The journey from 6-days a week to 40 hours a week environment!

Is this 5-days a week company? Do you have 5 days a week enviornment? Does this company provide 5-days a week work?

I and my organization (Ikigai) have been rejected by tons of candidates just because of these questions.

Many times candidates have asked me this question before asking me about a company or job profile. 🤦‍♀

Today, everyone is looking forward to work only 5-days a week. Especially in the tech domain. If the organization has a 6-days work week, candidates would not like to proceed further even with an intro call.

We had 6-days a week work environment back in 2017. Then we made it 5.5 alternate Saturday’s off in 2018.

Though it was alternate Saturdays off, we were facing so many rejections from the candidates’ just because we didn’t have 5-days a week model.

From 2018–2020, We didn’t make any changes in the work policy specifically the working days. The reason being, I was not able to convince my self and the founding team. We were ok making the changes but we didn’t want to make those changes without knowing in & out of it. We didn’t want to be another sheep following the herd blindly and then falling into the trap.

We waited for 2 years to find out what exactly is the need. What’s lying in the core?

Few things which restricted us to go for a 5-days a week policy

• Half of our team members loved to be in the office even on Saturdays. Most of us were habituated to work 6 days a week and we were happy with that.
• We were not so productive, we were a growing team back then. We needed to put extra effort to make our product succeed. 5 days were not enough with the skill set we had as a team. Even me, I needed to push harder on my initial days to cope with the learning in an HR domain.
• Being present in the office and getting results both have no co-relation. We always had a culture not to micromanage. Earlier with alternate Saturdays working model — Saturdays were reserved for HR activities, Learning sessions, Individual personal learnings. Which forced us to inculcate the new skills every alternate weekend. And that helped us sharpen the axe. Which we didn’t want to forgo the forced learnings.

Meanwhile, in 2018–2019 we were getting shaped to a mature organization. We were optimizing our operations, policies, product, office space, people, and many more things parallel.

Reframing the Policies (Work Days 👉 Work Hours)

Last year after Diwali 2019, we started pondering upon the workday policy again. We started from scratch.

We took below pointers into consideration:

• Why enforce a leave on Saturday? What if a team member wants to take a leave on Friday because s/he wants to attend the parents meeting at the school or guest coming home or doctor's appointment. It can be any logical genuine reason. And then work on Saturday? We at Ikigai believe in keeping things async. It’s absolutely ok if someone is working on Saturday or Tuesday or any day it doesn't make any difference.
• Results are not directly correlated with time invested most of the time. At Ikigai, being a product only company. We expect our teammates to work with a fresh and peaceful mind. We never wanted our team members to take much of the pain considering the time spent in the office. Results matters a lot more than the time spent.
• We knew that all team members are different. Some will exploit the policies negatively. For some of the core team members, we felt that they do not need any policy they are on and above those things.
• For Sales & Support team scenarios were different. They need to be available on the time allocated. Flexibility is not possible over here.

Here’s what we finally rolled out 👉HR Guidelines 2020

Earlier we called it policies that we renamed it to Guidelines now. Considering that team members and overall organization is now more mature that we do not need to be strapped by policies.

These guidelines give the freedom to every team member to choose the days he works, choose when to take leave, and no. of days s/he works in a week or month.

After all, every team members have a unique set of lifestyles, responsibilities, tasks, and way of working. Hence we decided not to fix the time to come and leave the office.

Ikigai’s office remains open from Monday to Saturday — 8 AM to 11 PM. One can work on any day, anytime between that.

The team members have to be worried only about their committed goals. And to achieve those we believe anybody has to at least contribute 40 hours in a workweek and not less than that as per current demand from the product**.**

That’s obviously not something new in the world! But yes that’s something rare over here in India and at least in Ahmedabad, India?

Team Ikigai loved this change. The team is now able to focus more on their goals. These changes have helped them to maintain a good work-life balance.

This is us at Ikigai!

Team Ikigai in Black

Do share your thoughts on it in the comment below.

P.S.

1. Don’t miss giving claps 👏 if you liked it!
2. I am in the hunt for a Tech lead and Sr. Ui/Ux designer, we are working on an interesting project. I am sure anyone would love to work on it. Check it out the openings over here 👉https://www.saleshandy.com/careers/#currentopenings

Wondering? how things are manageable with such flexibility? For that, we follow due dates! I have mentioned it in my previous article over here:These 6 ways will help you to make the remote working fruitful!