SEASON 2 - EPISODE 0107 - MAY 1, 2024

How We Work: Summer Fridays

In this episode, host Kimberly Rhodes chats with 37signals’ co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson about the company’s Summer Fridays policy, which grants employees a four-day workweek from May to September. While the perk encourages work-life balance and a feeling of seasonality, there are drawbacks to consider, like reduced productivity.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:46 - 37signals’ Summer Friday policy and why it was initially introduced.
03:09 - The trade-offs the company makes with summer hours.
10:12 - The challenge with summer hours in the pursuit of more ambitious goals.
13:09 - How the company balances coverage for always-on teams, like customer support.
16:17 - The effect on team projects that require collaboration.

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to REWORK , a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host, Kimberly Rhodes, and I’m joined as always by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Well, this week marks the first week of summer Fridays at 37signals, so I thought we would talk about it. How we work at 37signals is a break in the summer with only four day work weeks. This is particularly interesting as companies like Samsung have recently instituted six day work weeks for executives, and the idea of four day work weeks has become more popular in the post Covid world. So do you guys remember Jason, when you guys started Summer Fridays? Has this always been a thing?

Jason (00:44): Forever ago, I mean, well over a decade, maybe 15 years ago, maybe longer. I don’t remember. For a while I think we were even doing it all year round or something, or we had experimented with that at some point or something like that. I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. I’m getting old, but currently it’s basically May through September. We do four day work weeks, 32 hour weeks, so it’s not 40 hours packed into four days. It’s shorter weeks, eight hours a day, but just four of them. And people ask why in the summer. For us, the spirit was bring the seasons into work a little bit. Growing up, you go to school, this isn’t true everywhere in the world, but in the US at least you go to school and you have a summer break and you do something else in the summer and then you go back to school and there’s just this break in the year, it’s not as monotonous and you get into the professional world, it’s very monotonous. It’s like the same thing every day, all the time, every week, every month, and there’s no change. And so the idea was let’s bring a little bit of change for a few months a year, and I will tell you that obviously it’s a big hit here. A lot of people love it. I’m starting to wear out on it though. I’m just going to be honest about it.

Kimberly (02:00): Tell me why. Tell me why. Your employees love it.

Jason (02:03): To me, it’s one of the last vestiges of our preciousness thing we’re trying to squeeze out of the company to some degree, which is like, do we really need, we only work 40 hours a week to begin with. Do we really need this break? Are we pushing ourselves to the place where we need to relax for three months a year? Really? Again, I enjoy it, to be honest. I like the three day weekends and whatever, but there is still something about it that bothers me to some degree. It’s saying we just simply can’t work 40 hour weeks for the whole year. Really? We really can’t do that? It’s that hard? So these are the things that go in my head and I’m just sort of being honest about it at this point. Again, we’re doing it this year, we’ve committed to it, but I would say as of last year, I began to think about or question, why are we doing this? And I think it’s fair game. We question a lot of things about what we’re doing and how we’re doing them, and we should question this too. Why not? It’s not like things are off limits if they’re good. They’re good paper for some and maybe they’re not as good on paper for others. For me, I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth it. So anyway, that’s my current point of view on it.

Kimberly (03:07): David, do you feel the same?

David (03:09): Yeah. What’s interesting about the four day work week during the summer is it started as an experiment. And I remember the premise of that experiment. Do you really get less done in a four day work week versus a five day work week? That was the test we were interested in performing. And I think initially you get the sense that no, you get just as much done in four days as you do in five days, and that’s sort of the Hawthorne effect. While you are observing things, while you’re changing the mechanics, it can appear to you as though this is just a net win. We get just as much done. The only thing that gets cut out is just all the slack, which is actually a key point. What you do cut out when you go from five to four days is a degree of slack.

(03:58): And when you first see that and everything is going dandy, you go like, well, we didn’t need the slack. We can get just as much of the juice done in the same amount of time. What’s even the loss? And you don’t realize that until you need the slack. And part of the slack is just functional in terms of days spent, and this is one of the clearest examples I saw that actually there is a limit. You can argue whether on a perfect, sunny calm day you are weak, you’ll get exactly the same done with four versus five days. I’ve also become more convinced that probably not in the long run. Of course, if you have 20% less time, you’re going to get some degree less done. But what is even more pressing to me is the fact that the four day work week has zero slack.

