Konstruct Adopts The Coveted Fully-Remote 4-Day Work Week
We've begun a new cultural chapter under our new ownership. We adopted a 4-day work week at Konstruct. We've been fully remote for the last 5 years. It's been 6 months on the 4-day schedule and our team is stronger and more focused on our mission than ever before.
Being an engineer at Konstruct isn't easy. The Kubefirst products build your cloud environment, bootstrap your Kubernetes clusters, put an open source platform inside it, wire it all together with SSO, secrets management, access management, automated IaC, and gitops application delivery. Our new Colony product takes that technical depth even further to provide a bare metal orchestration layer for OS and cluster provisioning in private and hybrid data center environments.
By the way, if all of that sounds somewhere between amazing and impossible, you have to check us out at konstruct.io!! You'll be a hero by lunchtime.
konstructioWe maintain all of this so that you can have it installed instantly in your own cloud, home lab, data center, or laptop.
We also have to host and maintain our own management, pre-production, and production environments as we build and publish the products that give you these instant platforms.
There aren't very many of us. We have to work hard, and we have to do it all.
Passion impacts work life balance
As challenging as our work is, it's undeniable that everyone at Konstruct loves the work that we do and the mission that we've undertaken. We almost never ask our employees to work late, but they regularly do, and I do understand why. Our product spans just about every technical vertical in computing. If you love a challenge, it is a really hard to put your work down.
Building the bleeding edge of what’s possible in platforms makes it some of the most satisfying work in the world. But the challenges that we face require focused exploration, deep research, a lot of cognitive load, and time. Stopping until the morning often feels like a bad idea.
When we were acquired, our new ownership encouraged us to adopt a 4-day work week culture. We graciously accepted. I wanted to share a few anecdotes about what happens when you have an extra day off every week.
When Friday is the new Saturday
The best thing that's happened is that our passionate team will, actually, unplug on Friday. The green lights in Slack lose their green hue. It's been much more effective than our otherwise mostly-useless "don't work too late" comments on a Tuesday night.
When nobody is working on Friday, you feel like you should unplug too. Nobody wants to ruin the day off for everyone else. Instead, I've slipped off with my wife to see the cherry blossom trees when they were in full bloom in downtown DC. I've packed up the car on a Thursday night for a road trip to visit my parents and sister who I don't see often enough. That nagging dentist appointment that you've been putting off because you've convinced yourself that there's no time to even call? It's suddenly scheduled on one week, and then completed another Friday later. Fridays are really great for helping busy humans catch up on life.
Humans also need rest. Nobody can operate at full speed. The data is conclusive, play, rest and time away from screens is good for your brain.
My stories are only mine and I don't want to pry into the personal lives of my team, but from afar I can see each taking advantage of more human time, with long hikes, travel adventures, family time, hobby projects, and enjoying life. It's been pretty incredible to witness. The team seems to appreciate the extra cycle for themselves, and they return a few days later as inspired as ever.
The net result for Konstruct: we're more productive, organized, and fast paced than ever before. It may not be right for every company, but it sure was the right move for us and our talented team.
Pushing back on the status quo
With the recent headlines bubbling up of corporate policies shifting towards returning to the office, especially on top of 5-day work weeks, I wanted to give the internet a post to offset that motion. There is a better way, especially when you have to remind your team that they're working too hard.
Your team is the most important asset your company has by a lot, and whether you like it or not, they have a life of their own that they need to also embrace. Even the most passionate and talented employees on the planet should be encouraged to unplug and take a breath. I hope more companies will follow our lead.
If you're considering a shift to remote or to a 4-day work week, I'd love to tell you all about my experience. You can book time with me here.
