On Fridays, WFH means OOO

Three days a week, Annie spends two hours commuting to her public relations job outside Denver. Her company changed its office policy last year from remote to hybrid, leading her to lease a car and get back on the road. So on Fridays — without telling her coworkers — Annie typically doesn't work.

On the final day of the workweek, Annie watches TV, goes to the gym, takes a walk, or sometimes goes skiing. She keeps her phone or computer nearby to be available for messages in case something unexpected happens, but pushes her easiest work to Fridays, wraps it up quickly, and starts her weekly long weekend as early as possible.

When Annie is on the mountain instead of at her desk, she has "zero remorse," she tells me — on a phone call she scheduled on a Friday afternoon — even if she's a little worried about getting caught. (She asked that I change her name for this story for fear of retribution from her employer.)

Annie says the return-to-office mandate has worn down her social battery and made her less productive than when she worked from home full time. She was recently diagnosed as autistic, she says, and working from home has allowed her to focus better without coworkers interrupting. "If they expect me to come into the office and be fully present and sacrifice a lot of really important things that have improved my quality of life," she says, "then Fridays are the very least that I can do for myself to get through it."

What was once the final push to the weekend is becoming a sneaky personal day for some remote workers. The trend has been called "quiet Fridays" or "gentle Fridays" — a clandestine progression of casual Fridays or summer Fridays from the prepandemic era.

Some companies are instituting policies to ban meetings from being scheduled on Fridays and discourage sending emails. Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced legislation last year calling to shorten the workweek to 32 hours. In Tokyo, government workers will soon have the option of four-day workweeks, a move meant to give people more time to prioritize family as fertility rates in Japan have fallen and some have overworked themselves to the point of death.

But the dream of an official four-day workweek stays largely out of reach from many. Greece last year enacted a law enabling a six-day workweek in certain industries, a move to combat a shrinking population and lack of skilled workers. Workers are revolting against unpopular RTO mandates. Now, fed-up remote workers are sometimes taking back the day for themselves, particularly as the rise-and-grind girlboss mindset of the 2010s has been eclipsed by the ascent of the anti-work movement. Since the pandemic, burnout is up, workplace loyalty is shrinking as companies conduct mass layoffs, and people are prioritizing self-care over impressing the boss with long hours. Office attendance may be creeping back up, but Friday remains the least popular day to commute, by far. And as I found, for many workers at the end of the week, the W in WFH is in scare quotes.

A search through Reddit and TikTok will reveals number of viral hacks to trick your boss into thinking you're actively online. There are mouse jigglers and apps that keep screens on but also tips like turning off your phone's auto-caps settings so Slack messages look like they're sent from a computer and not a phone. More rogue hacks include putting PowerPoint into presenting mode to keep a screen on, entering into a Zoom meeting with yourself, or tying a mouse to an oscillating fan.

While workers may appear to their employers to be online and grinding away, evidence suggests that many have shut their laptops and gone out into the world. In 2024, for example, OpenTable saw 44% more diners book reservations between noon and 5 p.m. on Fridays than on other weekdays. "Shifts in work culture are definitely impacting dining habits," Debby Soo, OpenTable's CEO, told me over email. Similarly, on Resy, 28% of weekday-afternoon reservations were on Fridays, more than on any other weekday. Zocdoc shared booking data with me that shows that booking appointments on Fridays have crept up slightly since 2021, and that several types of appointments are more common on Fridays, including acupuncture, IUD procedures, and annual physicals.

ActivTrak, a workforce-analytics and productivity-software company, has found that people are in fact calling it quits earlier on Fridays. In an analysis of 71,000 workers at more than 800 companies that are ActivTrak customers, the company found that in late 2024 workers clocked out about an hour earlier on every day of the week than they did in early 2021. The steepest drop was on Fridays, with workers leaving at 3:42 p.m., some 80 minutes earlier than they did four years ago.

