Robin Schooling

Summer Hours: Who Set the Expiration Date?

Let me confess something up front: there are few pleasures more complete than walking out of the building at noon-ish on a summer Friday, laptop abandoned, the whole golden afternoon stretched out ahead of you – the beach, the lake, the local watering hole, or, if we’re being honest, the couch. I am a devotee.

But somewhere between the second iced drink and the third, a question tends to surface: why only summer? Why do we treat this small mercy as a seasonal release, doled out in June and clawed back by Labor Day, as though our capacity to leave early were somehow tied to the position of the sun?

The whole arrangement, when you stop to look at it, is a fossil. Summer hours – summer Fridays, the early dismissal, whatever your company prefers to call it – descend from a very particular mid-century fantasy: the breadwinner husband loosening his tie a few hours ahead of schedule, the wife and kids already packed into the wood-paneled wagon, and the family making its escape to the shore before the rest of The City’s inhabitants clog the expressway. The whole point was to beat the traffic, claim the weekend, and feel, let’s admit it, a bit elitist.

That world – single income, summer house, a commute measured against everyone else’s commute – was never the one most of us lived in, and it certainly isn’t now. And yet the ritual has outlived its own logic. We’ve kept the gesture and quietly misplaced the reasoning behind it, which is a very workplace thing to do.

Proof of Concept

What I find quietly delicious about it is that summer hours are, if you squint, a confession from the-powers-that-be. For roughly twelve weeks a year, organizations cheerfully concede that the work can be accomplished in less time, that people can be trusted to compress their hours, and the general output doesn’t collapss because the office empties out at one o’clock on Friday. We prove it, collectively, every single summer. And then September arrives and we pretend we never learned a thing.

This seasonal framing is convenient precisely because it’s temporary. A company gets to feel generous without committing to much of anything, since the policy comes with its own expiration date stitched into it. It’s the corporate equivalent of a free trial at the gym or a Columbia House CD promotion where employees are programmed to enjoy the flexibility now before the regular pricing resumes in autumn. And because it reliably ends, no one is ever forced to sit with the more unsettling implication that if the work can survive a summer of short Fridays, then the rigid five-day week is and always has been much more habit than necessity.

Consider, too, that we’ve spent the last several years rearranging nearly everything about how and where work happens. We moved it home, then half-moved it back, and then argued about it for a couple of years longer than anyone enjoyed. We learned, whether we wanted to or not, that bodies in chairs was a measure of attendance and not of contribution. Set against all that upheaval, the survival of summer hours as a strictly summer phenomenon starts to look less like cherished tradition and more like just another failure of imagination from the HR Department.

But What to Do?

There are two options of course: get rid of “summer hours” all together (no thanks!) or move to 4-day workweeks for everyone. And I’m certainly not naïve about how up ending this ritual (benefit?) in just about any way, shape or form would play out. Disastrous!

Some work, of course, is genuinely seasonal and taking it easy in the summer makes sense for some businesses. There are also jobs and industries where the work is brutal regardless of what the calendar says. And, of course, incorporating “summer hours all year” would, in practice, simply become the new baseline; people would begin to negotiate for Thursday afternoons or Monday mornings off instead … because that’s always how these things tend to go.

Now I certainly don’t want to give up my summer Fridays – you’re going to have to pry them out of my cold, dead hands – but I would appreciate a little honesty about the premise we all continue to labor under. When will we come to the reckoning about how we all decided we can hand people their Friday afternoons in July without the sky falling, so why then can’t we manage to do that in February? Or November?

No one remembers setting the expiration date; I guess that’s why no one feels the urge or responsibility to lift it.

Improve or Transform? Which Will it Be?

“Transformation” is one of those concepts that bends under the weight of everything people project onto it. Depending on who’s using it and in what context, it can mean anything from a genuine, disruptive overhaul – when you blow something up and build a better version in its place – to the sort of measured, incremental continuous improvement that’s been a standard business practice since someone mapped out the Toyota Production System decades ago. Both are legitimate and both are necessary, but they are highly dissimilar ways of heading toward an outcome. And HR teams that are already drowning in ambition and desire to “change” or “transform” may, in fact, simply be struggling with how to approach consequential organizational evolution.

