In August 2019, Microsoft Japan gave all its 2,300 workers a three-day weekend without decreasing their salary. The staff received Fridays off, working only four days but getting paid for five. The result? A significant improvement in productivity, more efficient meetings, happier workers and customers.
The project, called Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019, was an experimental trial. August in 2019 happened to have five Fridays, so all the employees got to experience a four-day work-week for five weeks in a row. The shortened weeks boosted productivity by 40%! The company also subsidized family vacations up to ¥100,000 or $920 as part of the trial.
Microsoft Japan president and CEO Takuya Hirano said in a statement to Microsoft Japan’s website:
Work a short time, rest well and learn a lot. I want employees to think about and experience how they can achieve the same results with 20% less working time.
The benefits revealed from this four-day work week trial include:
- Increased productivity by 40%
- Time off taken by employees dropped 25%
- Electricity usage in the office decreased by 23% (because of the office being closed on Fridays)
- 59% fewer pages of paper were printed
- 92% of the employees said they preferred the shorter work-week.
Microsoft Japan is not the first corporation to experiment with giving its staff long weekends. Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand trust management company, trialed a three-day weekend in 2018. It provided 240 staff members Fridays off for over two months. Their employees experienced an improvement in focus, better work-life balance, and a stress level decrease of 7%.
The majority of workers around the world say they could be more productive with fewer hours in the office. HR consulting firm, Robert Half, surveyed 1,500 workers and 600 human resources managers and found that 66% of them wanted to work less than five days a week.
A separate study by Harvard Business Review found that shorter workdays, 6-hour workdays instead of 8-hour workdays, increased productivity. The study included a survey of 3,000 employees created by the Workforce Institute at Kronos. It revealed that over half of full-time workers believed they could finish their work in five hours a day.
Microsoft Japan’s challenge will have a second trial this winter, the spokesman said:
In the spirit of a growth mindset, we are always looking for new ways to innovate and leverage our own technology to improve the experience for our employees around the globe.
However, it hasn’t mentioned how long the iteration will go for or if the changes will be carried out in other offices elsewhere.
