Here at Centralis, our team works hard to deliver the highest quality UX research and strategy services to our clients year-round. For the second year in a row, we’re excited to say thanks by giving the entire company summer Friday afternoons off. For the months of June, July, and August, all team members may enjoy Friday afternoons as their own time, without any reduction in pay.

The value of this benefit to our staff is obvious: they can get a jump start on traffic for weekend getaways, spend some time out in the garden, or just enjoy relaxing with family and friends. What was less obvious to us initially, though, was the value that this benefit delivers for the company.

As a consulting business, we sell our expertise in units of time – so how could having less of it available for sale be good for the company? The answer lies in a key lesson we learned from COVID-19:

Flexibility builds trust, and trust strengthens relationships.

Ever since the pandemic sent knowledge workers off to their home offices, many employers have been grappling with how best to prevent declines in productivity when they can’t actually see their workers working. It’s true that many of us were initially distracted during those early days – our children were home from school, our pets were excited by our presence, and our new combo home/workspaces were not ideally suited for a pure focus on work.

After the initial chaos was tamed, however, the Centralis management team realized that this brave new world gave us an opportunity to strengthen our relationships with employees by being flexible. Once we all figured out how to deliver the same level of quality experience to our clients as a distributed team, we were able to provide an even better experience to our employees by offering flexibility that our in-person situation did not as easily accommodate:

• Need to shift your hours for a midday appointment? Sure.

• Need to schedule your work to align with your baby’s naptimes? No problem.

• Want to work from your vacation home instead of your primary home? Why not?

Solving the challenges of remote work during the pandemic showed us that many of our assumptions about what was required for work (co-location, synchronous hours, constant visibility into staff activities) were simply not true.

Our new-found flexibility underscored to our staff that their needs mattered to us (they do!). The level of trust we showed in our team was returned back to us in spades – we are flexible, and so they are flexible. When we need someone to stay late for an overseas call, fill in for a sick teammate, or squeeze in an extra project, hands raise immediately and simultaneously. While critics may say employees should be expected to go the extra mile, we are grateful that they genuinely volunteer, thanks to the culture of mutual trust and respect that flexibility has sown.

So, we can close on Friday afternoons, because we know the work will get done. If there’s no other timeslot for a client call, the team will do the call on Friday afternoon, and not grumble (too much) about missing out on a benefit, because they know we’ll make it right another way. When you have your teammates’ backs, and trust that they have yours, everyone wins. Including our clients.

With that, I’m off for a Friday afternoon hike. See you Monday morning!