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Microsoft tried a 4-day workweek in Japan. Productivity jumped 40%
- stjohnswarts 6y agoWhile I think that productivity increases when people are happier and more excited about their job/life balance I think 40% would be impossible over the long haul. That said I would love a 4 day work week and I may make that a stipulation in my next contract. 3 days to do what I want sounds glorius.
- missedthecue 6y ago" While the amount of time spent at work was cut dramatically, productivity — measured by sales per employee — went up by almost 40% compared to the same period the previous year" Is sales per employee really an appropriate proxy for 'productivity'? The original report is entirely in Japanese, so I'm not really sure exactly how they are calculating productivity... is this a sales office? https://news.microsoft.com/ja-jp/2019/10/31/191031-published-the-results-of-measuring-the-effectiveness-of-our-work-life-choice-challenge-summer-2019/ https://news.microsoft.com/ja-jp/2019/10/31/191031-published...
- Tarsul 6y agoif they compare to the last year, they could have at least gone so far and compare to last month as well (probably did, but not in the cnn article, maybe someone who speaks japanese can say). It's a little daunting to just believe a 40% increase only due to cutting 1 day per week, would be quite phenomenal. Also, they cut down on meetings which was probably more decisive regarding improved productivity :) Article is from 2019 btw.
- getoj 6y agoThe productivity claim has been removed from the Japanese report you link. An erratum at the bottom of the page dated November 8, 2019 says this: "In the announcement dated October 31, one of the listed "improvements" from the 2019 Summer Work-Life Choice Challenge was an increase of 39.9% in labor productivity (sales revenue per employee) in August 2019 compared to August 2018, with a graph below. While this number is factual, it is not solely the result of this challenge, and was achieved due to a number of different factors. To avoid misunderstanding, we have removed that claim from the above summary of the direct effects of the challenge." Edit to add: >is this a sales office? "Every Friday in August 2019 was designated an office holiday. Permanent employees received special leave for those days, and all of the offices were closed."
- ajcp 6y agoYou should post this in the main thread, it is incredibly germane and enlightening.
- paxys 6y agoFor a sales team I think counting number of sales per employee is the perfect measure for productivity.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoIt would have to be weighted by size of the sales too. 1 sale that you worked really hard on could be worth 20+ small sales.
- rightbyte 6y agoOnly if there nothing else at play like a new good product. An increase in sales and decrease in productivity is not mutually exclusive.
- ekianjo 6y ago2280 employees in microsoft Japan, let me wage without being too wrong that 60% at least of those are NOT sales people. So this metric is completely nonsensical if you mix sales and non-sales.
- imwillofficial 6y agoOk, do you know if this was offered to all employees or sales people?
- ekianjo 6y agoAs far as I know it was applied to all employees of Microsoft Japan. And then they made big headlines out of it. Pure PR move (PR always does this kind of thing - that's their raison d'etre).
- fomine3 6y agoI heard that the company mentioned in the article, Microsoft Japan K.K. is mainly sales company (including DevRels, support engineers). Developers in Japan are hired by Microsoft Development K.K.
- 908B64B197 6y agoCareful. Some cultures in Asia have a strong culture of appearing to work hard solely based on time spent in the office. The Japanese salaryman comes to mind [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salaryman
- president 6y agoThough not as extreme, this happens in the US as well, especially in Silicon Valley. My last few gigs in large enterprise software companies were like this.
- BitwiseFool 6y agoI wonder if cutting official hours allows people to drop some of that pretense.
- ipnon 6y agoI find it hilarious that Americans don't seem to think they do the same thing.
- torcete 6y agoThey have plans to try a 4 days working week here in Spain, and I believe the working culture is quite different. We will see how it works.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI've worked in Spain and they thought I was a workaholic because I didn't converse a whole lot in the office (I was there for probably 6 months at our Spanish branch) and I was just putting in the 40 hours I would do in the States. While I got good reports during reviews, my manager said some where that I was a bit intense. He got a good laugh out of that because I'm was one of the less intense people on our team (stateside) at the time.
