Alexandra Samuel
speaker
163 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2021
last heard Sep 2023
Alexandra Samuel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Fridays are a work day if you need the time, if you need that focused, uninterrupted window to get your work done.
But if you're somebody who would rather work late on Thursdays, work harder on the other days of the week, maybe Friday is more of a flex day.
The shift to hybrid really threw Friday into a question mark in a lot of ways.
First of all, all of the rituals we had that made Friday special, things like being able to go home a little early, being able to dress casually, they didn't mean a whole lot once we were already at home and once most of us were living in sweatpants.
And part of what happened was Friday stopped being special.
And then, of course, the other thing that happened was that the weekday and the weekend started to bleed together.
And one of the big pain points people had in the transition to remote work was finding ways to punctuate their workday, punctuate their workweek, and to set boundaries so that they still had time for their personal or family lives.
There are a lot of operations we depend on running seven days a week, even 24-7.
But there is a difference between what we expect as office hours and what we expect as retail hours, emergency service hours.
And I think what's really changed since we returned to the office is that it's no longer clear whether office hours run until 5 p.m.
on Friday because in an awful lot of businesses, Fridays have become a ghost town day because so many people prefer to work from home on Fridays.
Part of that has to do with the ambiguity that continues around hybrid work.
And one of the places that it's hardest to get people back in the office is on Fridays.
It's pretty clear that in organizations that are running on a two or three day a week office schedule, Fridays and Mondays, to a lesser extent, are the days that most people want to work from home.
And so that means that in a lot of organizations, even if notionally you have a five day a week office,
You can't really expect to find anybody there if you come in on a Friday.
And yet there is a sense that maybe you're still expected to be answering your email, taking phone calls and scheduling meetings.
It's just kind of hazy.
One is part of a larger challenge I think we're seeing in organizations now when it comes to the ever-widening gulf between people who are in jobs that can be done remotely and people who are in jobs that are intrinsically onsite.
We have this conversation like the whole world of work has changed, and it certainly has, but it's changed for maybe half of the workforce.
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