Greetings from our newest outpost in beautiful Santa Barbara California, home to Oprah, Prince Harry, Kevin Costner… and now LHC’s Director of Demand Gen, Kelsey Brunone. Oh and also apparently home to the family of black widow spiders that she found in her garage.
Our team was split between being actionable (“move”), being extra (“run screaming for the hills”), and being hopelessly optimistic (“for what it’s worth though, tarantulas are much bigger/grosser but they don't bite”).
Kelsey chose option #4: An exterminator. A good reminder that sometimes a brainstorm is helpful. And other times, just doing the first thing that pops into someone else’s head ends with Trudeau Buttocks.
Elsewhere in LHC news, while we proudly espouse the virtues of remote work, we also are big fans of hanging out IRL:
Pictured: Austin, Santa Barbara, Long Beach, and NYC
And with that, we’ll segue ourselves onto the #content:
Making a 4-day workweek work
When we first started Lighthouse 5 years ago we were faced with a conundrum: on the one hand, we knew that being a services business meant being incredibly responsive to our clients at all times; on the other hand, we really wanted to create a company with a great work/life balance.
Thinking about how to achieve those two things led us to this company philosophy (forgive the corporate lingo):
“We are invested in the growth of both our clients and our team. We always respect our clients’ humanity, even when their requests are superhuman. We fully believe that work/life balance is compatible with being an always-responsive, letter-perfect services business.”
Which sure, sounds great. But what does that mean for people’s day-to-day? And what does it mean for our clients, who not only need us to be available but need us to deliver A+ work every time.
Well for one, it means we respect each other’s time and we respect our clients’ time.
Yeah baby, we’re talking about 15 minute meetings.
We’re talking about clear agendas and showing up on time..
We’re talking about direct, timely feedback that you don’t have to spend hours deciphering.
We're talking about the arch-nemesis of every CEO who wishes we could go back being one big happy work family.
It's why we're able to razzle and dazzle clients in every single pitch (source: us).
So how do we cram all this brilliance into four days?
Easy.
Cocaine.
Pictured: the LHC offices at 5pm on Thursday
Kidding. In truth, it helps that we’re an incredibly lean team (give or take a gaggle of black widow spiders) of people who truly know our shit. And we’re an experienced group who trusts each other, which means it’s easy for us to skip over the performative work and instead just come up with cool stuff like this and this.
Plus, our egos aside, study after study proves that four-day workweeks aren’t just good for the employee, but also the employer. The results from a global trial of 2900 companies showed:
“The four-day workweek significantly increased job satisfaction, improved work-life balance, and reduced employee stress. The results also showed improved product quality and customer service, and a significant reduction in absences and sick days.”
There’s more:
“There were benefits for businesses, too: The rate of workers quitting decreased during the trial, and revenue remained essentially steady, increasing by 1.4% on average.”
But look, we know that not every business is out here, glamorizing that 1.4% increase. We also know that work does still happen on Fridays - especially for our clients, who oftentimes don’t work in companies as enlightened as ours.
So what’s the real secret sauce to making this whole four-day workweek work when you have clients?
Before you embarrass yourself, it’s not ketchup mixed with mayo.
It’s that we put the time that’s needed into every single deliverable to ensure it’s our absolute best work. We’re not quitting Thursdays at 5pm and peacing out for the weekend when there’s something that still needs to be done. We’re also not leaving questions hanging and work unfinished just because it’s a Friday.
And sure – sometimes our clients need to meet on Fridays. And sometimes there are questions that need answering after hours. But when you make it the exception, not the rule, things tend to fall into a better place than if you’re expected to show up even if you have nothing to do.
And maybe that’s the real secret sauce to work/life balance: Just work smart. Create structure, throw in some basic team values — like, what if we always follow up and don’t force someone to ever send an email with “just bumpin’ this lol” — and then hire people who are able to figure it all out.
Oh, and also never be the sicko who schedules a Friday afternoon meeting just to touch base.
Department of self-promotion:
Let’s take a look at one of our clients, Andela, a company operating a global distributed work platform, seamlessly helping hundreds of organizations hire, manage, and collaborate with the best tech talent in the world. We’ve been working with the team for years, but recently new leadership tasked us with pivoting towards enterprise-scale businesses – which means help with messaging, platform management, content creation, demand gen and more. Since the summer, Lighthouse has built their new website, created over 20 pieces of written and video content, technically optimized their SEO, developed & deployed a multi-channel social strategy, and audited & improved their YouTube channel. With multiple cross-disciplinary touchpoints, Lighthouse’s work with Andela is a testament to our full-stack capabilities… and we really like working with them too.
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