- torcete 6y agoI can see how that can happen, a workplace in Spain is also a place for socializing. In fact, I have seen the opposite happening with Spaniards working abroad. Some of them can't take very well that their colleagues just come, work and leave and sometimes they don't even say hello or goodbye.
- olyjohn 6y agoMicrosoft should probably try a 5 day / 40 hour workweek here in the US some time. From what I was told at a few interviews there, and from friends who work there, 50 hours a week is pretty much normal and expected. Sounds terrible, and I'm not sad to not work there.
- vbtemp 6y agoI heard that they have the best work-life balance of any of the big tech co, in exchange for having the lowest salary/equity. Oh well...
- throwaways885 6y agoIsn't Google a better place for WLB? I too have heard bad things about Microsoft.
- whimsicalism 6y agoGoogle seems to be the gold standard.
- filoleg 6y agoWere your friends working in Azure or were you interviewing in Azure? Asking because Azure is the only place where I've heard about it (and even then, rarely). I have friends all over MSFT (at their main Redmond HQ campus, not remote offices), and no one outside of Azure works over 40/week. The occasional overtimes/crunches happen so infrequently, they could count the number of those days per year on one hand. And even an average workweek frequently falls under 40/week (all engineering btw, cannot comment on other positions like PM or design). I honestly am baffled by your info, because Microsoft definitely has a reputation here for being one of the more "relaxed" tech companies. In fact, that's one of the biggest reasons I am staying, because I could definitely make noticeably more by switching to another tech giant, but I don't want to lose my work-life balance, as it isn't easy to find at all.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
- jacquesm 6y agoWhy didn't they try it in the USA?
- t-writescode 6y agoProbably because there's historical over-working happening in Japan and that's less of a problem in the States.
- mrtksn 6y agoFindings like these that suggest a fundamental shift in our work life dramatically makes things better for everyone(be it the schedule changed or basic universal income or remote work) keep appearing all the time but we don't see a mass adoption of any of it, maybe with the exception of remote working after being forced to do it due to Covid-19. Are there any follow ups to the "Finland gave everyone living wage regardless of their employment and the productivity doubled" or "Denmark switched to 3 days a week and the profits actually increased" sort of stories? The article is from 2019, did Microsoft actually recouped the returns that %40 increase from the 4-day workweek brings? I'm getting numbed down to these stories, just like the ads about this one weird trick that makes you rich or helps you to be instantly liked by all the men/women.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoWork/life balance may be considered cliche but it is important. I remember the most miserable year of my life was when it got out of control at a startup. I was working 7 days a week 10-12 hours a day along with everyone else. We chewed through good people. And then I walked away. Ever since then I've been a stickler for 40 hour max (or I get paid 2X it's in my contract) . I've lost plenty opportunities for it but I think I've gotten better jobs as a result as well.
- Stupulous 6y agoFor real, I've been seeing "working less increases productivity" articles and headlines for over a decade now. Are these articles wrong, and, if not, why hasn't our efficient capitalist machine moved in to get it done? Looks like it took about 30 years to get the five day workweek from testing to full deployment, with some industries getting it done in 20. But my understanding was that that was a moral crusade. Leaving money on the table while making people's lives worse feels like the kind of thing that should correct more quickly.
- tpmx 6y agoWhy are you reposting news from November 2019 without labelling it as such? I remember it being heavily discussed back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21433710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21433710 (210 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21441689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21441689 (242 comments)
- t-writescode 6y agoWow! Thanks for sharing these couple other instances of it happening, I wouldn't have seen them otherwise! This is certainly the first time I'm seeing this news. I'm always excited to see more reason for us to shorten our working hours and I think it could help lots of the problems we've been or may soon be having in society! Thanks for bringing more examples of the conversation for me to look through!
