It's getting to that time of the year when many companies institute a "summer hours" policy, encouraging their staff to enjoy the weather and longer days. Summer hours are typically great for overall morale and can be useful in retaining and attracting talent.
We've had a "summer hours" program at Dynamo for sometime. It started off as a typical "start a bit earlier each day in exchange for leaving at noon on Friday" kind of arrangement. That system worked pretty well for us for a few years, but we thought we could do better. We were particularly inspired by a post describing a 4 day work week by the team at 37Signals and we thought we'd give that a try. About 2 years ago, we changed our summer hours program so that everyone on our team has every other Friday off. That system allows each member of the Dynamo team to have two 3-day weekends per month and it also means we always have a half team around on Friday for customer service/support and to handle any emergency requests that might pop up.
Has it worked for us? You bet! We've found that just about the same amount of work is possible to achieve when it's your turn for a 4-day week. Most importantly though, as creatives, the extra day off every other week allows us to come in to the studio each week fresh, inspired and ready to go. In fact, the idea has worked so well for us we made "summer hours" a year-round part of the culture here at Dynamo.
What kind of summer hours program are you looking forward to this summer?
Bryan Mahoney
- Bryan is Dynamo's Director of Technology, continually breaking new ground evaluating, developing and guiding our sites and webapps, & a pillar in Dynamo's client service front. Co-author of 2 early books on the integration of ColdFusion and Flash, he is an expert in database driven content management and design. Bryan now principally rides Ruby on Rails.
