Saturday off.
AE has broken with this tradition and moved to a Saturday-Sunday weekend system in January 2022 in line with the global system. The public sector has implemented a 4.5-day week with Friday as a half-day, while the private sector
Although it was left to the discretion of the company, only 23% of the 190 companies announced that they would introduce a 4.5-day work week. Even after the UAE changed the weekend, there was a decline in productivity (level of concentration on work) on the last working day of the week.
The phenomenon continues, and as the weekend structure has changed, the effect now simply shifts to different days of the week. Previously, the "pre-weekend effect" was seen on Thursdays because the weekend was Friday and Saturday, but now it is seen on Saturday and Sunday.
The paper uses Google Trends' search index and changes in trading volume on the Dubai Financial Market to measure the decline in work intensity.
In this example, we set 20 work-related keywords such as "meeting," "email," and "report," and 20 leisure-related keywords such as "brunch," "weekend," and "beach," and calculated the total number of work-related searches.
The index was calculated by subtracting the total number of leisure-related searches from the total number of searches. This index clearly dropped on the day before the weekend. Also, on the last trading day before the weekend, trading volume on the Dubai Financial Market was significantly lower than on weekdays.
This was interpreted as a result of investors trying to reduce their positions and avoid risks ahead of the holidays, as well as a decline in participation and concentration in the market as a whole.
The researchers said, "We confirmed the 'anchoring phenomenon', whereby the concentration of workers is strongly fixed to the timing of the regular end of work."
"It doesn't eliminate the productivity decline that occurs in Japan, but simply shifts the timing of it," he said. He added, "In countries like South Korea, where there is active discussion about shortened work hours, such as a four-day work week,
"Simply reducing the number of working days will not eliminate the 'Friday effect', but it may shift to Thursday," he said.
This shows that it is high,” he added.