- tpmx 6y agoI do remember the consensus being that it worked out well because a (quite capitalistic!) sales team did the 4-day workweek experiment in question.
- yaseer 6y agoIf I were making socks in a factory, the more hours I put in, the more socks will be output (to a limit). If I were a creative, composing music, the relationship is not so linear. Your creative output may significantly benefit from more time off. The optimum number of hours is really going to vary with job role.
- hntrader 6y agoIt's going to vary significantly on an individual level as well. The best system would be where people opt-in to more hours but are evaluated solely on the quantity of quality output.
- yaseer 6y agoExactly. The idea we can jump from 40, to another arbitrary number for everyone, seems misguided to me.
- wnevets 6y ago> The best system would be where people opt-in to more hours but are evaluated solely on the quantity of quality output. More hours will almost always look better to management regardless of output. Even if it was possible to evaluated solely on the quantity of quality output (we still have the socks vs creative problem) management will still tend to focus on "lost" productively. If person A is able to produce as much as person B but in half the time then management will tend to think person A should be able to product as twice as much in the same amount of time as person B! Person A isn't being a team player!
- hntrader 6y agoThis is why it's important to have good managers who deeply understand what their subordinates are doing. Detached managers can easily be gamed by maximizing metrics like hours-in-chair, which is pernicious because it makes people choose between making an impact and getting promoted.
- arduinomancer 6y agoCurious how HN feels. If you could work 4 days/week but your salary would be 1/5 less would you do it?
- lagadu 6y agoDefinitely. It even has an extra bonus: I'd effectively get more than one extra week of vacation each year, because despite the number of days being the same, the one extra day a week would mean a week and a half extra off, pretty nice!
- JetAlone 6y agoOne day a week would be somewhere between 48 and 52 days off, that's over a month of time off.
- lagadu 6y agoI'm not counting those, I'm counting vacation time. Lets say you get X vacation days right now, this means that you get X/5 weeks off. If the workweek becomes 4 days, while you're still getting X vacation days, the number of weeks off you get is now X/4. This is relevant because vacation time is almost always taken in multiples of week-long periods (ie. "Next year I'll be taking 3 weeks off in August, one in December, one in January and one in June").
- JetAlone 6y agoOhhhh I see, you're talking about how many vacation days it takes to fill up a whole work-week, like the commonly seen benefit of extending golden week's 3 days off into a full week using only 2 vacation days. Gotcha.
- rightbyte 6y agoYes. I actually will do it after my paternity leave. Not sure if I would do it without a kid though but I want to believe I would value "life" more then money.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoDoes anyone have any links to a different study on 4-hour work weeks? I’ve seen this same 4-week trial shared on every discussion of 4-day workweeks for years. It was such a small and short trial that the results look more like an outlier than a long-term trend. If I was an employee at one of these companies and management hinted that we could have Fridays off as long as it didn’t decrease productivity during a 4-week trial, I would definitely work extra hard during those 4 weeks. I don’t know if we can extrapolate much from this short trial among sales people.
- wngzro 6y agoRecent article from Bloomberg on the topic: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-02/four-day-work-week-gains-popularity-around-the-world https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-02/four-day-...
- orblivion 6y agoA Japanese acquaintance once told me that an office he worked at once instituted a strict "go home at the end of the day" policy to prevent people from staying late. I guess there's a sort of cultural pressure not to be the first one out of the office (which I can actually sort of understand; I feel weird leaving early). Apparently it worked out really well. Either similar or improved output. However after a management changeover things went back to as before. It's a cultural hurdle, sounds like.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoOne place I worked at actually gave us a 15 minute warning to get out at 5. That start-up meant it too, they kicked you out, and you'd need permission from the CEO to stay (his policy). You could take your laptop home if you were desperate, but you couldn't stay there.