(04:47): If you miss one day, even half a day, if you’re down to three days or three and a half days, that week sucks. That week feels blown. You couldn’t actually make the progress that’s proportionate to what a week is supposed to feel like in weight. It’s kind of, you pick something up, some object and you associate with that object, a certain weight, a certain heft, a certain mass, and if it’s too light, you go like, eh, I don’t trust this. This is not supposed to be this light. This supposed to be more mass, gravitas to the situation and three day weeks. Absolutely. They’re too light. They don’t have the mass, they don’t have the centering ability. They don’t want to have the capacity for progress that I think most people are happy with in the long run. So I think it’s worth acknowledging right upfront that the four day work week just has less slack, doesn’t have the option for you to spend half a day doing something else and then feeling like the rest of the week is weighty enough.

(05:54): And then the second thing is, of course we get less done. I mean, I think we kind of deluded ourselves into it the first few years thinking, oh, we can get exactly the same done. We’ve come to accept that no, we can’t, and therefore we change the schedule over the summer and we tackle less ambitious projects. We simply say, you know what? This seems like a five workday thing to do. We shouldn’t do this during the summer. Let’s save it until the fall. Which there’s just an acknowledgement there that no, you’re not getting the same stuff done. Now what I like to think of it, it’s a luxury. It is a luxury benefit that absolutely has a very real cost to the company. We have chosen to do it nonetheless, but I think the example you bring up with Samsung going to a six day work week for executives is really curious and interesting and actually good.

(06:50): There’s sometimes the sense of preciousness that comes in when you’re in trouble or there’s something’s not right and you’re not willing to give up the spoils to deal with the situation. I’ve seen that occasionally both at our companies and in other companies where shit’s on fire and we got to put it out the fire. What are you talking about it’s Saturday? Why does that matter? If the servers are down, the servers are down? That’s not a specific issue that we’ve had, but just the sentiment that sometimes when things are difficult or you’re uphill in a certain situation, you got to put in more. Our steady state is not more, our steady state is 40 hours a week, eight hours a day is enough. That’s a steady state, but occasionally there’s going to be a bit of ramp. Actually now I remember it, it was when we were launching HEY back in 2020. And we initially had a launch date for HEY

(07:44): That was I think spring and then whole world went kind of nuts for a while, and then we set a second launch date that was the summer. And during that summer, the world was still kind of crazy because of Covid, but then it also got crazy because of all this other social and political stuff that was going on. And we went, do you know what we’re going to launch? And there was a substantial amount of pushback. No, we can’t do that. There’s too much going on in the moment. Our brains are distraught. We’re thinking about other things. What? I mean, are we just going to stop doing things, stop releasing things, stop working because the world is difficult? I mean, that’s nonsense to me. And first of all, I also think it’s actually an antidote to feeling that the world is crazy to have something targeting your attention and your mind and putting something in your hands like, all right, I could walk around inside my own four walls rummaging about all the things that are wrong or I could get down to work and get busy

(08:45): And that is actually a way out of the mental moras you could be in. So that level of preciousness that you can’t occasionally push through something difficult or as we also had with that case, we had the, what did we call it? Code launch or something where, oh yeah, that’s actually what it was. I think it was for the launch of that we canceled summer Fridays for the month of June up to the launch. We’re like, you know what? This is a special moment launching a major new product like HEY, it’s going to take everything we’ve got. And we’ve decided we’re going to launch it in the summer, so we’re not going to do the summer Fridays. That was the first time I got this sense of, I don’t know, resentment over the entitlement. There’s a lot of push. What do you mean you can’t take that away?

