Illustration by Fabio Consoli

Illustration by Fabio Consoli

The co-CEOs noticed it right away: Early in the pandemic, staffers at the online children’s clothing company Primary.com were struggling when they logged back into Zoom on Mondays. People were not recharging over the weekend, like a cell phone connected to a power cord that’s not plugged into a socket.

“We were all feeling it,” says Christina Carbonell (MBA 2000). She and Galyn Bernard (MBA 2006), both founders and CEOs, were concerned for the team’s mental health and their ability to keep momentum going. So in May 2020, the leaders decided to take a chance on the four-day workweek.

Carbonell and Bernard were very clear that this was an experiment, and they reserved the right to walk it back at any time if it wasn’t working. A few months into the trial, they sent out an internal survey to better understand how the company’s 60 employees felt about the program and how they were using it. “We’ve never seen our employees answer a survey so fast. Usually it takes some follow-up, but we had results within 15 minutes,” observes Carbonell. On a scale of 1 to 10, the four-day workweek scored a resounding 9.7.

Almost three years later, the program is a keeper. “To this day we’re setting ambitious goals, and everyone is working hard to achieve those goals, with tremendous focus,” Carbonell notes. “As long as we can do that, we think the four-day week gives people the flexibility they need to live great lives, both professionally and personally. So why wouldn’t we continue doing it?”

Primary.com’s policy says that employees are free to use their Fridays however they wish. Get a haircut, take the kids to the orthodontist or watch TV while they’re at school, or possibly finish up a work task. “It’s all fair game,” Bernard says. The company also added a few guardrails to put structure around the policy, such as defining company meeting hours as 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday, with an hour of meeting-free time for lunch. When there’s no choice but to schedule something for a Friday, “it’s understood by everyone that the team’s prior personal commitments still take precedence on that day,” Bernard clarifies. For those employees whose work often requires a Friday presence, as in customer care teams, they work with their managers to take another day of their choosing.

As the teams felt their way through the transition, employees came back with questions such as, Does this mean we work 32 hours now? “We didn’t build the company with the idea that this was a 40-hour expectation. From the beginning, we wanted this to be a place where we set goals that are ambitious but reasonable for us to accomplish together,” Carbonell says. So it doesn’t mean 40 hours, and it doesn’t mean 32. It means that there are no expectations that people will work on Fridays unless they want to. The goal is to offer people the flexibility and choice as to how they spend their time.

A policy like this doesn’t get far without trust, Bernard emphasizes. She and Carbonell had worked together previously at Diapers.com, where the prevailing culture was one in which team members thought like owners. It’s one of the values that the cofounders wanted to bring with them as they built their own brand. “We look to hire people who have that sense of ownership and can exercise good judgment, as if it were their own company, and I think that gave us confidence out of the gate with this,” Bernard reflects.

The research backs them up. “Our studies show that people who work flexibly feel a stronger sense of connection to their manager and their colleagues, because when you feel trusted to do your job, you feel more connected,” says Sheela Subramanian (MBA 2011). She coauthored the book, How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives, with Brian Elliott (MBA 1993) and Helen Kupp (MBA 2015)—all colleagues at Future Forum, a consortium backed by Slack. Although many executives feel an urgency to get people back into the office full-time to rekindle a sense of connection, Subramanian says the evidence suggests otherwise.

On the flip side of the same coin, a Gartner survey of 4,500 knowledge workers found that return-to-office mandates—like Elon Musk’s decision after taking the reins at Twitter—can sharply reduce peoples’ sense of connectedness. Among employees who lacked flexibility in the Gartner survey, 18 percent reported feeling connected, compared to 53 percent of those who enjoyed considerable autonomy over their location and schedules. It matters, the study suggests, because people who are more connected are 36 percent more likely to stay in their job and 37 percent more likely to perform at a higher level.

As leaders consider flexibility as a tool for retaining and engaging employees, Subramanian says there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. “It’s critical to think through the culture that you’re building, your approach to meetings and asynchronous work, and how leaders are going to set the behavioral tone from the top. This is an opportunity to shift the conversation from command and control to trust and transparency,” she says. And it’s about more than just a hybrid schedule: People want flexibility in where and when they work.

Meanwhile, Bernard and Carbonell continue to set the Friday vibe at Primary.com. Asked to look back at their calendars for the previous Friday, Bernard says she did a quick PR interview in the morning, then spent the rest of the day getting some exercise and catching up on Only Murders in the Building. For her part, Carbonell took a Pilates class and did some grocery shopping. (“Not having to go to Trader Joe’s on a weekend is huge.”) Then she finished a book.

Doing less on Fridays has revealed two additional findings for the company: First, stepping away from the routine has a way of forcing a new perspective and opening up a space for fresh thinking. Bernard says her best big ideas don’t come to her during back-to-back meetings. They bubble up when she’s walking or completely disconnected from work. The second has to do with the notion of leisure: “It sounds like such a luxury and something we shouldn’t permit ourselves to have, but we’re seeing how leisure contributes to our success,” Carbonell says. Primary.com employees report that they’re using the time to devote themselves to hobbies, mastering other skills, and finding time for the things that bring them joy in life, and it’s paying dividends well into the workweek. “We’ve adapted to a place that transcends the pandemic experience around how we work,” Carbonell says.

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