After working hard all week, trying to complete a project or meet a deadline on Friday can be difficult and stressful. The rushing, blinding stress and inability to collaborate effectively often result in errors, rework and worst of all, friction. At Partnear we value our mental health, teamwork, and work-life balance, and we work hard to keep clients abreast of how their projects are progressing. We don't value "Friday COB" deadlines.
For many people, Fridays are a time to wind down, finish off loose ends of the working week, and plan and prepare for the following week. However, when Friday deadlines exist, it can be difficult to be at your best at the end of the workweek. The stress of achieving something by an arbitrary day, only for no one to then look at the outputs over the weekend, can take a toll on your mental health and well-being. It can also cause you to take stress into the weekend when you should be recharging and living your personal life. Failing to have a good weekend, you start the next work day already mentally fatigued.
At Partnear we make an effort to avoid the arbitrary Friday deadline. We make a point of understanding when our team members, clients and partners require outputs and deliverables to fit within larger project schedules and the nuances of the dependencies on those milestone times. Working with the broader project team, we then set reasonable timelines to service both our clients and employees' needs.
We understand that project delivery is a journey, and not everything is known at inception. Issues will arise, priorities will change, and delays will occur. We like to discuss these things as it happens, rather than waiting until a deadline and being unable to deliver as frantic work attempts to achieve 3-days worth of work in 3-hours.
We find without the stresses of a 'Friday COB', we have reduced stress and anxiety throughout the whole week (weekend included), our productivity is improved as we're less frantic, we have greater clarity in our thought as we're not destructively focusing on a particular stressor and ignoring other factors, and our home lives improve as we can be mentally present.
It is liberating to utilise Fridays for contingency, reflection, organising and to get ahead on the following week's work/deliverables rather than stressing to achieve the end-of-week deliverables.