(09:34): That’s a thing that I have and this is how we work and this is. What? This is, first of all, curiosity and novelty and experiment that we’ve just kept on running for 10 years and here’s a moment where we need extra. So that rubbed me the wrong way too, but I think I’m probably more on the positive side perhaps to some degree because I really do like that sense of seasoning, the change of it, but maybe you could get that in a different way. Maybe you could break up the year in other ways. This isn’t the only way to do that.

Jason (10:04): I agree with the seasonality. That’s kind of really the spirit of it for me. But the other thing is I feel like we’re entering a bit of a golden age internally of ambition to some degree in that we’ve got three more product ideas we’ve been tossing around. We’re working on one right now. There’s two more ideas that have come up that I’m particularly excited about and we’ve got a lot of work to do, and I kind of think about, well, some of the stuff are we going to be able to, for example, we could launch three products this year. We launched Campfire this year. We’re going to launch this next ONCE product soon-ish within the next couple cycles and this other product, there’s two other product ideas that we are going to explore. We could pick one of them and launch that this year too possibly. Like, we could.

(10:53): We certainly have the people to do it and we could do it, but with Summer Fridays, maybe we can’t. And again, it’s not about driving people too extreme because we don’t do that anyway. Normally, it’s not like a reprieve from extreme working conditions. So it makes me think like, well, we are here to work. That’s what our jobs are, and we basically have to put a bunch of stuff on hold in a sense because we simply just are not allowing ourselves to have the time to get it done. And it can be frustrating. But yeah, there’s pros and cons, and I do know that what is interesting is that near the end of the summer Fridays, of course there’s some people don’t want to go back to school essentially, you could say, but many people do. They’re like, I’m ready to get in there and I need more time.

(11:41): I haven’t been able to get the work done I want to do. I just can’t. Like David said, you just really don’t have as much time and there’s no slack, and then you don’t have time to explore as much because you feel like you’re wasting precious time. So people do look forward to that. So there is value in it, but I do think it does take a hit on your ambition and when you’re in an ambitious mode, because ambition in my world at least comes and goes. I’m not always coming up with ideas for things and excited to do new things, but when you are and then there’s this thing you put in front of yourself that doesn’t allow you to really do that, it’s sort of frustrating. So it’s a weird one-two punch there.

Kimberly (12:17): I mean, I agree with the seasonality of it. I know it’s something that I look forward to because it seems like just this time of year where you’re like, I get a little bit of a break, but you’re still working really hard the other four days a week. It’s just a nice little break. And I don’t know about everyone else, but for me, it’s not like I’m going on a three day weekend vacation every weekend. It’s like that Friday is a day I’m taking my car in to get serviced that I wouldn’t normally do during the week because I have things going on or don’t want to spend my Saturday doing it, which is like your one day. But anyway, tell me this. For people who are listening this four day work week, how does that affect departments that aren’t necessarily cycle based or working on programming? I think of teams like support, who are always on. How do they work through this four day work week situation?

Jason (13:04): Well, so everybody picks. You can pick a different day. So not everyone gets Friday off, someone might take Monday off, someone might take Tuesday off. We have to have coverage for our customers. Our customers, they don’t care where our policies are. They need to be serviced essentially, and we need to be available to them. So the team just works that out and they work out their own scheduling and that’s how that works. And I think on the product teams, typically most people are taking Friday off, but some people take Monday off too and they just work it out. It’s all about just let adults work it out, figure it out. In fact, some days it’s nice when if you take Wednesday off and you work Friday and no one else is around on Friday, in a sense, you feel like you can get a lot more done, in fact. So some people are very strategic about it in that way.

David (13:44): I also think that that is one of the areas that occasionally do have serious trade-offs. If you’re taking off different days, now you’re down to three days of overlap. That’s not enough. If you need someone else, if you are reliant on someone else to make progress on your stuff, it’s kind of frustrating to be working several days where that person is not available. Now, if there’s no overlap, of course, no problem, but it does have trade-offs and I think as someone, as a company who’ve been doing it for 10, 15 years, we should be very honest about it. It’s not free. And this is what annoys me sometimes about the four day week zealots. They try to precision this as a free lunch that you’re just going to get exactly the same amount done. No, you’re not. Stop saying that you are. Doesn’t mean you can’t do it doesn’t mean you can’t say, Hey, we’re going to take a 20% cut on ambition or whatever during this phase, and that’s a luxury that we choose to afford, but don’t tell everyone that it’s free.

