The archive · Work & Ways of Doing · Operational decision · 2019
Microsoft Japan's 4-day week: 2,300 staff get Fridays off, productivity up 39.9%
Microsoft Japan closes its offices every Friday in August 2019 and finds sales per employee up 39.9% — a template for the four-day week.
Microsoft Japan
What it had to solve
Japan is known for long working hours, and Microsoft Japan wanted to test whether employees could hit the same results with 20 percent less working time. So it ran the 'Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019'.
How it works
In August 2019, Microsoft Japan ran the 'Work-Life Choice Challenge Summer 2019': every Friday the office closed and all 2,300 employees took a paid day off, with no salary reduction and no annual leave deducted. The month was a live test of whether the company could get the same results with 20 percent less working time.
The shorter week forced new habits: meetings were capped at 30 minutes, in-person meetings were replaced where possible with remote conferences to eliminate commute time, and the company subsidized employees' family vacations or further education by up to ¥100,000. Employees used the extra day for self-development and family.
When the results came in, sales per employee were up 39.9% compared with August 2018. Electricity use fell 23.1% and pages printed fell 58.7%, while 92.1% of employees said they liked the four-day week — evidence that the constraint itself, not extra hours, had redesigned the work.
Why it lands
- A hard 20% reduction in time forces prioritization — meetings were shortened, cut, or moved remote because there was simply less room for them.
- Keeping pay and annual leave unchanged made the trial about work design rather than compensation, so employees engaged with it instead of gaming it.
- The experiment was measurable: sales per employee, electricity, printing and satisfaction were all tracked against the same month the year before.
- The CEO framed it as a question employees should experience themselves: can you achieve the same results with 20 percent less working time?
What it did
Sales per employee rose 39.9% versus August 2018, electricity use fell 23.1%, pages printed fell 58.7%, and 92.1% of employees said they liked the four-day week.
What you can take
Scarcity is a forcing function: when the working week shrinks 20%, meetings and busywork get cut instead of output — the constraint itself redesigns the work.
Since then
Microsoft Japan said it planned to repeat the challenge the following summer and extend it to other periods, and the trial became one of the most cited corporate four-day-week experiments. Its numbers — productivity up 39.9%, electricity down 23.1%, 92.1% employee satisfaction — were quoted by advocates and by the wave of shorter-workweek trials that followed around the world.
Sources
- Microsoft Japan's 4-day workweek experiment sees productivity jump 40%
- Microsoft Japan's 4-day work week boosted productivity by 40 percent
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