Are Fridays dead?

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘Are Fridays dead?’

Worker 1
When I go out with my colleagues, I go out on Thursday. Friday, I do work from home. Monday, also work from home.

Worker 2
So Tuesday to Thursday, generally when I go in.

Worker 3
Sometimes on Friday, but depends if I’m hungover or not.

Worker 4
Monday, Friday, something’s gone badly wrong in my workload to end up back in the office on those days.

Worker 5
Central London on a Friday, it’s like a ghost town compared to Thursday evening.

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

What you’ve just heard is the happy sound of City workers celebrating the end of a week in the office. But it wasn’t recorded on a Friday. It was recorded on a Thursday. Friday has become the day to work from home for office workers across the world. Thursday seems an increasingly popular choice for after-work socialising. Are people at home actually working at all on Fridays or have we quietly moved into a four-day week by stealth? And if Fridays have slipped away, are Mondays next? To find out, I spoke to Nick Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford university, who’s been doing research on working from home for a long time. Nick does a brilliant job of explaining why workers have been shunning the office on Fridays and why that won’t change anytime soon. We’ll hear more from him later in the show.

But first, here’s the FT’s Pilita Clark. I started our conversation by asking a fairly direct question. Pilita, welcome back to Working It. It’s been a while.

Pilita Clark
Hi, Isabel. Very nice to see you.

Isabel Berwick
So, are Fridays dead?

Pilita Clark
I’m afraid that when it comes to working in the office, it’s, I would say, not quite dead, but definitely looking extremely dodgy and possibly on life support. I cycle into the office a lot, and I distinctly remember that on Fridays I would go out of my way to avoid a certain pub on my way in called the Red Lion, not because it’s a bad pub, just because it would be so busy that I’d have to get off and push my bike through the crowds. That doesn’t happen on Fridays anymore. But I did notice not that long ago that it was certainly starting to happen on Thursdays, and I rang them up and spoke to a manager and said, what are you doing, how are you dealing with this? And she told me that actually, they have to put on substantially more people on Thursdays now and substantially fewer on Fridays compared to what they used to just to deal with this shift in traffic.

Isabel Berwick
So that’s the kind of being present in a workplace aspect of the end of Fridays. But are people even working on Fridays? You know, you’re at home. The idea of what we might call Summer Fridays predated the pandemic for some sectors, which I think was finishing at lunchtime. It was quite prevalent in the creative industries, I think. Do you think that’s been formalised or do you think people are just not doing very much on Fridays before the pandemic?

Pilita Clark
If you wanted to speak to somebody on a Friday, you really had to make sure that you’d made all of your calls ideally before 10:00, definitely before midday, and just forget it after midday, (laughs) because unless you knew the person you’re trying to reach or you had their mobile, the chances of you reaching them through the office were, I would say, less than 50 per cent. So I think that, you know, in a way it’s because I think in a lot of jobs, people perhaps felt that on Fridays if they had the opportunity, they would just make that their afternoon when they caught up on things, when there was this sort of silent agreement in a lot of workplaces. I think that’s kind of what Fridays were for, was catching up, getting ready for the next week, not necessarily for hard charging through and making lots of appointments and meetings and interviews and all of the rest of the things that you would probably do on a Monday.

Isabel Berwick
I do feel there is an element of anti-authority, you know, rearguard action here in the Friday thing. If you are a little bit annoyed with your employer for making you go into the office Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, might, you know, that little spark of rebellion in you be fired up on a Friday afternoon is exactly the way to take revenge?

Pilita Clark
I would just say, though, that come an economic downturn, tighter labour market conditions, that’s when you do start seeing the pendulum swing again.

Isabel Berwick
Let’s just throw it forward. In five years’ time how do you think we’ll be working?

Pilita Clark
I find it very difficult to see how this genie is going back in the bottle any time soon.

Isabel Berwick
Yeah, I think Fridays in the office are gonna stay pretty quiet for the foreseeable.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK, so pubs are quieter on Fridays. It’s harder to get hold of people. And even though we love working in the office on Fridays, it seems most people don’t. Those are our hunches. But are they borne out by the data? I spoke to Nick Bloom to find out. I asked him if Fridays really are dead, and he was pretty definite.

Nick Bloom
Yes. Fridays seem to be dead forever. If you go in, you go in Mondays sometimes, but Fridays, it’s dead forever. It just seems to become the work from home day. So now we have this three-phase week. We have Monday to Thursday that are kind of somewhat in the office working days. Fridays are work from home day and then Saturday and Sunday is the weekend.

Isabel Berwick
So what does the data tell us? Because there’s a relevant survey that was done, isn’t there? The US Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, or SWAA, as it’s called? Does that point to Monday being the next day to be killed off?

Nick Bloom
Friday is the champion. If you think of a boxing ring holding its arms above his head, cheering, Friday clearly is the work from home champion. The other contenders now are Monday or Thursday. Depends a little bit on the data source. Monday looks like it’s winning out. You know, train journeys is lower then, swipe card data is lower then. I’ve looked at desk booking. All of them tend to have Mondays as the second most popular work from home day.