- mywittyname 6y agoWhen we overwork, the line between work and personal time blurs such that they eventually become the same. So you don't feel guilty about slacking off. Long hours in an office setting promote procrastination. Why do something now when you are going to be here at 8PM anyway and will need something to occupy your time? Once you stop procrastinating, because you know you can't be at work late, then you build up work inertia. This is probably where all the efficiency gains are.
- peruvian 6y agoYup. I am always more productive when I force myself to log off at 5pm.
- ekianjo 6y agoIn Japan, staying long hours at work is not about productivity, as I explained in my other comment. It's to make sure to understand that now, your office, your peers = your life. That's for the exact same reason you invite co-workers and your boss to make a speech at your wedding once you get married: your work is your new family (whether you like it not).
- getoj 6y agoPosting to a top-level comment: The productivity claim has been removed from the Japanese report[0]. An erratum at the bottom of the page dated November 8, 2019 says this: "In the announcement dated October 31, one of the listed "improvements" from the 2019 Summer Work-Life Choice Challenge was an increase of 39.9% in labor productivity (sales revenue per employee) in August 2019 compared to August 2018, with a graph below. "While this number is factual, it is not solely the result of this challenge, and was achieved due to a number of different factors. "To avoid misunderstanding, we have removed that claim from the above summary of the direct effects of the challenge." [0] https://news.microsoft.com/ja-jp/2019/10/31/191031-published-the-results-of-measuring-the-effectiveness-of-our-work-life-choice-challenge-summer-2019/ https://news.microsoft.com/ja-jp/2019/10/31/191031-published...
- ekianjo 6y ago> was achieved due to a number of different factors. How surprising that something is used as a single variable explanation by a PR department. I for sure have never seen that before. Glad to know they backtracked on that, but it's too late since the news has been out there already for a long time and this CNN article perpetuates it.
- soneca 6y agoI would not blame solely company PR departments for this, often the press exaggerates claims for clicks. I remember working on a non-profit that provided philanthropy advice to millionaires. Once we hosted a small conference and we ran a very informal poll about the said millionaires satisfaction with their own philanthropy. The result was something like 32 out of 40 wanted to donate more money annually than what they were currently donating (as opposed with “satisfied” with the amount or wanted to “donate less”). We mentioned the result to a journalist covering the event and of course the newspaper headline was ”80% of Brazilian millionaires want to donate more”. No mention that it was a poll during the event with only 40 people that were highly selected to people wanting to donate more (the purpose of the event was teach how to donate well). On the contrary, someone reading would have the impression that our organization funded a well-done proper research covering a significant sample of all millionaires in Brazil. That was not our PR, that misleading headline was solely the journalist creation. The event itself was pretty boring, so they went with that headline to justify their time investment in covering it I think.
- trhway 6y agoi'd guess that while a 4-day week de-jure, it was de-facto a 5-day week with 1 day being free of meetings, manager's micromanagement, communication&collaboration (like being able to ignore Slack for the whole day) and other corporate crap. In this case it would mean that the productivity in that 1 day grew 3x to result in that 40% growth for the whole week. Those 3x estimate pretty much matches my experience of how big the corporate crap is a drag on productivity.
- ekianjo 6y ago> The initiative is timely. Japan has long grappled with a grim — and in some cases, fatal — culture of overwork. The problem is so severe, the country has even coined a term for it: karoshi means death by overwork from stress-induced illnesses or severe depression. I love the ignorant CNN contributors there. You can really see the full effect of people commenting about cultures they do not know or do not understand. First, 'overwork' is not what you think. Most of work done in Japanese companies is not busy work. Long hours are often the result of excessive bureaucracy and long meetings, and the expectation that you'll go out for dinner (maybe not everyday, but regularly enough) with your peers as a form of social bonding at the end of the day (something that is not really a thing in other cultures). If you don't understand that aspect of the culture, well you don't understand anything at all really. As for coining words. Japanese people have a coin word for everything under the sun, even mundane things that foreigners would have no expression for. It's a culture that loves making new words, new expressions, new acronyms - very much in the DNA of the Japanese language, so there's no "even coined a term for X" that remotely means anything at all. Niche phenomena also coined specific words, and it does not mean there's a massive trend going on. You should be a lot more concerned by the number of suicides in Japan than by the number of people dying from overwork - it's not even on the same scale at all.
