Kapok AMER: 4-day workweek trial
Request for comments
Need
4-day workweeks have come up in various meetings of mine since I started at GitLab. Let's find out how they could work in Support.
Approach
Support Global Groups (SGGs) allow for more easily conducting small-scale trials, which is among the reasons we switched to them. AMER members of the Kapok SGG have discussed (in Slack) trialing this. Many were interested in participating (the trial is planned to include all of Kapok AMER), and no objections to the trial were raised (including no objections from our direct managers, @abuerer and @mdunninger).
We would coordinate to have a spread of days off (as opposed to having everyone off on Monday or Friday), so that we can keep 5-day coverage on tickets (including NRT assigned to those who are off on any given day). Some within Kapok don't mind having mid-week days off, so this should be fine. To clarify: each Support Engineer in Kapok would have a single, fixed (for the most part, we can swap as needed) day off during the usual 5-day work week, and those single days will be from Monday to Friday.
There is much to clarify regarding how this will work. Throughout the trial, we will have to iterate on our process to make sure that we properly handle FRT and NRT. For on-call shifts, we can treat those the same as weekends: if you are on-call and are paged, you respond to it even if that day is a weekday you have off. For account escalations, high priority tickets, or other sensitive cases, we will choose a buddy that possesses the appropriate skills and availability to help, and keep track of things in pinned Slack messages in our SGG channel. There may be complications regarding communicating availability (internally and externally). The simple, short term solution will be using Slack statuses on our extra day off to indicate availability.
My initial thought was to switch to having 10-hour days, as I perceived this as a smaller change. However, from our discussions in Slack, I think it makes sense to trial 8-hour days, and see how that works for us. This seems to have more support and excitement, and has the potential for greater benefit (but perhaps more challenges).
This will be a success if, while trialing this, we feel that we have good processes in place and ticket performance within Kapok has not meaningfully dropped. We plan to conduct the trial for 2 months, which will allow us to iterate and gather data.
Benefit
Trialing a 4-day workweek in Kapok AMER allows us to iterate on the process and see how things go. If it works out for us, we would then become a model for other SGGs to follow. We will have experience (and documentation) on what works and what doesn't.
A 4-day workweek may lead to increased productivity, higher happiness/lower stress levels, reduced burnout, and make working in (or staying in) GitLab Support more attractive.
Going to a 4-day workweek with 8-hour days aligns with our Results value, especially the measure results, not hours sub-value.
Competition / Alternatives
Some may have concerns that working fewer days/hours will not allow us to meet our obligations to our customers. If we don't find ways to address this, we may need to try 10-hour days or revert to 5-day workweeks. Counterpoint: studies show that 4-day work weeks with 8-hour days and the same pay often results in increased productivity, presumably because of workers feeling less stressed, more happy, better rested, etc. This trial aims to find solutions that has all of the benefits without hurting performance. A couple interesting resources on increased productivity with 4-day workweeks:
Some might find it unfair that they don't always get the desirable contiguous 3-day weekend. Perhaps there is an alternative where days rotate. We can consider this if problems arise, but this doesn't seem to be too big of a concern within Kapok AMER right now.
In general, there is risk involved in this trial. I am confident that with good communication and awareness of the situation, we can iterate and find out whether 4-day workweeks (with 80% working time compared to before) will work for GitLab Support.
TLDR
Kapok AMER plans to trial a 4-day workweek with 8-hour days, and iterate on that to see if this can work well within Support (no decrease in productivity).