Toyota’s AI and robotics research arm moves to 4-day work week – says staff overworked during pandemic period

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is Toyota Motor’s research arm for artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, energy and materials, and automated driving. It operates semi-independently from Toyota Motor, at the heart of Silicon Valley in Los Altos, California, near Stanford University.

More importantly, it’s located far away from the reaches of Toyota Motor’s Aichi headquarters' creativity-stifling tentacles. The decision to put TRI far away in Silicon Valley is a conscious decision by President Akio Toyoda, whose son Daisuke Toyoda was one of TRI’s founding members.

Daisuke has since moved on to head TRI’s Tokyo-based commercial arm Woven Planet, itself a spin-off from the former Toyota Research Institute - Advanced Development (TRI-AD).

TRI is one of the few organizations within the Toyota group that is headed by a team of non-Japanese and more importantly, counts women in its top management ranks.

Former MIT and DARPA robotics expert Dr. Gill Pratt is its CEO and Chief Scientist, while former Lyft Vice-President Kelly Kay is its President and CFO.

Everything that Toyota needs to build the next generation EV batteries, self-driving car, home assistance robots, or algorithms to optimize traffic flow, comes from TRI.

The best and the brightest in software and robotics are employed at TRI, and the people at TRI are nothing like the traditional penguin suit-wearing office folks at Toyota Motor. Likewise, TRI staff also don’t work or think like traditional office workers.

Like many technology companies, TRI recently announced that it has switched to a 4-day work week. Interestingly, the company says that there is no difference in productivity, and their working teams’ efficiency and motivation actually increased.

TRI President Kelly Kay said in the company's Linkedin page, “A few weeks into the pandemic, we found our people working harder than ever before. The isolation of our homes, all social spaces closed, and nothing to do but work led to our team putting in more hours than before, and those hours were, for most, filled with back-to-back meetings as we tried to remain connected and maintain strong social bonds among our teams. As leaders, we love when our teams are working hard, when they are dedicated to work. In fact, prior to the pandemic, some companies provided both lunch and dinner to keep employees at work longer. However, we quickly realized the impact to the health and wellbeing of our team members and their families was becoming a pandemic itself. Something had to change.

“To help with this, during the pandemic, we moved to an experimental schedule of meeting-free Fridays and every other Friday off. Some leaders worried that productivity would go down. However, we saw the opposite. We had already observed people were working more and harder than before the pandemic, so we thought we could give our team members some much needed “me time” and still sustain the level of productivity we had prior to our new experimental schedule. 

“In the end, our people loved every other Friday off and as the world slowly opened up, we would hear stories on Monday of adventures they had with friends or family outside. Improving their happiness and health through one day off a week. We conducted surveys and assessments and heard from employees directly about whether this experimental Friday schedule was working, and the answer was a resounding YES.”

As companies adjusted to the pandemic and resumed operations, hiring also restarted. Prior to the pandemic, many technology companies were already facing a serious shortage in talent.

So when businesses resumed, many companies faced ‘The Great Resignation,’ as hiring / resignations that have been put on hold in the last 2 years suddenly resumed.

TRI says its decision to switch to a 4-day work week is one reason why TRI managed to retain its best and brightest despite The Great Resignation sweeping the industry.

“As we approached a return to office, we contemplated the “great resignation.” Thankfully, we had not experienced it at TRI to date, but it was vital to prevent this from happening. As a result, we began to think about what made TRI a great place to work, what our peers in our space were doing, and what was best for our people who stood by us, as we stood by them, during the pandemic. Our goal was to create a great place to work, respectful of people’s commitment to us, and reflective of what was happening to the future of work,” said Kelly.

TRI however acknowledged that switching to a 4-day work week for the sake of doing so will actually make things worse.

“We also know that switching to a four-day workweek without setting expectations and reinforcing boundaries on work can lead to employees working longer hours and burning out. This makes the three-day weekend all about recovery rather than rejuvenation and personal investment, which is our main motivation for the change. To address this issue, we’re encouraging our team members to work with their managers to find the right balance for each individual team, to limit meetings as well as encourage asynchronous collaboration, and to encourage informal social and collaboration opportunities together during the workweek.”

On the importance of face-to-face collaboration, which is a core part of TRI’s work culture, Kelly said “I wrote earlier about how TRI is a research organization and that we firmly believed in the importance of in-person collaboration. We still believed this but now, our focus on what mattered most had shifted dramatically.”

“Our desire for normalcy and to preserve our culture was high. But the reality was, normal was gone, and our culture was forever changed by the past two years of working from home,” she said, adding that between preserving a cherished work culture and protecting employees’ wellbeing, the latter takes priority.

Closer to home, the topic of a 4-day work week is being debated in Malaysia.

Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers president Tan Sri Soh Thian Lai told The Star, “As it stands currently, an employee working five days per week is effectively working an average of about four days a week after taking into account the many public holidays, sick leave, maternity or paternity leave, and others.

“As such, reduced hours per week or a four-day week is not required.”

Soh added that implementing a 4-day work week will actually drive up cost due to higher overtime claims, which will lead to further increase in prices of consumer goods.