(14:44): It’s not free. Some of the same things are true with working internationally. We have people in Europe, we have people in the us, we have people in other places. Having less overlap is also not free. Sometimes it’s good. I mean, I actually enjoy having a few hours to myself when I’m in Europe and there can be benefits to it, but it’s not free. If you have a team where designers in the US and our programmers in the EU and they perhaps are even on different coasts like a west coast with someone in Denmark, that’s not easy. And if you only get two hours of overlap, Jason and I’ve had it when I’ve been in Copenhagen, he’s been out here on the west coast. Do you know what? That’s a compromise that is not free. And just at least fucking be honest about that. Be honest about that the things that you like are not free. We don’t have to pretend that four day weeks are just as productive as the five day weeks to sell the message because if you do, people are going to learn reality, which is that it’s not the same, that there isn’t as much productivity in a four day work week as there’s in a five day one, and then they’re going to go like you’re full of shit. Don’t be full of shit.

Kimberly (15:57): Okay. I’ve also heard of companies doing an option four day work week for a pay cut meaning like 20% less salary and you work a shorter schedule. Is that something you’ve ever considered?

Jason (16:10): No, I think what’s tricky about that is that it’s hard to depend on people. Unless people are working truly independently, it’s hard to depend on them as a teammate. If some people are working less and some people are working more, it is to the point of overlap. It’s just it’s harder to plan. It’s harder to deal with that. I don’t know. It’s not something I would do or would offer here. I would say we’re all doing it or not doing it. I don’t like the idea of some people doing it. I know for some it’s a cost. For some companies it could be a cost savings. I think it’s actually quite expensive in other ways. That’d be my take at least

David (16:48): Where I like it and where I’ve seen it work in Denmark where working part-time is actually a fairly common thing. I know it’s not exactly common. I don’t even recall anyone in the US I’ve talked to who work part-time at a white collar job. But that happens all the time in Denmark. And I like it for positions where you don’t need the full position. If you have in-house counsel or an accountant or a bookkeeper, and there’s not 40 hours a week worth of work, it makes perfect sense to me. If you could hire someone part-time, I have in the past wished that we could hire half a lawyer or a quarter of a bookkeeper. Now in the US, people deal with that by just hiring external companies. But in other countries, including Denmark, they deal with it by hiring people on part-time. And it’s both a cost saving things in the sense that, you know what, if we only need half a bookkeeper, it’d be nice just to pay for half a bookkeeper, not a full bookkeeper

(17:45): you only use half the time. And it’s also nice for the individuals, for some people’s life circumstances. My mom growing up, for example, worked part-time. It was kind of nice. She’d be off at whatever at one o’clock or something, and that had very real benefits. So I think it can work in that realm. I don’t think, as Jason says, it works at all in the team realm where you have to depend on that person and that person has to be available predictably so. In fact, I’d say this is one of the reasons why hybrid work is so terrible, this idea that, well, you just need to come into the office three days a week. And then people come in on a Wednesday and the person they need to talk to is not there, and then they need to zoom from the office anyway, and everyone just goes like, ah.

(18:30): The lack of dependability is a loss and dependability and the slack, the optionality of it has a real benefit. You don’t always know when you’re inspired or have a question or want to reach out to someone. I think this is one of the main costs that’s had when Jason or I are on far different sides of the world, we kind of need to schedule in advance. All right, we’re going to have to call. And there’s this time slot and it fits in there and you can totally make that work. But there’s some serendipity that is lost in that equation. And again, you just have to be honest about the fact that that’s the price. You may be willing to pay it. Fine. Don’t tell people it’s free.

Kimberly (19:12): Well, that is fair. We will be anxious to hear how this all shakes out. REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Show notes. Just kidding. Full video episodes are on YouTube and Twitter. And if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 7 0 8 6 2 8 7 8 5 0. You can also text that number. We just might answer your question on an upcoming show.