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Tech employees all over the world are complaining of burnt out. Can Microsoft’s four days work week experiment change mindsets?
I’ve always quipped, if you find yourself working long hours all the time, either you are being exploited, or you are unproductive.
China’s tech titans would probably not agree with me. Many developers by now would have heard of China’s ‘996’ culture — a reference to working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.
The fallout from Chinese tech employees suffering bad health and personal problems caught the attention of western media throughout 2019 — with the likes of Bloomberg, Forbes, New York Times and the BBC all covering the 996 culture.
Github (the online mecca of coders) even had a top trending campaign on it, resulting in an anti-996 movement to ban companies accused of the culture from using open source code on Github. In a time of intense US-China trade war, this was a strange show of solidarity by western programmers with their Chinese counterparts.
Microsoft breaks ranks
In a somewhat timely twist, news broke out in early November 2019 that Microsoft had conducted a four days work week experiment in its Japan office in August 2019. Offices were closed on Fridays for that entire month.
It resulted in a 40% increase in productivity.
Microsoft also imposed a 30 minutes limit on all meetings and encouraged remote communication. By the end of the month, the experiment also resulted in 23.1% savings on electricity and 58.7% reduction in printing paper.
In reality, Microsoft was just one of many companies and academic studies that found that a shorter work week often led to happier employees and higher productivity.
Is the theory proven then?
Saving on goof time
An Ohio University study found that out of a typical 8-hour work day, the average employee spent almost three hours of it doing frivolous activities like reading news, surfing social media and chatting with colleagues on matters unrelated to work. Interestingly, 26 mins of it were spent looking for new jobs!
