It's FriYAY! It's time for deep work and/or learning and development

It’s the third FriYAY! of May, and I’m investing my time in writing this blog post to share with the world outside lastminute.com about our approach to learning and development in our Technology function.

Yes, you read it right, FriYAY!: it is a more exciting version of a usual Friday, where, across the entire Company, we get to invest our morning working hours either in deep work, or in learning and development. As for the afternoon, it’s free: till the end of 2022 the employees based in Europe will be trialing a 36-hour working week (with no cuts in salary nor in time off calculations), which in practice translates into a shorter Friday. So I hope you can see why we renamed our Fridays to FriYAYs!

This measure is part of our Smart Working framework that we are developing, and it is based on the assumption that we can be as productive and more engaged when we are working less hours if we are focused on objectives and results and we make room for deep work and personal development. We just introduced it (as of 1st of March 2022), and we’ll run recurrent mini pulse checks to understand how it is working and adapt and refine it if needed.

As for learning and development, our Tech people have the autonomy to shape their FriYAYs in the way that best suits their development needs and requirements. They can:

• invest in self-directed learning
• harness the learning opportunities offered by other colleagues across the company, or be the ones powering those opportunities (after all, teaching is the most effective way of learning!)
• join in-house formal training sessions
• or come up with new ways to maximise learning

In the next posts, we will explore the learning and development opportunities our Tech people can count on.

Photo by Maksym Tymchyk on Unsplash