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US companies first started letting staff leave the office a few hours early on the Friday afternoons between Memorial day and Labor Day in the 1960s, reportedly so that New York City executives could beat the traffic to the Hamptons.
While so-called summer Fridays have become a more rare and coveted perk in recent years, an increasing number of workers have started giving themselves a shortened last day of the week — often worked from home — all year round.
“Log into Teams, check email, then live my life” was how one analyst at a Wall Street firm — who asked that their name be withheld because they feared retribution from their employer — described their Friday schedule. “We just carry our work phones around in case something comes up.”
Corporate America’s working rhythms have been evolving since the start of the pandemic. In late 2020, as employers started pushing for a return to the office, some insisted on workers showing up in-person on Fridays to avoid a slide into effective three-day weekends, said Nick Bloom, a Stanford economics professor who studies workplace data.
But as a labour shortage shifted the balance of power towards workers, some employees have been able to negotiate working from home on Fridays in particular, and increasingly giving themselves more flexible working hours on that day.
“Friday is just a dead day,” Bloom said.
Last week, office buildings in 10 US cities averaged 55.9 per cent of their pre-pandemic occupancy on Tuesday, compared with 31.3 per cent on Friday, according to an analysis of office building access card data by security system provider Kastle Systems. In New York, Friday attendance was 20.5 per cent.
More than a dozen workers across corporate New York told the Financial Times that what began as “no-meeting Fridays” — or “no-camera Fridays” intended to reduce fatigue from video calls — has in effect slowly devolved into taking the day off.
As more companies embrace a hybrid model, workers said the concentration of office work around the middle of the week meant that most crucial tasks and meetings are arranged for Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
That schedule left few pressing matters for Fridays, workers said, allowing them to fill their final afternoon of the week with errands, workout classes and family activities, or leaving early for weekend trips.
One New York-based Google employee said that while they technically work on Fridays, they are always “super quiet”, with few meetings, incoming emails, or tasks that cannot wait until Monday.
The employee’s manager usually will only schedule meetings for emergencies, the person said, and any work they do is completed from their phone.
Executives at the tech giant do not endorse this practice, however, and quietly started telling employees to start filling their calendars — even as they internally referred to the day as “Focus Fridays”. It currently requires employees to work from the office three days a week. Google declined to comment.
The demise of Fridays has been forecast for decades. Richard Nixon told The New York Times in 1956 that Americans would only work four days a week in the “not too distant future” in order to experience “fuller family life”. Yet most employers operate on the 40-hour work week that was first mandated by the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.
The pandemic rekindled interest in the question of whether companies should shift to a four-day work week. Last year, in a pilot programme, 61 British companies reduced their working hours by 20 per cent for six months last year.
Most participants gave their staff Friday off, while others allowed employees to decide which eight hours to cut. Researchers said fewer employees at participating companies quit, while revenue rose by a third on average compared with the same period in 2021.
At the end of the programme, nine of 10 participants said they would prefer to stick to the new schedule.
Four-day work week test programmes in Iceland and New Zealand found similar success. A handful of US companies, including crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, payment platform Bolt Financial and online thrift store ThredUp have also started giving their employees Monday or Friday off.
In a blog post on the company’s website, Kickstarter’s director of business operations Wolf Owczarek wrote that its Monday to Thursday schedule helped staff “live brighter, fuller lives” in addition to increasing their productivity.
Despite these promising results, the four-day week is yet to be widely adopted by employers. However, the Google employee said they doubted that work would ever be busy at the end of the week again.
“If it were me, I would just close the office down on Fridays,” said Stanford’s Bloom.
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