Meeting-free Fridays Are Great for Meetings

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

At our company, Friday is a special day. Sometimes we have a team lunch or early finish to mark the day but every Friday we say “Have a Fantastic Friday” (the capitals are emphasized in how people say it).

I didn’t expect the following to happen on a recent Friday morning.

A Great Time for a Meeting

We need to have a meeting with our entire horizontal team. Unfortunately, a number of the team have a clash with other meetings.

The solution comes from a team lead. “Book Friday next time so mostly all can attend”.

This makes sense because we have meeting-free Fridays. At my company making meetings on Friday is increasingly popular as you have an increased probability of higher attendance.

Makes sense for the meeting organizer of course. It sucks for developers since meeting-free Fridays are a really impactful intervention companies can make for employee well-being. Let me justify that.

Why we Should Protect Meeting-Free Fridays

Friday should be a Fri-yay.

A 2019 survey, found that 67% of 2000 respondents agreed spending too much time in meetings significantly distracts them from their work. Our work as developers is focus-based and having a day to get things done is a real advantage.

For us developers, we need one thing. We need time to write code. We need time to focus.

Things are bad for employees in general but they are terrible for software developers because of the work we do. Getting things done for developers might mean completing tickets or studying something new.

The evidence

Microsoft tried a 4-day work week and got a 40% productivity boost. Giving devs a day to work and study? Amazingly beneficial.

Meetings are a waste of time, even 65% of managers said meetings keep them from completing their own work.

A third of Americans spend between 4 and 12 hours a week in meetings, and employees spend 60% more time in meetings than in 2020.

Conclusion

So, I’m sad about our Fri-yay new meeting. I say new because we have multiple meetings on Friday anyway.

Does anyone think about this stuff before setting up a policy that nobody adheres to? Wait, that sounds like our coding standards.