- ath92 6y agoDo you think the suicide rate could be related to the cultural pressure to work long hours?
- ekianjo 6y agoJust like every problem, there's tons of factors at play. Let's not try to reduce everything to a single variable, because then we are surely mistaking ourselves. Top of mind, I would say the following factors probably play a role: - social pressure to conform - social pressure to be successful - depression not being very well treated in Japan - work/school being too much in one's life compared to other things - lack of support/encouragement - isolation - fatalism ('you can't do anything about that') kind of belief But even that list is too short, I feel. I think by living in Japan you grasp a little more what is at play but as I said, it's a whole package, not just a few factors.
- jasode 6y agoAt least 2 other things to think about when reading workplace experiments like this: 1) Hawthorne Effect when workers are aware of being observed in response to a novel change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect 2) Difficulty and disagreement in measuring the success of a change: E.g. France has had 20+ years of the 35-hour work week and there's still debate on whether it was successful. : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35-hour_workweek#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/35-hour_workweek#Criticism
- mvkel 6y ago1. The second paragraph of the Hawthorne Effect wiki says that the whole thing is BS.
- vardaro 6y agoI worked at a large co that did a 4/10 work week schedule. I didn't feel any more productive but I was certainly happier overall.
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- yosito 6y agoOn a related note: when I intentionally time-box just 2 hours for focused work in a day, I usually get more done than when I sit in front of my computer from the time I wake up until the time I go to bed.
- wnevets 6y agoI wonder what the percentage of any perceived productivity increase is due to the reduction of time spent in meetings. Management has less hours to appear they're doing management things so they're forced to have less meetings. I feel like my productivity is so much higher when I don't need to worry about meetings. "No point digging into this important task, it's 30 minutes before that meeting. I guess I'll kill time looking at hacker news" "I'm exhausted from having be part of that meeting, I need 30 minutes or so to recharge before I dig into that important task." "There's a follow up email to that meeting, I guess I should I should read it before digging into that important task"
- BlargMcLarg 6y agoI can also imagine less meetings cause less bureaucracy, less mental fatigue from playing social theatrics, more satisfaction in actually doing things for people who hate meetings, etc. A meeting rarely if ever is "just" a meeting, and those that are "just" a meeting tend to be superfluous for the majority of participators (no preparation needed, no reflection afterwards).
- somedude895 6y ago> "No point digging into this important task, it's 30 minutes before that meeting. I guess I'll kill time looking at hacker news" "I'm exhausted from having be part of that meeting, I need 30 minutes or so to recharge before I dig into that important task." This is me exactly. A meeting to me isn't just a 1 hour slot, that leaves me 7 hours for other things. If I have a task that takes 90 minutes of focused work, I'll have 90 minutes before that meeting where I can't work on that task. And at least 15 minutes before the meeting will be spent getting into the right mindset / catching up on what's relevant to the meeting, plus 15 minutes after to get everything in motion that was decided during the meeting itself. Also, I've started to try to do meetings only from 5 to, lasting til 5 to. e.g. if I find a slot for a meeting with someone from 10-11, I'll make the meeting 10:05 - 10:55 instead of the full hour. Really helps when the rest of the day is packed with meetings as well.