So when HR leaders, or pundits on stage at an HR conference, talk about “transformation” … is everyone on the same page?

Improving or Transforming?

The distinction between improvement and transformation matters more than most HR conversations acknowledge. Continuous improvement, rooted in the concept of Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of small, ongoing change, is the incremental, steady effort to make existing processes better and more efficient by optimizing what’s already there. Low risk by design, it’s cyclical and iterative; when it’s working well, it becomes part of the operational DNA of an organization rather than an initiative that someone needs to announce and everyone else needs to survive.

Transformation is an entirely different proposition. It’s a structural overhaul aimed at changing the base state itself; not refining how things work but replacing what those things fundamentally are. It is, by definition, disruptive, and it requires significant investment, genuine change management, and an organizational willingness to absorb cultural upheaval along the way. The timeline isn’t cyclical; it has a beginning, an execution phase, and a new operational reality on the other side.

Part of the confusion amongst HR and organizational leaders (and there is genuine confusion) stems from a lack of understanding of organizational appetite: an organization’s comfort level with disruption and the pace at which change is expected to happen. Some organizations thrive on the “burn it down and rebuild” approach; others would break out in hives at the mere suggestion. Neither disposition is inherently wrong, but the gap between a leader’s appetite for disruption and an organization’s capacity for it is where transformation initiatives tend to skid off the tracks.

And part of it, honestly, is organizational size, which may get glossed over in a lot of these conversations.

Tales from Two HR Teams

Early in my career, I worked in an HR department of about 25 people, organized along the classic functional lines: I was the Recruiting leader and my peers headed up Benefits, Compensation, Employee Relations, HR Operations, and Learning and Development with all of us reporting to the VPHR. At some point during my time there, the decision was made to move to a new HCM system. What followed was a long parade of vendor demos, a narrowing-down process, a final decision, and then implementation planning in earnest. The whole arc – from the moment someone first had the thought to the day we went live – was mapped out over roughly three years. And it took that long. It was a major undertaking that touched every corner of the HR function and required real coordination, sustained communication, and deliberate attention to training and change management.

Later in my career, when I joined a mid-sized organization to lead our small HR team, I found myself staring at a moderately active recruiting process (3 to 4 open reqs at any given time with a few hundred applicants per requisition), running almost entirely on email, a spreadsheet, and collective goodwill. It was neither sustainable, efficient, or fun to be around for anyone. So I sat through a handful of demos, chose an ATS that both fit our needs and would bring us into the 21st century, and we went live within about a month.

The easy conclusion would be that the second situation wasn’t really “transformation” – that it was too small, too fast, too modest in scope to earn the word. But I’d push back on that assessment and the reason has nothing to do with size.

Go back to the distinction we started with – that transformation changes the base state while improvement optimizes what’s already there. By that test, the ATS rollout qualifies; not because it was big, because it wasn’t, but because it replaced a non-system with a system. There was no real process to refine (remember we operated with email, a spreadsheet, and a lot of hope) and I didn’t set out to make the old way better, but rather to replace what the old way fundamentally was. Had I instead swapped a clunky ATS for a slightly better one or tuned-up the workflows in a platform we already had, that would have been improvement – useful and worth doing, but not transformation.

Which is exactly why the two situations, three years and three weeks apart in effort, belong in the same category. Both changed the base state, both required a genuine shift in how work got done, and both demanded planning, decision-making, stakeholder communication, training, and the kind of steady follow-through that keeps things from quietly reverting to the old way. Both asked the people involved to let go of a familiar process, however inadequate, and adopt a new one. The timelines were different, the organizational footprints were different, and the complexity was different, but the fundamental nature of what was being transformed – and what it asked of the humans doing it – was not.

What gets lost in a lot of transformation conversations is that human element; all those “things” that we require of the human beings doing the work. And I don’t mean this in the feel-good inspirational-poster sense; I mean the specific, measurable reality that people have a finite capacity to absorb change, and that capacity matters whether you’re running a three-year HCM implementation or a four-week ATS rollout.

Scale doesn’t exempt anyone from the obligation to manage it well… and size doesn’t automatically confer the discipline to do so.

The Future Remains Unwritten

Which brings us back to the original question: are you transforming or improving?

