Three days a week, Annie spends two hours commuting to her public relations job outside Denver.
So on Fridays without telling her coworkers Annie typically doesn’t work.
(She asked that I change her name for this story for fear of retribution from her employer.)
What was once the final push to the weekend is becoming a sneaky personal day for some remote workers.
Some companies are instituting policies to ban meetings from being scheduled on Fridays and discourage sending emails.
Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced legislation last year calling toshorten the workweekto 32 hours.
Workers are revolting against unpopularRTO mandates.
Office attendance may be creeping back up, butFriday remains the least popular dayto commute, by far.
Some people may be out and about more on Fridays because their companies encourage them to log off.
Buffer, a social media management software company, moved to a four-day workweek in 2020.
Stok, a sustainability consulting company, started offering “quiet Fridays” every other week in 2020.
But flexible gigs are getting harder to come by.
“A Friday-morning Costco run is magical,” Jenna tells me.
The trust gap between bosses and workers is widening.
But employers can build trust by better communicating their expectations and shifting to more flexible arrangements, Hansen says.
Of course, no-work Fridays are a privilege reserved for white-collar remote or hybrid workers.
The more room they have to slack off, the greater a divide we might see inwork-life balanceacross industries.
I, taking advantage of my then-employer’s summer Fridays, left my laptop at home.
It took some teamwork, but where there’s a will to work less, there’s a way.
Amanda Hooveris a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry.
She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.
