Flow Friday — the benefits of more flow time at the end of the workweek

All around the globe, we have been living in a changing work environment for over two years now, and we continuously need to adapt to more changes. With remote or hybrid work, the frequency of meetings and communications increased in general, as more alignment seems to be required, and everyone wants to keep being connected to their colleagues. As a result of this, lots of companies see that their employees are spending their days mostly in meetings, lacking proper flow time: being uninterrupted for several hours in order to focus. At tb.lx, we experienced precisely this and therefore tried out a countermeasure to create more flow time.

The concept of Flow Friday

Four months ago, we introduced the concept of Flow Fridays at tb.lx: one day each week without any pre-scheduled meetings in our calendars. The goal was to give us more time where our creativity could spark and where we could focus for a longer period of time without interruptions. “It’s not a silent Friday; it’s a Flow Friday,” said our CEO, Chris Lessing.

Why did we feel the need for Flow Friday?

In the past, we often discussed our meeting culture and the need to prioritize which meetings are essential and which could be replaced by asynchronous communications. On top of that, the remote-first setup increased communication in general, notifications, and the feeling of needing to be “always-on.” We have already improved a lot, with a guideline for more effective meetings and for how to improve async communications. However, we still were often interrupted by meetings throughout the day.

Our goal was always to create a better experience for our partners, customers, and employees. And this is why we believe that one day without interruptions, one day to flow, could solve some of those points above.

Four months later: Was it a success?

After four months of Flow Friday, we did a survey in the company to understand the impact it created, and the results were clear: Flow Friday is here to stay. If you are still questioning if Flow Friday is for you, keep reading about how it improved our workweek.

89% of all employees felt a positive impact on productivity.

The main topics pointed out were:

• More time for focused or creative work, for tasks that are more time-consuming and involve more thinking and concentration;
• The possibility to “get in the zone” without worrying about upcoming meetings;
• It allows for spontaneous conversations with colleagues who usually have a very busy schedule;
• Meetings on the other days have to be more structured to not lose time on those days. We asked ourselves a lot: “is this meeting really necessary?”;
• We improved our async communications, not expecting people to reply immediately to messages on Fridays;

Only 2 % of employees felt less productive.

“For me, Flow Friday was a game-changer.”

Obviously, there was an impact on the rest of the week, for 61% of all employees positively, for 11% in a negative way.

The positive impact included:

• More time to prepare for the following week and, therefore, a more organized and better prepared week ahead;
• The thought of “I always have flow Friday for this” when the week gets stressful with too many meetings and tasks that have to be delayed;
• Going into the weekend with the feeling of accomplishment and very low virtual meeting fatigue;
• An overall reduced amount of meetings.

Some people negatively felt the last point, with:

• More meetings during the other days.

This also reflects that 52% of all employees changed cadences in team meetings and moved and adapted meetings throughout the week to free up the Friday.

And being really transparent: No, we couldn’t keep every Friday free of any kind of meeting, at least not during the first weeks of adapting. But the good news is: that 76% of all employees managed to have Fridays without meetings.

And the meetings that still occurred were not the regular kind:

• No regular meetings happened, but some employees used the time for workshops;
• Some teams decided to keep their team dailies on Friday mornings;
• And a few team leads still needed the time for synchs with their teams.

We felt the most significant changes were overall positive (88% of all employees confirmed that). A few examples of the changes we felt included:

• More time to focus and study;
• Less context switching on one day;
• Not needing to keep an eye on notifications, so less distraction;
• Less meeting fatigue;
• An improved work-life-empathy (using flexibility to start/leave earlier);
• More self-organization, less externally controlled;

“Flow Friday is not just another day; it positively impacts my work and my motivation.”

When asking our employees what they actually spent their Flow Fridays with, it obviously depended on their role, but some of the main activities included:

• Coding, Documentation, Research;
• Strategic Thinking and Planning;
• Creative Tasks;
• Studying, learning, and reading;
• Planning the following week;
• Exchanging with colleagues;
• Making presentations.

Wrapping it up, Flow Friday works well for us, and we hope to inspire you to also implement Flow Fridays in your teams! Feel free to reach out if you have any questions: https://tblx.io/