My team at work recently instituted a “flex time” Friday policy. Basically, as long as we’re maintaining productivity we aren’t expected to work on Fridays. A lot of us still work half days to keep up but it’s nice to know that if I work a little more earlier in the week I can just take a three day weekend.
My boss doesn’t work on Fridays and I’m starting to push for this flex setup. I’ll check my emails and do the hour or two of work that might come in those days, but I want to do it from home while getting my household chores done before the weekend.
This is the way to go.
What’s crazy is your productivity and efficiency is probably the same or better since you can have a softer reset with the weekend.
FWIW every study on the subject shows that, for typical office work, four 10hour work days is not more productive than four 8hour work days, and both are at least 90% as productive as five 8hour workdays. People tend to fill the time with the production they need to get done.
Unless you’re working on a production line in manufacturing.
What is stopping your employer from giving you so much work that you are forced to work on Fridays so your employer only has to pretend the policy works?
We use a bottom-up work planning system (scrum). We have a backlog of work items that we (the people doing the work) assign point values to based on how complex we think the work is. Management knows about how many points of work we can complete in a 2 week period, and they decide what items they want done this work period based on their priorities. If we don’t get something done, it slips to the next 2 week sprint. If we get everything done and still have time, we pull additional items from the backlog. So long as the number of points we complete every 2 weeks stays relatively steady they are happy.
I know it’s hard to believe, because I’ve worked other places where it wasn’t like this. But some employers really do respect their employees and try to treat them with dignity and respect.
I will say that occasionally we have looming deadlines and more work to get done than we can normally do. When that happens we will be asked to dig in and work extra hours to get things done. It sucks but it’s also pretty rare. I’ve been with the company for going on 9 years and I think it has happened 3 times, for limited periods, and afterwards management will make it up by giving us time off as compensation. Most of us like working here enough that we don’t mind the occasional brief crunch.
My team at work recently instituted a “flex time” Friday policy. Basically, as long as we’re maintaining productivity we aren’t expected to work on Fridays. A lot of us still work half days to keep up but it’s nice to know that if I work a little more earlier in the week I can just take a three day weekend.
Ah interesting. I too have instituted a flex time Friday.
So far my company hasn’t seemed to notice
I dread the day my manager calls me in to talk about the flex time Friday
Eh as long as the tickets keep on chugging along, there should be no problem.
My boss doesn’t work on Fridays and I’m starting to push for this flex setup. I’ll check my emails and do the hour or two of work that might come in those days, but I want to do it from home while getting my household chores done before the weekend.
This is the way to go. What’s crazy is your productivity and efficiency is probably the same or better since you can have a softer reset with the weekend.
Fuck that sounds nice, I’m trying to sell my boss on changing to a 4-10h day work week, and he hasn’t said No yet, so we might be getting somewhere
FWIW every study on the subject shows that, for typical office work, four 10hour work days is not more productive than four 8hour work days, and both are at least 90% as productive as five 8hour workdays. People tend to fill the time with the production they need to get done.
Unless you’re working on a production line in manufacturing.
What is stopping your employer from giving you so much work that you are forced to work on Fridays so your employer only has to pretend the policy works?
We use a bottom-up work planning system (scrum). We have a backlog of work items that we (the people doing the work) assign point values to based on how complex we think the work is. Management knows about how many points of work we can complete in a 2 week period, and they decide what items they want done this work period based on their priorities. If we don’t get something done, it slips to the next 2 week sprint. If we get everything done and still have time, we pull additional items from the backlog. So long as the number of points we complete every 2 weeks stays relatively steady they are happy.
I know it’s hard to believe, because I’ve worked other places where it wasn’t like this. But some employers really do respect their employees and try to treat them with dignity and respect.
I will say that occasionally we have looming deadlines and more work to get done than we can normally do. When that happens we will be asked to dig in and work extra hours to get things done. It sucks but it’s also pretty rare. I’ve been with the company for going on 9 years and I think it has happened 3 times, for limited periods, and afterwards management will make it up by giving us time off as compensation. Most of us like working here enough that we don’t mind the occasional brief crunch.
That’s not how most jobs that can offer “flex time” function. The employer literally cannot just “invent” work to do.