For most HR functions, across any given year, the honest answer is some version of both. Continuous improvement keeps the wheels turning and the HR and People Operation healthy; it’s how we refine hiring processes, tighten onboarding logistics, and smooth out the performance feedback cycle. Transformation is warranted when the base state itself no longer works – when the current model isn’t competitive, when new technology demands a structural pivot, or when the gap between how work is designed and how people experience it has grown too wide for one more round of optimization to even close.

The trouble starts when those two get conflated. Many organizations reach for the language of transformation when what they’re describing is improvement, and that mismatch may carry consequences. The investment required, the change management involved, the human capacity needed – all of it calibrates differently depending on which road you’re traveling. Dress up routine improvement as transformation and you raise the stakes for no reason, burn through goodwill, and train people to be skeptical of the next big initiative before it even arrives. Run a genuine transformation as though it were routine improvement, and you’ll inevitably under-resource it, under-communicate it, and watch it stall.

So before you announce that HR is transforming, it’s worth asking a different question first: “are we changing the base state, or are we making the current one better?”

Both are worthy. Both deserve your discipline. They just don’t deserve the same word.

*****

Three Days Off, Four Days of Consequences

Another long holiday weekend is upon us in the US of A, and with it comes the predictable cascade of news coverage about gas prices, TSA lines, and highway traffic that somehow surprises us every single time. The holiday-meets-weekend alignment happens several times a year, and each time, a significant portion of the workforce collectively decides that it’s time to close the laptop, load up the car, and leave their coworkers to figure it out.

But guess what? The 3-day weekend isn’t really 3 days. It’s 5, at a minimum … and everyone knows it.

Thursday evening, of course, marks the unofficial start, which is why a certain kind of energy takes over offices on Thursday afternoons. By Friday, the people who do show up are operating at a level of productivity that can only be described as sloth-like. No meetings have been scheduled because scheduling a meeting on a pre-holiday Friday is considered, in most workplaces, an act of aggression. Instead, what happens is long lunches, a healthy amount of YouTube scrolling, and hallway conversations that start with “so, any plans?” (and last 25 minutes). The parking lot empties by 2 PM.

Then comes the long weekend itself which passes, as they always do, faster than it should. Naps, food and, perhaps, a few household chores fill the time.

And then Tuesday arrives. Tuesday, of course, is re-entry day, and it functions less like a workday and more like a controlled decompression chamber. No one schedules meetings before Noon on a post-holiday Tuesday because that, too, is an act of aggression. The morning is consumed by email archaeology as we all excavate our inbox and reconstruct what happened in the long-ago past. And by “past” we mean “last week.”

_____

A brief, necessary pause here: not everyone gets to observe a 3-day holiday weekend. For healthcare workers, hospitality staff, people in logistics, manufacturing, law enforcement (and many more), the calendar doesn’t automatically provide a holiday. For a lot of those folks, a national holiday just means more volume, more crowds and more cries of “we’re short-staffed again.” So remember that the 3-day weekend, if you get to observe it, is a workplace luxury. I certainly think that’s worth acknowledging before we commiserate further.

______

And yet, somehow, despite the abbreviated effort on Thursday, the pleasant vacancy of Friday, the long weekend itself, and the gentle easing-back-in of Tuesday, we return feeling more wrung out than before we left. Navigating the post-holiday 4-day workweek feels like an expedition to the prairies of hell itself. We quickly realize that the time away – ostensibly to help us rest, relax, and recharge per workplace well-being gurus and HR teams – has instead rendered us barely able to make it through this shortened workweek. And no one has a satisfying explanation for this.

Because here’s what makes the compressed workweek so sneaky: it stacks everything that would have been spread across 5 days into 4, which means the pace is slightly higher, our calendars are slightly fuller, and the feeling that we’re behind-in-everything is slightly more overpowering than usual. By Thursday of the short week, it feels like we’ve been working for 11 days straight, that 3-day weekend of rest, relaxation and rejuvenation feels like a fever dream, and we get through it by sharing a mindset of collective delusion with our co-workers.

The 3-day weekend giveth.

But the resulting 4-day workweek absolutely taketh away.

