This is somewhat like what we have at my present workplace. Friday afternoons, it is mandated that we socialize and break out beers. At corp headquarters, they play foosball. In Houston, we break out Guitar Hero.
I worked somewhere where the last 2 hours of Friday afternoon - were the weekly table tennis tournnament. Good for winding down for the week, bad if you were in the middle of solving an interesting problem..
It sounds nice in theory, but I know that in practice I'd resent it. I hate being told when it's "break time", doubly so if I know that people are going to freak out two days later because some project isn't done yet.
At the last company I worked for, they had a nice system: about every two weeks they'd find some excuse for the company to pick up the bar tab after work. A big percentage of people would go, but you didn't have to. Some people would be there right at the start, others would show up later and you could leave whenever you wanted to.
Coffee areas with couches also payed big dividends -- again, the idea was that you'd yack with your coworkers, but only when it fit in with your work schedule.
I didn't get the impression from the article that Friday was "break time". I got the feeling that it was "meeting time" and "argument time", which is a different thing altogether...it's formalizing the constant interruptions that most work environments have throughout the day into one half day at the end of each week. So, you save up your discussions for Friday. It just happens that having meetings and discussions with people you like OK is a pretty low stress way to spend an afternoon, so it makes the last day of the week an easy-going sort of thing.
But, I agree that a lot of corporate environments could not pull this off. There is a point in every companies life where the culture becomes too divided. Not everyone likes fantasy football, Mario Kart, Rock Band, Medieval themed restaurants, or volleyball, and any formal attempt to get everyone involved in any one of those things is destined to failure and poor morale.
A pretty large percentage of people, below a certain age, can agree on free beer, so the "picking up the tab" policy is a somewhat safer choice, but probably a less productive one. Do you really want people discussing business strategery after four or five cocktails over the sounds of the football game on one side and the jukebox kicking out Justin Timberlake on the other?
You've summed it up pretty well, Joe, and I agree this would need an overhaul to be scaled. The only correction I have is that enjoying Medieval themed restaurants is a prerequisite to working with us.
As far as "break time" goes, we really don't care exactly how or when you accomplish 4 days of work, but we do want 4 days of solid work to be accomplished. Some of us are night owl's and others rise at first light. Nobody's going to freak out at you unless you're really slacking.
I definitely think having a single designated "meetings day" would help just about any company. Monday morning meetings have to be the most life-sucking idea ever. While I can see value in meeting briefly with your direct team--the one or two people who are working on the same part of the codebase--at the first of the work week, a bunch of people working on a random panoply of things in a room at 8:30 Monday morning is comparable to beating productivity with a Louisville Slugger and leaving its bloody barely breathing body in a ditch down by the highway. Starting the week off that way is just asking for trouble.
Though the Wufoos are more fun than most people I've met, so they can probably make Fridays into a vacation without having to actually be free from work. I suspect not many employers have a comedy goldmine like Kevin, Ryan, and Chris around to tap into. (And, if they do, they probably think of them as a problem to be managed into submission rather than given a raise and put in charge of something.)
I think the take-away from this article isn't that you should absolutely use the 4-1/2 day workweek model at your firm; instead, I read it to say that they had experimented with several different schedules, put some serious thought into what worked and what didn't, and then implemented a solution which was tailored to their team, deployment schedule, and customer base.
If you want something which works as well in your business, don't just mindlessly clone this, or the 37signals 4-day week, or the first-stage startup 80-hour deathmarch, or any existing schedule -- work it out for your own environment.
Personally, I've been doing a lot of tweaking of my own schedule at work over the last year, and found that having at least one full day a week where work from home is a big booster to my productivity. It's an entire day where I can avoid random interruptions, and I never have that meeting in the middle of the morning that basically wastes the day through lunchtime.
We actually took the opposite approach a couple of years ago and designated a specific "no meetings" day every Tuesday for the development team (and so many people work remotely on Fridays that it's effectively a meeting-free day as well). Our team is too big and too diverse to effectively wall off much more time than that without running into major scheduling issues, but even having one day a week completely walled off from any sort of meetings has turned out to be really helpful.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 17.6 ms ] threadAt the last company I worked for, they had a nice system: about every two weeks they'd find some excuse for the company to pick up the bar tab after work. A big percentage of people would go, but you didn't have to. Some people would be there right at the start, others would show up later and you could leave whenever you wanted to.
Coffee areas with couches also payed big dividends -- again, the idea was that you'd yack with your coworkers, but only when it fit in with your work schedule.
But, I agree that a lot of corporate environments could not pull this off. There is a point in every companies life where the culture becomes too divided. Not everyone likes fantasy football, Mario Kart, Rock Band, Medieval themed restaurants, or volleyball, and any formal attempt to get everyone involved in any one of those things is destined to failure and poor morale.
A pretty large percentage of people, below a certain age, can agree on free beer, so the "picking up the tab" policy is a somewhat safer choice, but probably a less productive one. Do you really want people discussing business strategery after four or five cocktails over the sounds of the football game on one side and the jukebox kicking out Justin Timberlake on the other?
As far as "break time" goes, we really don't care exactly how or when you accomplish 4 days of work, but we do want 4 days of solid work to be accomplished. Some of us are night owl's and others rise at first light. Nobody's going to freak out at you unless you're really slacking.
Though the Wufoos are more fun than most people I've met, so they can probably make Fridays into a vacation without having to actually be free from work. I suspect not many employers have a comedy goldmine like Kevin, Ryan, and Chris around to tap into. (And, if they do, they probably think of them as a problem to be managed into submission rather than given a raise and put in charge of something.)
If you want something which works as well in your business, don't just mindlessly clone this, or the 37signals 4-day week, or the first-stage startup 80-hour deathmarch, or any existing schedule -- work it out for your own environment.
Personally, I've been doing a lot of tweaking of my own schedule at work over the last year, and found that having at least one full day a week where work from home is a big booster to my productivity. It's an entire day where I can avoid random interruptions, and I never have that meeting in the middle of the morning that basically wastes the day through lunchtime.