Let’s face it, the weeks we all live for are the short work weeks, when we get to have a bonus day off or, even rarer and better, maybe two days off.
No doubt, employers worry about the bottom line when those holidays roll around, all the lost revenue opportunities and all that, but hey, everybody’s in the same boat for the most part, right?
And it turns out they have even less to worry about than they think — at least as one sample from Japan shows.
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Japan was a great place to test out the effect of more time away from the office.
Japan has a notorious work-centered culture, with workers there putting in the longest hours in the world.
As CNBC reported, a government survey in 2016 showed that a quarter of Japanese companies required their workers to put in more than 80 hours of overtime every month, often unpaid.
Moreover, 63% of Japanese workers reported feeling guilty for taking paid time off.
So, in the summer of 2019, Microsoft Japan tried an experiment to create a healthier work-life balance with its workers.
Under a workplace reform project called The Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019 , for the month of August employees were given three-day weekends. That’s right, all 2,300 employees got Fridays off for the entire month of August, with pay.
Of course, the big question was, what would happen to the company’s numbers with all those work hours lost?
Despite losing four work days that month, productivity numbers went *up*.
And not just by a little bit — with staff in the office 20% less, productivity increased 40%.
Breaking down the results, the company found a few big reasons why numbers that seem at odds with each other actually worked out.
For one thing, when you have to get five days of work done in four days, you spend your time more efficiently.
Which means fewer meetings — something we can all get on board with. Meetings for the month of August were capped at 30 minutes or just canceled altogether, so less time was wasted.
Many other things were wasted less as well — with no employees in the office, the building used 23% less energy, and the number of pages printed off by staff went down by almost 60%.
Not to mention that workers were happier at work, which tends to lead to better performance.
Don’t you find yourself more focused and energized when you’re well rested and feeling respected by your employer? So, no surprise, 92% of workers reported that they enjoyed their three-day weekends.
Now, Microsoft Japan hasn’t said anything about adopting three-day weekends full-time, but because this experiment was such a success, they plan to repeat it next summer. So at least Japanese workers have that going for them, which is nice.
h/t: SoraNews24
