It’s another sunny summer Friday afternoon, and at 2:30 the Beltway is jammed, the Bay Bridge is backed up and the grass at Farragut Square downtown is crammed with office workers enjoying a very long lunch.
What no one seems to be doing is actually working on a workday.
From government employees who stretch their flextime into three-day weekends to private-sector businesses that adopt summer hours because they realize nothing is getting done on Friday afternoons anyway, a growing number of Washington area residents are enjoying a workweek that ends on Thursday evening or midday Friday.
The shift has occurred despite the dreary economy and in the face of widespread anxiety about job security, according to economists and academics who study labor trends.
In an informal survey of personnel directors at Fortune 1000 companies conducted for The Washington Post by the Corporate Executive Board in Rosslyn, nearly half said their business has instituted a compressed workweek during the summer or is considering doing so, often by allowing workers to put in longer hours Monday through Thursday in exchange for taking off all or part of Friday.
“We see companies moving in the direction of giving employees flexibility over when they work,” said Brian Kropp, managing director of the board’s Corporate Leadership Council, which advises businesses on management and strategy. “Taking every other Friday off is much more effective than ice cream socials or company picnics. The gift of time is the most precious gift you can give an employee, and it pays off in employee engagement.”
At SpeakerBox Communications, a public relations firm in Tysons Corner, chief executive Elizabeth Shea created a summer-hours option seven years ago, allowing employees to work an extra half-hour Monday through Thursday in exchange for ending their workweek midday Friday every other week all summer.
“The extra half-hour doesn’t feel painful, especially in the recession, when people felt the need to work extra hard,” Shea said, “and this helped them feel rewarded for that extra work.”
As a service company, SpeakerBox has to remain available to customers, “but in the summer, there’s less likelihood that our clients are going to need us to accommodate them on a Friday afternoon,” Shea said.
The National Geographic Society’s downtown offices are closed alternate Fridays all summer. The organization’s “Green Fridays” program, launched in 2008, was intended to save energy, but workers, who add one hour a day to their schedule the rest of the week during the summer, say the policy has also been a morale boost at the nonprofit organization that has resorted to layoffs because of declining membership.
The idea of an early quit is top of mind for many office workers who head to Farragut Square for the weekly Farragut Friday gathering of many of Washington’s food trucks. As the trucks line the square, some workers have already finished their job for the week while others are stretching their lunch hour, hoping to slip back into the office and then right out again.
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