At SuperHi, we like to try out new things in the hopes that it makes our staff happier, healthier, and more productive. Inspired by companies like Buffer and government trials, we trailed for two months until the end of September 2021. We found this is successful in its objective, so we rolled out a longer trial.
Our staff work Mondays to Thursdays and are expected to be online, in meetings, and available to answer questions.
On Fridays, there are no meetings, sending or replying to Slack messages or DMs is discouraged and there is no commitment to being available. Some people use Fridays to catch up on work in a more flexible way, others take the day completely off.
We discourage any peer pressure from either more senior or junior staff to be available to work – we will be doing regular check-ins with staff to make sure this benefit isn't one-sided (e.g. we don't want junior staff members to be working while senior members are away, and vice versa).
There will be no changes to salaries at all, and the amount of time worked per week doesn't affect any changes to salary calculations.
We don't think that hours worked are not necessarily correlated with productivity.
No, we are hoping that this change will make staff more productive with their time. We think this will encourage less unneeded meetings and famously "work expands to fill time" so we hope that this means the same output in a short amount of time.
Hopefully not! Even if there is work that staff feels like they're behind on, the way we project manage SuperHi at the moment is in two-week sprints which means there are always at least two opportunities to take a Friday off. However, we don't want any staff member to be in a position where they are spending every Friday catching up on work.
If we are finding some staff members struggling to complete work, we will work with them to reorganize their priorities.