Flexible work is ‘here to stay’

Tech workers can demand more flexibility than ever, and companies are taking note. Since the new year, both Bolt and Panasonic have joined the short but growing list of tech companies offering a four-day workweek. Coinbase announced Monday that it will shut down for four separate weeks per year to give employees a break, and Robinhood revealed yesterday that it’s now a remote-first company.

These moves toward condensing workweeks, coordinating time away from the (home) office and allowing for work-from-anywhere all point to one thing: the talent wars. As people are able to move about more freely for a job, companies are offering various benefits to entice employees to stay.

Companies are offering three-day weekends, but every weekend. Bolt committed to the four-day workweek after a three-month trial last fall proved a success. 94% of employees and 91% of managers supported making the schedule permanent.

• Many tech companies have designated one day a week when they don’t have meetings. Bolt is aiming to go further, according to founder and CEO Ryan Breslow. “We’re turning Fridays into something more like Saturdays or Sundays,” Breslow said in a blog post.
• The schedule demands that employees get their work done by Thursday, which likely means working 10-hour days rather than cutting back to a 32-hour work week, Bolt Chief People Officer Jennifer Christie told my colleague Amber Burton.
• Panasonic also introduced an optional four-day workweek, the company told investors Friday. Other companies that have embraced this schedule include Canadian video game developer Eidos-Montréal and the software maker Wildbit.

Companywide shutdowns are another pandemic-era trend reflected in Coinbase’s announcement. LinkedIn, Twitch and Hootsuite are among the companies that have also tried this.

• Similar to the four-day workweek, shutting the whole company down synchronizes time off work — and therefore lets employees really relax without worrying about the pile of emails and Slack messages waiting for them upon return.
• The catch: Coinbase will encourage employees to limit their flexible time off to those four “recharge weeks.” There’s still some wiggle room, according to a blog post in which Chief People Officer L.J. Brock said, “We know that’s not always possible, and that’s OK.”
• Essentially, Coinbase is scheduling employees’ vacations for them in order to get them to step away from jobs where, as Brock said, “many days and weeks are long.”

There’s a growing list of remote-first companies, including Robinhood, Dropbox, Twitter and, yes, Coinbase.

• Robinhood isn’t going fully remote: All employees will still have access to its offices, and some teams will still have to live near the office for “regulatory and business reasons,” according to a company blog post.
• Most, however, can live and work from anywhere. Employees asked for this flexibility, according to Robinhood.
• Many tech companies are rethinking how much they even need offices as remote work remains popular. Autodesk is closing its new, 117,000-square-foot San Francisco office eight months after opening it because 55% of its employees would rather work remotely, the San Francisco Business Times reported Tuesday.

And it doesn’t seem like this trend will die down anytime soon. One in four U.S. workers who quit their jobs during the pandemic did so in order to be able to work from anywhere, according to a Conference Board survey from last month. Workers are more likely to leave over flexibility than they are for more pay or a better job title, hiring managers and HR professionals told Fiverr and Hibob in another December survey.

“Employees absolutely have their say in terms of what they’re looking for,” said Steve Black, the co-founder and chief strategy officer of the HR software maker Topia. “This world of flexible working is here to stay.”

— Allison Levitsky (email | twitter)

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