In our SWAA survey data, we do see a drop-off on Thursday too. You can figure out that people are looking to make work from home days into long weekends. That itself was also changed. So back in 2020, remember the early incarnations of hybrid, we’d say we’re allowing people to work from home couple of days a week, but we really don’t want them next to each other. So, for example, Apple said it’s gonna be Wednesday, Friday or other firms had Tuesday, Thursday. Then labour markets became tight. Firms became better at managing work from home, performance reviews, etc. And then they said, at this point, why not just let folks bunch them together next to the weekend? And so Thursday/Friday, Monday/Friday become, you know, the two most popular options.

Isabel Berwick
So do you think they were specifically trying to stop people from having long weekends?

Nick Bloom
Yes, definitely. (Isabel laughs) I had many conversations with managers, CEOs in 2020 saying, you know, the last thing we want is their employees disappearing off to, you know, Mexico or Barcelona or wherever it is they’re worried about, or Amsterdam. And so we’re gonna have at least one of them, if not both, midweek. There are some things that are clearly better in person. So larger, certainly sensitive meetings; maybe, you know, trainings, presentations, lunches. If it’s a Thursday, even afternoon, you decide something needs to be done in person and Fridays and Mondays are work from home, you’re looking at next Tuesday as the earliest date. But that worry seems to have, you know, declined over time. And the big drive right now is employees value that at about the same as an 8 per cent pay increase. So companies really are using this as a retention and recruitment perk and, you know, that therefore turns into, you know, lower turnover, lower attrition, lower training costs. So it’s profitable for firms to do it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
Both Nick and Pilita have mentioned the state of the labour market. At the moment it’s still pretty tight, meaning firms are struggling to find qualified workers. As Pilita said earlier, that could change with knock-on effects for Friday working. For now, though, Friday’s still holding firm as the day people work from home. I asked Nick if CEOs who are trying to get their employees back in the office are getting anywhere.

Nick Bloom
So they are (laughter) mostly losing the battle. What’s entertaining is the CEOs that lay down this four days in the office, five days a week — many of them are not able to enforce it. And I think managers just, they’re fine as long as you’re performing well. You’re coming in three days a week. They don’t wanna see massive turnover. In fact, I was told a story that one of the big UK financial services firms has told people to come in five days a week. And I was talking to one of their competitors that told me gleefully they’ve now been, you know, LinkedIn messaging and emailing all of the head folks saying, why not come over to us? They’re saying this is a fantastic poaching opportunity. They’ve made a horrible error with scooping up many of the high performers because people don’t wanna come back.

Isabel Berwick
Looking ahead, is the working pattern gonna stabilise at three days a week in a year or five years? What do you think’s gonna happen?

Nick Bloom
So we are now 2023; 2020, ’21, ’22, work from home levels were declining after that initial pandemic jump. By ’23, looking at various data sets, surveys, swipe card data, public transit data, it looks like it’s now stabilised. I think we’re in a kinda Nike swoosh, so I would guess ’24, ’25 is gonna look pretty similar. At some point, five, certainly 10 years out, work from home levels are gonna increase. Why? Well, there are two big factors that are driving it. One is what economists call market size effects. So the market for work from home technology has gone up about fivefold. There are now roughly five times as many days work from home as pre-pandemic. And that means there’s been an absolute rush of innovation and start-ups and venture capital funding and, you know, big tech firms producing hardware and software to support that. So think of Apple’s headset or the improvements in Zoom and Teams and better cameras, etc. So technology is getting better and that would drive it up in the longer run.

The other thing is what I call cohort effects. Younger firms are significantly more likely to work from home. As those younger firms grow and become, you know, tomorrow’s small, medium, and bigger firms, in a few years, they’re gonna take that with them. So I think the Nike swoosh is a pretty safe bet. We’re kinda flat. We’re gonna be flat probably for the next two, three years. But if I was planning five, certainly 10 years out, it’s gonna be higher. And I think that’s, you know, that’s an easy prediction to make.

Isabel Berwick
Do you know approximately what proportion of office workers are in the office on Fridays now?

Nick Bloom
So I would guess, certainly versus pre-pandemic, probably you’re looking at 20 per cent occupancy rates on Friday. I mean, you hear endless anecdotes about it’s dead, nobody’s here. You know the biggest reason often folks tell me actually why they like coming in on Friday, well, there’s two. One is shorter commutes. The other thing is, nobody else is around. And the second tells you if you’re a manager and you really want hybrid connectivity, the reason you want people in for three days a week, you may actually be best off closing the office on Friday because in some senses, you know, you’re telling employees they wanna come in three days a week to connect. And some of them are choosing days when no one else is there. It’s not really clear that that’s that useful. That’s kinda meeting the letter of the law, but really not the spirit. So some companies I talked to are also just saying, look, for management and environmental reasons to avoid heating and air conditioning, running security, we’re just closing down the office on Friday. We’ve just given up on it.

Isabel Berwick
And are people who are at home on Fridays actually working or hardly working? Have you done any research into what people get up to at home on Fridays?

