Update: The change to a new Saturday Sunday weekend is now official. Read more here.

The UAE will also be officially moving to four-and-a-half day working week. Read more here.

The UAE could be switching its public sector to work in the office only four days a week, according to a prominent Emirati figure.

The weekends may also change to Saturday-Sunday as off days, according to Dr. Habib Al Mulla, a respected Emirati lawyer.

The working week would then be Monday to Thursday, with Friday working from home for only half a day.

This would not translate to the private sector, however, according to Al Mulla.

“The private sector will be a full day,” Al Mulla wrote in Arabic.

The four-day work week has been talked about worldwide as a way to improve quality of life while potentially not sacrificing productivity.

Another prominent Emirati figure also separately tweeted, “Goodbye Thursday forever! Change is coming soon.”

A report released last night said that Iceland’s switch to a four-day working week was an overwhelming success.

“The Icelandic shorter working week journey tells us that not only is it possible to work less in modern times, but that progressive change is possible too,” said Alda researcher Gudmundur D. Haraldsson.

The study, from Alda and UK thinktank Autonomy, made two large-scale trials from 2015 to 2019 on a reduced working week with no cut in pay for around 2,500 workers, or 1 percent of Iceland’s working population. The group worked around 35 to 36 hours per week.

“It shows that the public sector is ripe for being a pioneer of shorter working weeks, and lessons can be learned for other governments,” said Will Stronge, director of research at Autonomy.

“Worker wellbeing dramatically increased across a range of indicators, from perceived stress and burnout, to health and work-life balance,” said the report, while “productivity and service provision remained the same or improved across the majority of trial workplaces.”

The report said that the study could act as a as a “blueprint” for future trials in other countries, while also saying that 86 percent of Iceland’s working population are now working shorter hours or “gaining the right to shorten their hours.”

It’s unclear if or when the switch may happen, but it is being considered now, according to Al Mulla. The change in weekends, Al Mulla says, is about keeping with global standards of working days, as most countries in the world have Friday and Saturday weekends.

When some pushed back that the Arab world did not need to follow Europe, Al Mulla pointed out this was not just a Euro-centric standard.

“The world is not just Europe. There is the whole East,” tweeted Al Mulla, adding that he had no opinion on the matter personally.