Shorter by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Author:Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Company Profile

APV and the Perils of Losing Office Friendships

Losing the sense of sociability and camaraderie in the office made Hong Kong video production company APV abandon its four-day workweek after four months in 2018. Founder Mark Erder had read about the four-day week at Perpetual Guardian, and “I just sprung it on everybody at a Monday morning meeting,” he says. “I decided that if we did talk about it, we’d talk to death, and I wanted to make it work.” Video production is the kind of business that attracts highly creative people and keeps the ones who learn to be highly collaborative and work together under tough deadlines and pressures, so he was confident that his team would take it seriously.

The company decided that everyone would still attend the traditional Monday morning meeting, but people could choose which day they’d take off. Closing the whole office for one day would be too disruptive for clients, every week’s time demands were different, and people needed to be available for shoots, client pitches, and production meetings. “One of the only rules we had was, on your day off, you’re not taking half the day, you’re not working from home,” Mark says. “You’re spending time with your family, or giving back to your community, or working for a charity, or doing something else that you really enjoy doing that is of great value to you. I wanted people to take a full day, to really focus on not being at work. And in that time, if you’re doing something that’s creative, ideas do come to you. They can then be applied to your work.”

After four months, the financial side, client satisfaction, and quality of work were all fine. But, Mark tells me, “because we’re a small company, when a couple of people were off for their four-day week, somebody was on holiday, somebody else was out sick, and crews were out shooting,” the office could be a ghost town. “That didn’t just happen one day a week; that could have happened a few days a week. It damaged a sense of sociability, conviviality, collaboration, joy over being at work—all those things that make working here fun. Everybody liked the idea of having one day off, they liked it when they were away. But they didn’t like it so much when they were here and other people were away.” As a result, at the end of the trial, they decided to go back to a five-day week.

When I ask what Mark would advise other companies do to avoid the pitfalls that brought down APV’s four-day week, he answers, “I would say, ‘Choose a day,’ rather than make it scattershot as we did. Choose a Friday or Monday and have everyone take a three-day weekend.” He thinks that they might try a four-day week again one day, because Mark still believes that reorganizing the workweek to give his employees more time off is worthwhile. “Especially if you’re in a creative business, you have to take that day off,” he says.

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