- amir734jj 6y agoI work at a financial company (200B assets) writing software to analyze bond market. When pandemic started and stock crashed, our software didn't expect such a market crash (obviously, it's called a pandemic ...), so I had to work 80+ hours to get it fixed as everyone else who worked on the application already left and the new people didn't have any clue. Fast forward to the post-mortem phase which also happened to be annual review time, my manager told me I am a toxic person and I made everything worse during the crisis. To make the matter worse the night when everything was fixed, I was on my way home at 3:30am and I got a speeding ticket for going 60mph over the limit. I fell asleep behind the wheel, thank God I'm still alive. I left that team immediately, and exactly one year has passed and they haven't been able to find another person to replace me but what bothers me is they promoted that manager because I left and he got all the credit. In summary, I will never ever work over 40 hours for any company.
- didibus 6y ago> In summary, I will never ever work over 40 hours for any company Thank You!
- fendy3002 6y ago> In summary, I will never ever work over 40 hours for any company. Even if anyone can, please don't (exception applies). Especially if you're a developer, 40+ hour a week will burn you out fast.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoI don't have any issues with 40 hours a week. But at 40 I drop it all. Knowing I have the self discipline to do that, 40 is fine. I have had the "go ahead and fire me talk" with more than one manager.
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- hutzlibu 6y ago"In summary, I will never ever work over 40 hours for any company." In general I would say, don't generalize. If you are with a good company and in a great team, you might want to make exceptions again to succeed as a team. (exceptions as in at critical times, family would still come first)
- effnorwood 6y agoBecause only the worst employees actually took the 5th day off. Unencumbered by the usual idiots, productivity soared.
- didibus 6y agoI'd be curious to see a similar study for a 6 day workweek. In a way, if a 6 day work week increases productivity as well, it becomes more curious that 4 day would too. I say that because I think the challenge here is measuring productivity, and people are just mentally skeptical that less working hours could equal more productivity. I hope it is true, but I too feel like really? So maybe a counter data-point could make things clearer. If the 6 day experiment has worse outcome, at least we'd start to suspect that overworking might be detrimental to output. And that could reinforce the theory of 4 day work week.
- kgin 6y agoI might be misunderstanding, but I think they're talking about productivity in the sense of work output / time worked. A big part of the productivity increase could be explained by Parkinson's Law of the same amount of work getting done in less time. I don't think they're saying that 40% more work was completed overall.
- didibus 6y agoSomeone else said it is measured by: sales revenue per employee So I think you're right. I still think people will be suspect. Like why couldn't more work be done in a 5 day week compared to a 4 day week? Why would 4 day produce the same work which result in the same sales as 5 day? And it's hard to logically argue for or against. But if you tried a 6 day week, you could try to answer: well does more working hours result in more work with more sales output? And if not, then maybe the truth is that there's a max budget of real work per week for employees, and more work hours just go to waste. And in turn that could explain why 4 day over 5 didn't see a big change on sales output.
- BlargMcLarg 6y agoAt that point, I'd prefer if they would also toss in any kind of scheduling to begin with. Where I live, 5x8 9-5 gets emphasized a lot, and any alternative that isn't working earlier or reducing the days gets incredible backlash. I'm young and fairly carefree outside work, I'd love to try more extreme patterns like 3x12 (especially with WFH) and have more days I can turn my head off completely regarding work, including a shift so I don't get chastised for coming in at 9:30. Someone else might prefer 6x6 starting from 6:30 and quit a bit before noon.
- aasasd 6y agoSeen plenty of such articles, but still waiting for a single one saying productivity doesn't drop back after a few months. (This is coming from someone who's been working remotely and free hours for quite a while.)
- twodayrice 6y agoTurns out that the productivity gain came from the fact that they wrote less code. Call me cynical.
- agumonkey 6y agodoes productivity compose ? because reports of WFH improving productivity by 22% would make a nice bump on top.
- _carbyau_ 6y agoWhen I joined the fulltime workforce I got to wondering: "If everyone is meant to be working fulltime, who is out there being a customer to sell to?" Maybe society could try a 4 day & 3 day "work weeks" with people only allowed to work one or the other by Tax office enforcement?