Some people may be out and about more on Fridays because their companies encourage them to log off. Buffer, a social media management software company, moved to a four-day workweek in 2020. It started as an experiment but proved so positive for morale that the company has kept it in place, says Hailley Griffis, its head of communications and content. After the initial adjustment of cramming more meetings into the first four days of the week, the schedule now "really helps reduce the amount of stress and anxiety," she says. "It would be very difficult for me to go back to working five days a week, in terms of energy management."

Stok, a sustainability consulting company, started offering "quiet Fridays" every other week in 2020. The goal is to have no emails or meetings that day, and instead allow employees to put their heads down on projects or take the day for themselves, says Madeleine Drake, Stok's director of people and culture. "Each of us has the awareness and autonomy and collaborative spirit to understand what's best each day," she says, adding that some 90% of the company's employees typically participate.

But flexible gigs are getting harder to come by. Job posts offering four-day workweeks have dropped 42% since late 2022, according to data from Indeed, and those offering flexible Fridays are down 18.5%. Employees are likely "more interested than they've ever been" in flexible Fridays and shorter workweeks, Kyle M.K., Indeed's talent-strategy advisor, says. "But the implementation is probably slowing down," in part due to economic pressures and labor market uncertainty, he adds. There's a disconnect between what employees want and what employers are offering, despite growing evidence that shorter workweeks improve productivity and employee satisfaction and that workers are getting fewer things done on Fridays anyway. "I think employers will start to see a decline in the ability to attract top talent and see their turnover grow if they're not focusing on the work-life balance, the burnout, and the stress level of their employees," he says.

Some workers feel there's no reason to hang around on Fridays if they can get all their work done by Thursday. Jenna, who works in sales in Philadelphia and whose name has also been changed, says she felt burnout in 2020 and would have to log off midday because of exhaustion. Nearly five years later, she's taking nearly all of Friday off and expects her clients or coworkers to be doing little on the last day of the workweek, too. Like Annie, she chats with me on a Friday afternoon — between hanging out at a neighborhood brewery and running an errand. It's a typical Friday for her, which can include vet appointments for her dog, trips to the gym, or boozy lunches with a friend. "A Friday-morning Costco run is magical," Jenna tells me.

The trust gap between bosses and workers is widening. A 2024 survey from PwC found that 86% of business executives believe employee trust to be high, but just 67% of employees say they have high trust in their employer. About half of business executives say they have a great extent of trust for senior leadership, while just 38% say the same of entry-level workers.

Employment is a contract, where both parties should have clear communication to maintain trust, says Shaun Hansen, a professor of management at Western Oregon University. If you're instructed or it's implied that you should be working Fridays, then that's the agreement. But employers can build trust by better communicating their expectations and shifting to more flexible arrangements, Hansen says. That might mean analyzing roles and admitting that not every white collar job has to fit a 40-hour, 9-to-5 schedule to be done well. "If you have a job that you can finish on a Thursday night, but your employer is insisting that you're there on Friday, it not only puts you in an ethical pickle, but it also will cause you to probably look for a better job where you have more flexibility," he tells me.

Of course, no-work Fridays are a privilege reserved for white-collar remote or hybrid workers. The more room they have to slack off, the greater a divide we might see in work-life balance across industries. "I feel guilty about it from the level of: What a privilege I have that I have a job that I can even do this," Jenna tells me. But guilt about not being fully honest with her employer as she fields occasional Microsoft Teams pings from the bar? Not so much.

On a Friday afternoon last summer, a friend and I packed up the car to head away for the weekend. I, taking advantage of my then-employer's summer Fridays, left my laptop at home. But I watched as my friend connected her laptop to a hot spot, opened it on the back seat, and began playing a lengthy fireplace video on YouTube that would keep the green circle next to her face on Slack aglow for the ride. I was given her phone to act not just as a road-trip DJ but also as her secretary, responding to any messages from her boss. It took some teamwork, but where there's a will to work less, there's a way.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.