Job Search as Content Strategy: Unemployable by Design

It’s awful out there for job seekers; searching for a job right now is an exercise in what-feels-like futility and managed humiliation. You submit your application on LinkedIn, the platform helpfully informs you that 875 other people have also clicked “Apply,” (a detail that serves no purpose except to drain your optimism in real time), and then you wait inside a digital black hole from which no light – or response – ever escapes.

Last week’s April jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn’t help the mood: 115,000 jobs added, which sounds like reasonable progress until you strip out the 38,000 courier and messenger positions (a seasonal delivery surge) and the 13,000 building materials and garden equipment jobs (a spring ramp-up). Subtract those two narrow, weather-driven categories and the broad U.S. labor market added roughly 64,000 jobs last month. The place that next to 358,000 newly unemployed workers, 445,000 additional involuntary part-timers, and federal employment down nearly 350,000 since October, and it’s nowhere near inspiring.

So yes. The job market is genuinely difficult, and the people navigating it deserve more than platitudes about resilience.

Something’s Happening Out There

Now I certainly don’t fault anyone for whatever hustle they’ve assembled to keep the electricity on and the gas tank above empty. But there’s a particular phenomenon that’s been developing across LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram Reels; visible enough now that it warrants its own name. And since no one else seems to have gotten around to it, I’ll do it.

The Unemployable Influencer.

These are the people, and you’ve encountered them, who open with a very public declaration that they are, in fact, actively seeking employment, and then proceed to spend the majority of their online presence time eviscerating everything and everyone connected to the hiring process. The application process gets dragged (and granted, there’s legitimate material there). Recruiters get it. HR professionals get it. Managers and executives and companies of every size and industry affiliation get it. The entire apparatus of employment – interview panels, offer letters, performance reviews, onboarding rituals, corporate communication – receives a consistent, thorough, and often quite energetic takedown, delivered with the kind of frequency and precision that begins to feel less like venting and more like a deliberate editorial strategy.

Which is, I think, exactly what it is … for at least a portion of the people doing it.

My theory is that the Unemployable Influencer doesn’t genuinely want to return to Accounting or Widget Manufacturing, or whichever field their resume reflects. What they want – what they’re auditioning for – is to become unemployed famous. They want to accumulate enough followers, enough engagement, enough algorithmic momentum from the ambient outrage economy that the platform itself becomes the job. “Job seeker” becomes their on-ramp to “workforce commentator” and they never even have to update their LinkedIn profile to reflect an actual employer.

Now, and I mean this without sarcasm, that might be a legitimate career move. The creator economy is real, audience-building is a genuine skill, and there might be a market for people who can articulate the frustrations of job searching with enough wit, specificity, and relatability to sustain a following – and maybe even a revenue model.

Here’s where it gets complicated, though, particularly for anyone doing this while still maintaining the fiction, to themselves or to others, that finding a job remains the primary objective. The strategy is self-defeating if employment is the actual goal. Because the hiring managers, the HR leaders, the recruiters, and the decision-makers who might otherwise find your background interesting are also on LinkedIn. They’re also scrolling Reels. They have access to all of it, and they are, to put this as gently as the situation warrants, not particularly motivated to extend an interview invitation to someone who has publicly characterized their entire profession as corrupt, incompetent, or irredeemably beyond repair.

A Line Worth Drawing

I’m not suggesting that people who’ve been laid off owe the organizations that shed them a favorable review. The frustrations are real, the process is broken in ways that are well-documented and worth discussing, and candidates who have been ghosted, strung along, or processed like SKUs down a conveyor belt have every right to say so publicly.

There’s a meaningful difference, though, between credible criticism – grounded, specific, adding something useful to a conversation that genuinely needs to happen – and performing rage for an audience in a way that forecloses the very opportunities it claims to be seeking. The job market is legitimately hard, the hiring process is legitimately broken in real and documented ways, and those problems deserve the kind of sustained, honest scrutiny that leads somewhere.

What they don’t require is a content calendar.

If you’re in job search mode and simultaneously building a platform, the most useful thing you might do is get honest with yourself about which one is the actual goal, because the approach required for each is fundamentally different. Trying to optimize for both at once tends to produce a compromised version of neither. Rage-posting your way through unemployment is a valid strategy for building a platform, but a fairly unreliable one for finding a job.

The LinkedIn algorithm doesn’t care either way, but your potential next manager probably does.

****