Why an Office Friday Just Isn’t the Vibe Anymore
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Here's your money briefing for Friday, September 22nd. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Before the pandemic, Friday at work had a certain energy, a certain je ne sais quoi. Casual Friday was a thing. Some co-workers planned group lunches. And some were able to wrap up their work mid-afternoon and get a head start on the weekend. Fast forward, and when Friday arrives now, some people aren't sure what Friday even means anymore.
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.
We'll talk to WSJ contributor Alexandra Samuel after the break.
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Nearly everyone looks forward to Friday. But is Friday a workday, a part of the weekend, or something in between? Companies and workers can't come to an agreement. Wall Street Journal contributor Alexandra Samuel joins me.
How did COVID-19 blur the meaning of Friday at work?
So, Alexandra, there's always been a certain informality to Friday. The acronym TGIF has been in our vocabulary for decades. But how did COVID change how we view Friday?
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.
But no matter how you look at Friday, to be sure, there are jobs where Friday's role in the workweek has never been in question, right?
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.
Since the lockdown days of the pandemic, companies have gone through great pains to draw up hybrid work schedules for employees. Why is Friday still a day that people can't quite define?
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.
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