From August 2 – 6, Redfin tried a meeting-free, no-new-tasks reduced-stress week. It was such a big hit that now we’re going to do it every quarter. When we talked about it on social media, we got enough interest in the idea that we thought it made sense to share the data we gathered on the employee response to our August pilot.
But first, we should explain how we set up the week. These were the instructions we delivered to folks in our headquarters and field-support organization on June 29.
For folks not on the front lines with our customers, we want the week of August 2 – 6 to be a reduced-stress week. Please cancel all recurring meetings, from one-on-one meetings with your boss to staff meetings to talks, stand-ups and business reviews. Managers and executives should avoid assigning new tasks to folks during this time. Our goal is to reduce your stress by just giving you the peace and quiet to finish what you’re already doing. You can work the same hours or reduced hours.
If this week is a big hit, we’ll explore doing it regularly. When prioritizing projects and setting deadlines for the third quarter, remember you may work more slowly for at least one week in August, and that many team members will also go on longer vacations this summer.
Just because our customers are relentless in their 24/7 pursuit of a better home, we couldn’t promise to cancel meetings for our front-line real estate agents; instead, we modestly lowered productivity expectations, even though home-buying demand has been through the roof. At our field leaders’ request, we’ll reduce the emphasis on working fewer hours for future reduced-stress weeks; we were surprised to learn that agents want to participate in this program too, to get a break from team meetings.
In September, we surveyed the employees who participated in the August reduced-stress week, with 724 responses, a 70% response rate. Two-thirds of employees reported that managers fully supported the reduced-stress guidelines; 20% said that managers mostly supported those guidelines.
Only 7% of employees got less work done; many folks said they got the same or more work done, but the most common response was that the work people got done was different, because they got a chance to think for days at a time about a problem that may have been bothering them for years. The most precious resource you or I have is just uninterrupted thought.
Seventy-four percent of employees reported that the week reduced their stress a lot or a little. The employees who reported that their stress was actually higher complained that they couldn’t convene a group of people to address an emergency, so maybe our guidelines for future reduced-stress weeks will allow for that; of course people will then argue about what constitutes an emergency.
The simplest arbiter of whether to institutionalize reduced-stress week was its popularity: 91% of employees want to do it again.
Maybe these results aren’t surprising: the Scrooges will argue that most people will always want to work less for more money. There’s some truth to that. But you can’t ask people to work without also believing that, for many people at Redfin and beyond, work can be a source of fulfillment and dignity, not just income. What makes work dispiriting isn’t just its quantity, but its harrowing, harried quality. This is hard to fix, but we have to try.
To bring to life new ideas for improving the workplace, execs and line managers across corporate America have to stop questioning employees’ motives, except in the case of poor performance. You can’t fully explain how earnestly the people of Redfin have worked over the years without accounting for our need, almost like a child’s need to be loved, to make a difference in others’ lives. Once we trust in that need to make a difference, we can give one another far more latitude to do so, each in our own way, and on our own time.
The reason I’m writing this blog post as Redfin’s CEO is because no one knows better than I do about that need, or about the lust to conquer our enemies. All the perks in the world won’t matter if Redfin doesn’t win. It’s hard to take my foot off the gas when everyone inside the car will be disappointed if we don’t cross the finish line first. But the never-ending, two-steps-forward-one-step-back dialog we have with one another about how to work together better is the only way to win over time.
Many thanks to Bridget Frey, our CTO, Ee Lyn Khoo, our chief human resources officer, and Keith Broxterman, our senior vice president of support, for developing the idea of a reduced-stress week. The idea would’ve never come to life if you hadn’t thought out loud about how work could be different, in a room full of people who work very hard.
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