Nick Bloom
A lot of what I’ve seen in various studies is folks saying, look, I’m gonna work from home on Friday. That’s the day I may use, you know, to go play golf in the morning or go for a run or pick my kids up from school or go to the dentist or get the plumber around. But they’re making it up in the evenings or on Thursday night or on the weekend. So it’s made us a little bit more kind of like a grad student economy whereby I have, you know, many grad students, they work very hard. They just don’t do it on the nine till six schedule. They tend to, you know, sometimes pull all-nighters and work evenings and weekends and then maybe go to the beach. So that’s what I think is going on. People are working less time on Fridays, and the data I’ve seen, it’s maybe about an hour and a half less, but they’re making it up on other days in the evenings and on the weekend.

Isabel Berwick
Do you go to the office on Fridays, Nicholas?

Nick Bloom
I actually live on Stanford campus, so I’m about a 10-minute commute by bike. So I have a very unusual pattern of going into the office most days. So I’m kind of hybrid, but I’m hybrid hour by hour rather than day by day. Not many people have a five-minute commute, which is I think if I had a one-hour commute, it would probably look quite different.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
So Nick’s confirmed some of mine and Pilita’s suspicions — a small proportion of knowledge workers are going to the office on Fridays, and those who don’t go to the office do appear to be working, albeit a little bit less and a little bit more flexibly. What happens if a company really leans into more flexible Fridays? Some companies do exactly that through something known as Summer Fridays, giving employees the chance to finish work at lunchtime during the warmest months of the year. It’s not just small creative companies doing that. Some big firms do it too. One example: Kellogg’s, the cereal giant. I spoke to the company’s managing director for the UK and Ireland, Chris Silcock. Kellogg’s has had a summer hours policy for the past 20 years, and Chris says it hasn’t negatively affected productivity.

Chris Silcock
On a Friday afternoon, we do encourage if people have worked their contracted hours through the week already to finish at midday, you know, if they can or at least choose some time on Friday afternoons to switch off and get into the weekend. It’s just about allowing people to recharge, get everybody to perform at their best. You know, it’s really good if we find for mental and also physical wellbeing. We’re a performance-based business, so you know, I measure success based on outputs and, you know, people delivering against performance metrics. I don’t measure performance based on how long people sit at their desks or, you know, are on conference calls for. So the performance of the business is key but if we could do that in a way that allows people to manage their lives and to recharge and be more productive, then we absolutely do that.

Isabel Berwick
And do people feedback directly to you about it?

Chris Silcock
I try to role model it myself. So we have a weekly meeting on a Friday morning and I often will let people know what I’ll be doing on a Friday afternoon with my own summer hours. You know, I like to get out on my bike if I can. And so I think if you role model, then you see people and you can feel people picking up on that.

Isabel Berwick
What day do people tend to socialise? Is there a pub day?

Nick Bloom
I’d love to be able to tell you, but (Isabel laughs) I don’t get invited all the time, so . . .

Isabel Berwick
(Laughter) You’re the boss.

Nick Bloom
Well, let’s zoom back in the day. It was always a Thursday. Thursday was good, but yeah, I think Thursdays is my preferred day now, but I couldn’t tell you what the rest of the . . . 

Isabel Berwick
Fair enough.

Nick Bloom
I’m a bit too long in the tooth.

Isabel Berwick
Do you think you get more out of people on a Friday paradoxically, than if they were just sort of phoning it in that day? So I think people tail off on Fridays.

Nick Bloom
Friday mornings, I don’t see any change, certainly from the participation that I have with the teams on a Friday morning. You know, we would run the same pace and the same mindset and the same passion on a Friday morning as we would for the rest of the week. So now I don’t see any drop from a Friday morning specifically.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Isabel Berwick
I started off this recording a little bit sceptical about whether Fridays in the office were gonna be dead forever. But actually I’ve ended it feeling that Fridays are gone and I think it’s perhaps the biggest outcome of our flexible working during the pandemic that for knowledge workers, Friday is the place where we assert our autonomy. The number of people who have the choice to go into offices on Fridays and still go is tiny, and that shows something has really shifted. Fridays are sacred. They’ve become the place where we don’t have meetings, where we can knock off work a bit early, where we can do our admin. Fridays have changed massively since the pandemic and that five day in the office, that thing’s never coming back.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Thanks to Nick Bloom, Pilita Clark and Chris Silcock for this episode. If you’ve enjoyed Working It, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. For a limited period, we’re making links to certain stories about work and careers free. Follow the links in the notes to this episode to read them.

Do join me at the FTWeekend Festival on Saturday, September 2 at Kenwood House in London. We’ll be recording a live edition of the Working It podcast, and I’ll be joining Claer Barrett to record a live edition of Money Clinic. There are 10 stages of talks, demonstrations and debates to enjoy. You can claim £20 off your festival pass using the promo code FTPodcast at FT.com/festival.

This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval with production assistance from Lucy Snell and mix from Simon Panayi. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa, and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.