August just wrapped up a pretty successful summer helping clients reach their better teaming goals. And we did it on 4-day work weeks.

How, you ask? Experimentation, prioritization, and intentionality.

Our journey with shorter work weeks began in 2022, when August held our first Summer Fridays experiment. You can read my colleague Max Sather’s great posts about the initial intention and the retrospective reflection.

TLDR, three major lessons emerged:

1. Revenue & sales increased across the board
2. Personal Development took the hit as we figured out how to reallocate our hours
3. We REALLY like each other. Less time together impacted our sense of community 

Four years later, the lessons remain mostly the same, but we’ve gotten more intentional about creating systems to help us thrive.

Logistically, our Summer Fridays succeed because of relentless prioritization and a commitment to the Even Over: “Client work even over internal work.”

We reduce internal meeting time, cancel non-essential internal meeting cadences on internal initiatives, suspend personal development time, and prioritize our clients as the core of our business.

When hours get reduced, the extra work doesn’t disappear. It needs to be thoughtfully restructured to ensure that folks don’t burn out trying to fit 8 hours of effort into a tighter timeline.

Does this mean we end up deprioritizing things we value? Absolutely. Personal development is central to our work, but we’re able to suspend it in the short-term because we know regular internal priorities will resume in the fall.

This year, one big change we made was to build in regular moments for pure Pal connection. Not meeting time, not work time, but joyful time together where we focus solely on community.

This prioritization of joy is something I’ve thought a lot about over the past several months.

To me, Summer Fridays are incredibly joyful. Having free time to get out of “obligor” mode (where what drives you is owing somebody something) and reconnecting with my own desires of what I want and need to do gave me a unique motivation that I’ve felt multiply in the office.

While work should absolutely be joyful, it doesn’t have to be the source of joy. Life should also be your source of joy. Summer Fridays allow for more of it.

But as much as I love the freedom of the 4-day work week, I also genuinely enjoy the return to a more spacious 5 days.

We talk a lot about working rhythms at August, and there’s something really satisfying about tightening our work during the summer and releasing back into a more expansive cadence for the rest of the year. We get to reprioritize a whole set of things we love to do, and approach these goals with more energy, more inspiration, and more joy.

I’m sure that next summer we’ll try out a few more shifts to our Summer Fridays policy. As Max says, that’s the great thing about transformation. It’s always in flux, and there are always more experiments to try!

If your org has a Summer Fridays policy, I’d love to hear about how it has impacted your work. Do you notice a natural shift in priorities? Are there guidelines in place to help you succeed? Hit reply and let me know.

Karina Mangu-Ward

Partner, August Public