“Happy people solve problems in a much better and faster way than unhappy people.”

And that is why Dunedin-based IT company CloudCannon officially adopted a four-day working week this month after the successful trial of a nine-day working fortnight last year.

“It was an overall success and our employees were happy,” CloudCannon co-founder and chief technology officer George Phillips said.

The company was founded in 2013 by Mike Neumegen and Phillips, both University of Otago computer science alumni.

Many staff were able to maintain their work-life balance and meet personal commitments as a result, Phillips said. Staff were paid a full salary, even though they worked fewer hours.

The new structure incorporated a few lessons from the trial, including cutting the number of internal team meetings as they drained time.

“We had scrutiny of our meetings and we found that many meetings were unnecessary.”

It had been decided to push the weekly meetings into fortnightly meetings and fortnightly one to a monthly meeting, he said.

CloudCannon is one of several companies that have introduced new policies to improve employees' work-life balance. Earlier this month Microsoft introduced unlimited leave. Photo / Jason Oxenham

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Clients would not be affected as more part-time customer support staff would be hired.

CloudCannon, which employs about 28 people, including one part-time staffer and a three-member team in the US, was planning to hire more people and wanted to use the new structure as a recruiting tool.

In the coming year it was planning to hire 10-15 more staff and primarily the recruitment would be for sales, marketing and customer support roles.

The company received 50 per cent of its total revenue from the US market and had plans to widen the marketing team there.

It counted OTT platform Netflix OTT and video-streaming company Twitch as its major customers.