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Comment by throwawayboise | Hacker News Reader

we’re encouraging employees to set the following out-of-office email notification of Fridays: “I’m out of the office today because we’re working consciously here at Bolt and are currently testing out a four-day workweek. I’ll be back in touch with you on [Monday].”

Ugh. Just say "I'm out of the office today and will respond on Monday" no need to tout your experimental company philosophy.

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Disagree. While the "we're working consciously" bit can be left out, you have to let the people you communicate with know that it's not just this Friday, it's EVERY Friday. Just saying "I'm out of the office today and will respond on Monday" implies it's a one-time thing.

You only have to do that if you're in a situation where your correspondent expects same-day responses. Mostly you should try to avoid creating that expectation -- or where you do want to provide that level of service, eg for customer interactions, that sort of email should be going via some kind of role address or internal ticketing system so that it gets reliable rapid responses that don't depend on individual employees not happening to fall ill and so you can ensure cover during holidays or whatever.

(I work a four day week personally, and I never set an out-of-office response.)

Not necessarily just for that. It's also useful for people knowing whether they send you something Thursday towards the end of the day that's somewhat time sensitive whether to expect/hope you'll get to it, or if that's something they shouldn't expect any more than sending it towards the end of the day Friday. It's useful in the same way as knowing when holidays are and not estimating when someone might get something done while including a Monday they will not be working.

Not required, but useful.

I feel like many or most places already have the "be cool late Friday" mindset. Emergencies or critical things can still happen, but if possible maybe don't schedule a long meeting end of day Friday. Don't ask for something that needs turn around after the morning as people already are going to likely be in a wrap-up mode. It always feels like a very implicit "can this wait till Monday?" attitude permeates the day. And it's not just being nice, splitting a task over a weekend can lead to things being forgotten or missed or just the context being lost. Hell, I've seen places operate more in a "be cool all of Friday, it's the pseudo-weekend".

All that is a long way of saying that that group feeling now exists a whole day before and it's important to communicate that.

Plenty of people in my country - where part-time-by-choice work is normalized - is to set your message to "I don't work on Fridays".

Why would that matter? If it comes up again next week, the person will get the same message. If I have a one-time interaction with you, all I need to know is that you're out today and back Monday.

It helps parties coordinate in the future.

For example, if I need X done by Friday, and I know Y company doesn't work on Fridays, I have a better idea of how much workload there is per day. It saves me from sending another email asking "hey, I know you weren't here on Friday, but is that every Friday or a one-time thing? And does that affect Joe from marketing and Sally from DevOps, or is it just you?"

No, they don't need to know your policy at all. They only need the "I am not here..." message regardless of how many times you use it.

"when to expect me to be here" is often worth communicating. "Why" less so. Avoids confusion like:

> I tried him last Friday, and the one before that, and the one before that. He's never available.

IMO it is much better to be transparent and predictable. Makes things easier for everyone.

Ugh. Four day work week trials have proven very successful in Japan, Iceland, Spain, and now the US. It absolutely makes sense to tout this proven benefit to others. The only folks complaining are the ones who don’t believe data driven evidence or have an unhealthy relationship with work. No need to denigrate positive, no cost efforts to drag forward work life balance and quality of life.

Disagree, if I have to interact with someone only on Fridays and I’m getting back an out of office notification literally every time I email them, I want to know what’s going on.

"I'm not available on Fridays" wouldn't suffice?

Think this begs the question, Why? Saying it's company-wide is fair. But honestly I think people have their own cases and can make the judgment on too much/too little info

Definitely not. Childcare, company policy, focus time on development, playing darts - it doesn't matter. All that matters is they're not reachable on Fridays and that they've chosen not share the why.

Exactly - or you might try emailing someone else, and get some other strangely worded auto-response.

> if I have to interact with someone only on Fridays

> I want to know what’s going on

Why are you restricted to interact ONLY on Fridays? What's going on with you?

How do ideas spread if you don't tout them?

Why would you want to spread the idea of the “experiment” before gathering results? What if you conclude the experiment was a failure?

Pre-registration of studies is a virtue ;)

So people can learn about what other people are experimenting w/? Seems pretty straightforward to me.

They made a blog post, we're currently commenting on it.

The blog post touts the idea. If they didn't tout the idea, we wouldn't be here commenting.

Audience for a blog post and HN link is minuscule compared to the total set of people Bolt employees interact with over email.

Here in Holland many e-mail footers will read like:

- Name

- Company

- Department

- Mon-Wed-Thur

Or something like that, to signal when a person is working...

Just broadcasting this will ruin "testing".

I genuinely don't understand how HR/higher handle these things. Are they just extremely out of touch or something?

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