Its productivity shot 40%

Japan is a country known for its demanding work culture and its endless working days. Loyalty to the company and the commitment to the results led employees to put at risk your life With extreme trends.

However, the division of Microsoft in Japan decided to break those rigid schemes and Implement a summer With the work week four days for its entire template. The experiment exceeded all expectations on productivity and labor well -being.

Microsoft challenges Japanese work culture

Despite Japan’s reputation for his “culture of presentism” and the custom of working long hours, Microsoft dared to launch A pioneer initiative In 2019. In August of that year, the company gave its 2,300 employees five consecutive free Fridays, maintaining the full salary and without demanding time compensation.

According to the companyThe objective was to “experiment how they can achieve the same results with 20% less work time,” said Takuya Hirano, then president and executive director of Microsoft Japan.

The measure adopted by Microsoft was especially innovative because it advanced To the global trend to explore work models more flexiblelong before the pandemic accelerated the debate on the Working Day and Teleworking.

The experimentknown as “Work-Life Choice Challenge 2019 Summer”, sought to improve productivity and creativity by changing the way time was used in the company. In other words, he sought to optimize his processes by eliminating those more unproductive tasks of the day.

An unexpected leap in productivity and efficiency

The big surprise came when reviewing the data collected during the test: productivity, measured in this case by sales per employee, increased by almost 40% with respect to the same period of the previous year.

The key to this increase was in the OPTIMIZATION OF WORK TIMEespecially in which employees dedicated to meetings. During the experiment, a New standard for meetingssetting them by default in 30 minutes, instead of 60 minutes as usual.

This cut was a 46% increase in short meetings. In addition, many of them were performed in remote format instead of face -to -face, which further expedited processes. The company itself acknowledged that “the time of its meetings and the number of participants in Japan were well above the global average”, so that cut was decisive for the success of the test.

According to the 4 Day Work Week organization, which has supervised most pilot tests carried out in the world, including that of Valencia“The substantial increase in productivity observed in the study underlines the effectiveness of a condensed work schedule to optimize employee performance.”

Cost reduction for the company

The experiment not only Productivity improved of Microsoft, but also registered a savings in your operational costs of the company’s offices. During the trial period, paper printing was reduced by 58.7% and energy consumption fell 23.1% compared to the same month in three previous years.

One of the keys to this success was the intensive use of digital platforms such as Microsoft Teamsthat the company had launched in 2017, and that allowed to centralize communication and meetings in a single virtual space.

Microsoft took the opportunity to demonstrate to its corporate clients that efficiency goes through adopting alternative digital tools and models. “Microsoft has been a pioneer in Asia in its intention to offer alternative work models that attract talent to their ranks and also to retain it,” They stood out In its official statement.

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