Our team looked exhausted and even a bit scared. And rightfully so! It was May 2020, and we were three months deep in the midst of quarantine from the global pandemic, a global financial depression, and the largest civil rights movement we’ve seen since the ’60s. My co-founder Anna and I were desperately trying to figure out how to take good care of our team. They’d been pushing on in spite of everything going on in the world, taking loyalty and hard work to a whole new level. But that loyalty and hard work came at a large personal cost.
Initially, 2020 was shaping up to be the biggest year ever for Stoked, our design and innovation consultancy. But like for so many businesses, that rapidly changed. Our business had radically slowed. And it was becoming clear that even though there was less client-facing work, burnout was still happening. Asking our team to handle a full workload while dealing with everything else happening around them didn’t seem to be helping.
I’ve long been a fan of companies like Basecamp who are great about sharing their hard-won best practices. One of those practices is moving to a four-day workweek during the summer months so parents can spend more time with their kids. There’s also some great research led by The Henley Business School, and even a book espousing the benefits of a four-day workweek.
As Anna and I considered the many ways we could offer some relief to our team, this idea came back to us. Anna is a mother of three and liked the idea of a four-day workweek but always found it hard to execute. As a business owner, there’s always more to do than there is time to do it. But we tend to be overprotective of our team, so we decided to try and do the thing that had eluded us in the past.
We moved to a four-day workweek and gave them Friday’s off.
At Stoked, we take pride in the fact that we practice what we preach when it comes to prototyping solutions for hard problems. So, like we often do when trying something new, we framed it as an experiment. We agreed to take the next two months and only work Monday through Thursday while still paying everyone their normal salary. We originally called this experiment a four-day workweek, but based on what we’d come to learn, the name would have to change. Welcome to Auxillary Fridays.
After sussing out the details with our leadership team, we made the announcement over our regular Monday afternoon Zoom meeting. Honestly, I was excited and couldn’t wait to see everyone light up with surprise and relief. But, when I announced our plan to the team, I could immediately see something that looked like uneasiness in some of their eyes. If anyone was excited, it didn’t show. Judging by the looks on their faces, you’d think we’d just added a workday to their week. Their minds seemed to be crunching questions like ‘How will we get our work done in four days?’ ‘What about our clients? Are we just going to leave them hanging?’ Everyone was dead quiet for a minute. Finally, one brave soul spoke up and, without smiling, asked how they were supposed to explain their lack of availability to our clients.
Wondering if we’d done more harm than good, I tried to be calm. I said, “We’ll reach out to all of our clients and let them know that we’re moving to a four-day workweek for the foreseeable future. We’ll tell them we’re giving everyone some much needed time to deal with life in this new world we’re all living in.” (Turns out, our clients were more than fine with our decision. Not only were they amenable to our being unavailable on Fridays, but they liked it so much they wanted us to get back to them with the results so we could teach them how to do the same thing at their 50K+ person organizations.)
“But”, I said to them, “let’s just see how this goes for a few weeks. If it’s an abject failure, we can always bring Fridays back!” Silently, they agreed to go along with our experiment. In my mind, they were questioning our sanity or ability to lead a company.
We only had two rules we asked the team to follow:
- No collaboration between teammates. If you want to work, you can, just not with each other.
- No communication between teammates. Don’t alert your teammates to work matters. If they are actually trying to take time off, we don’t want to activate some sense of guilt by advertising that we are working. No calls, texts, meeting invites, or emails.
Two Months Later // The Results // So What Happened?
The first two weeks were like dipping our toes in the pool. Some of us already had meetings and client-facing work scheduled for Fridays so we kept those engagements. Others went straight into taking days off. I think it took the first month for everyone to get their bearings and feel comfortable with this new way of working. Then it started to really hum for everyone. People started to see where this newfound freedom could allow them to work, or not work in really interesting ways.
After a couple of months in this new schedule, I interviewed each of our teammates about how they felt concerning the new work schedule. The overarching theme was that everyone treated the experiment differently. Per usual, there was no one-size-fits-all. Here’s what I learned:
- Autonomy. It’s not a four-day workweek. Fridays are days where nothing is scheduled, and people have a choice to work in whatever way they want. Or, to take a day off to recover when they see fit.
- Make Space. The absence of communication with other teammates allowed our people to achieve a completely new headspace. The space to do deep work, to learn and grow, to think about work and life proactively and not reactively, and maybe most importantly, since they’re not responding to others or delivering work, they have the space to explore.
- Get Intentional. Most people also gained a real sense of intentionality in their work and personal lives. When our days and weeks are already predetermined by our calendars, we have no ability to move freely about the cabin. No chance to think about what’s most important in that moment, and then act on that. On Auxiliary Fridays, everyone has the chance to act with intention, no need to run (hair on fire) from one thing to the next.
- Create Freedom. Some of our team members got to play with both when and where they work. One team member, in particular, enjoyed working more in the evening hours and leaving the sunny hours open for walks, laying in her hammock, and enjoying the spring weather. Other team members took on podcasts and reading to learn more about their craft and grow in their roles…but they did it poolside, cocktail in hand! The freedom to choose the when and where is invaluable to a team like ours, who highly values freedom and autonomy.
- Mindful of Working Style. We’re big believers at Stoked that everyone has both an introvert and an extrovert side to them. Monday through Thursdays we tend to work in very extroverted, collaborative ways. So it makes good sense that at least one day a week, we need to nurture our introverted selves by giving us space and quiet to work in a different way and process the week past.
But what about downsides? Are there any?
But it wasn’t all poolside reading and peaceful exploration while gardening. We found a few things that didn’t work great and we continue to iterate on these issues.
First, and maybe most obvious, is that email buildup can feel stressful to some people. But for some of us, going three days without checking or responding to email creates a sense of anxiety. Especially since we pride ourselves on taking wonderful care of our clients. It doesn’t always feel “human-centered” to leave a client waiting for an extra day if they feel like they have an urgent request.
Similarly, to-do list buildup was challenging for some. Many (if not all) of our teammates keep a running task list. With one less day during the regular workweek, they find it hard to get through.
I submit this though: most of us never get through our inbox or to-do list. They are never-ending by design. So maybe there is a teaching moment for us here. To learn to live with unfinished tasks and requests. They will most certainly be there when we log back in on Monday morning.
At the end of the two-month experiment, 100% of our team voted to keep Auxiliary Fridays, giving them the freedom to choose between an introvert workday or a recovery day. To allow them as individuals to make the decision that will best suit them on any given week. This, of course, requires trust on our part. We’re still paying everyone the same amount, but now giving them 20% of their time to do as they see fit. And for us, this is a no brainer. We trust our team so fully that we believe this will increase employee happiness, health, and engagement, lead to less burnout, and result in improved outcomes for our clients.
Stoked has a decade long history of running bold experiments in the name of creating an amazing culture. It’s everything we’ve built our company around. And since we’re a small team it’s easier to gather qualitative feedback on what’s working, what’s not, and how we can iterate moving forward. Plus, experimenting on ourselves allows us to learn lessons that we can pass on to our clients.
The team looks and sounds better. More rested, and like they have more bandwidth to both deal with this world we’re living in, as well as continue to do great work for our clients. Ultimately, we believe that employee happiness is critical to delivering world-class outcomes and also critical to living good full lives. So we’ll never stop trying new (and hopefully weird) things to improve the lives of our team.
