Quantity v/s Quality of Work
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
– Steve Jobs
In the daily struggle to complete
the enormous pile of tasks planned on our work schedules, it is often found
that people can be guilty of ignoring quality for quantity work. When
evaluating our performance, one generally focuses on the question, “How many
hours a day did you work?” This question is not just limited to the
professional front, even as a student one is generally asked, “How many hours a
day do you study?” But nobody asks the real question, i.e. “How much value do
you add to your organization in a day?”
We generally think that an
organization with long working hours and a 6-day work schedule would be really
productive. We tend to think that such organizations would be earning higher
profits than say an organization which only works from 9 to 5, and 5 days a
week. This prevalent thought process has been changing for quite some time now,
with more and more companies adopting the 5-day work schedule and Flexi working
hours.
The Microsoft Experiment
This mind-set of working in
quantity to increase productivity came under severe scrutiny when Microsoft
Japan experimented on a 4 day work week schedule for the month of August. As
part of a program in Japan called, “Work-life Choice Challenge”, Microsoft
closed its office every Friday, giving its employees an extra day off. The working
hours for the remaining days of the week were not changed. This cut time that
employees spent at the workplace by 20%. Some rules were obviously set in by
Microsoft. Meetings, for example, were suggested to not last more than 30
minutes. In addition, the company tried to abandon the physical meetings for
digital ones, on the company’s own Teams meeting app.
What came as a massive surprise
to the world was that adopting the 4-day work week policy caused an increase in
productivity and a decrease in its costs. The company noted in its press
release that the shorter workweek saved it 23% in electricity, and 59% fewer
pages were printed. Sales per employee rose by 40% compared to the same period
in the previous year.
Microsoft is not the first
company in the corporate world to experiment with the longer weekends. In 2018,
Perpetual Guardian, a trust management company in New Zealand, tried the 4-day
workweek over two months for its 240 staff members. Employees reported
experiencing better work-life balance and improved focus in office, due to this
policy. After observing a 20% increase in productivity, the company permanently
adopted this policy last October.
Can this work for any company?
Microsoft has not made any plans
yet to test this policy in other branches of the world. Doing so would involve
the whole company to undergo special challenges. Some departments like customer
service – can’t simply close down for a part of the week. That would lead to
customer dissatisfaction, which no company would like to encourage. One of the
solutions could be to have a rolling three day weekend, wherein, some workers
would get Monday off, and some would get Fridays to themselves. There are
obviously other logistical concerns as well that would need to be worked out
before this can be implemented anywhere else.
However, it is clear from this
experiment, that employees have a tendency to work harder and focus more if
they get the added benefit of working for only 4 days a week. This is a growing
movement across the corporate world that requires an organization to focus more
on the outcomes and work product than the hours spent at a desk.
The Indian
Outlook
Such a program in India would not
be easy to implement. The biggest issue of all is that almost 80% of people in
India are still employed in the informal sector and small proprietary
businesses. Small businesses in India have limited resources and end up
stretching the working hours of their existing employees beyond what would be
fair. Most people end up working for 6 days a week or sometimes even more.
The corporate sector in India
forms a very small portion of the total workforce. But both sections of the
workplace face similar issues when it comes to their work – being extremely
occupied by their work such that it doesn’t leave time for much else.
Yet as India moves towards the
more organized workplace, the country must change the basic characteristics of
having a job before the country can talk about a 4-day workweek. The
implementation would require a social change across the societies in India. A
survey concluded that Indians feel the most pressure to extend their work hours
to grow professionally.
The Situation Ahead
Work is not always about checking
items on our to-do list. Some days, we may not even check off one thing from
that list, and it may seem that nothing has been accomplished. Yet the thing to
note is that even then you may have added tremendous value to your
organization. It is important to focus on quality and not quantity.
What Microsoft has shown by successfully completing this experiment is that a 4-day workweek can work. A lot more testing would be needed to see how it might work across an entire company, or how other companies working in other industries might successfully implement it. What’s clear, however, is that once workers know this may be an option, they will work harder to get it. That could lead to companies offering shorter workweeks as part of their recruiting process to attract the best talent and increase the intellectual capital of their organization.
-Simran Bakshi
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