Making a good impression in a new job

Good morning from Fast Company. Here's our daily look into what's driving today's creative business leaders.

This episode is brought to you by Framer. You could design a website or an awesome new graphic for your social media page fast. If you use Framer where your entire workflow is in one place, there's no switching back and forth. Framer is a free full featured design tool that I think you'll love and.

It'S all you need.

You can start and finish your design in Framer. There's no need for Figma imports or HTML pastes. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites and it's now redefining how we design for the web with the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas based design tool, Framer is more than just a site builder. It's a true all in one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons all the way to a live site, Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish, ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool. Start creating for free@framer.com design and use code FC daily for a free month of Framer Pro. That's framer.com design and use promo code fcdaily framer.com design promo code fcdaily Rules and restrictions may apply.

You're about to make a trade. Which u do you listen to? Is it get optioning those options.

Or.

Let'S do a little research? Learn more@finra.org TradeSmart remote and hybrid Workers.

Work Less on Fridays it's hurting Collaboration by Christos Makridis I'm a labor economist who studies how technology and organizational change affect productivity and well being. In a study published in an August 2025 working paper, I found that the way people allocate their time to work has changed profoundly since the COVID 19 pandemic began. For example, among professionals in occupations that can be done remotely, 35% to 40% worked remotely on Thursdays and Fridays in 2024, compared with only 15% in 2019. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, nearly 30% worked remotely, versus 10% to 15% five years earlier. And white collar employees have also become more likely to log off from work earlier on Fridays. They're starting the weekend sooner than before the pandemic, whether while working at an office or remotely as the workweek comes to a close. Why is that happening? I suspect that remote work has diluted the barrier between the work week and the weekend, especially when employees aren't working at the office. The Changing Rhythm of Work the American Time Use survey, which the U.S. labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts annually, asks thousands of Americans to recount how they spent the previous day. Minute by minute, it tracks how long they spend working, commuting, doing homework, and caregiving. Because these diaries cover both weekdays and weekends and include information about whether respondents could work remotely, this survey offers the most detailed picture available of how the rhythms of work and life are changing. This data also allows me to see where people conduct each activity, making it possible to estimate the share of time American professionals spend working from home. When I examined how the typical workday changed between 2019 and 2024, I saw dramatic shifts in where, when, and how people worked throughout that period. Millions of professionals who had never worked remotely suddenly did so full time at the height of the pandemic. Hybrid arrangements have since become common. Many employees spend two or three days a week at home and the rest in the office. I found another change. From 2019 to 2024, the average number of minutes worked on Fridays fell by about 90 minutes. In jobs that can be done from home, that change accounts for other factors such as a professional's age, education, and occupation. The decline in employees with jobs that are harder to do remotely was much smaller. Even if you just look at the raw data, U.S. employees with the potential to work remotely were working about seven and a half hours per weekday on average in 2024, down about 13 minutes from 2019. These averages mask substantial variation between those with jobs that can more easily be done remotely and those who must report to the office most of the time. For example, among workers in the more remote, intensive jobs, they spent seven hours six minutes working on Fridays in 2024, but eight hours 24 minutes in 2019. That means I found, looking at the raw data, that Americans were working 78 fewer minutes on Fridays in 2024 than five years earlier. And controlling for other factors, for example demographics, this is actually an even larger 90% difference for employees who can do their jobs remotely. In contrast, those employees were working longer hours on Wednesdays. They worked 8 hours 24 minutes on Wednesdays in 2024, half an hour more than the 7 hours 54 minutes logged on that day of the week in 2019. Clearly, there's a shift from some Friday hours, with employees making up the bulk of the difference on other weekdays. Fridays have long been a little different. Although employees are shifting some of this skipped work time to other days of the week, most of the reduction, whether at the office or at home, has gone to leisure to be sure, Fridays have always been a little different than other weekdays. Many bosses allowed their staff to dress more casually on Fridays and permitted people to depart early long before the pandemic began. But the ability to work remotely has evidently amplified that tendency. This informal easing into the weekend, once confined to office norms, can be a morale booster, but as it has expanded, it's become more individualized. Through remote and hybrid arrangements, those workers in remote intensive occupations who are single, young, or male reduced their working hours across the board the most relative to 2019, although their time on the job increased a bit in 2024. The benefits and Limits of Flexibility There are a few casual studies on the effects of remote work on productivity and well being in the workplace, including some in which I participated. A general takeaway is that people tend to spend less time collaborating and more time on independent tasks when they work remotely. That's fine for some professions, but but in roles that depend on frequent coordination, that pattern can complicate communication or weaken team cohesion. Co location Being physically present with your colleagues does matter for some types of tasks. But even if productivity doesn't necessarily suffer, every hour of unscheduled independent work can be an hour not spent in coordinated effort with colleagues. That means what happens when people clock out or log off early on a Friday, whether at home or at their office, depends on the nature of their work. In occupations that require continuous handoffs, such as journalism, healthcare, or customer service, staggered schedules can actually improve efficiency by spreading coverage across more hours in the day. But for employees in project based or collaborative roles that depend on overlapping hours for brainstorming or review or decision making, uneven schedules can create friction when colleagues are rarely online. At the same time, small delays can compound and slow collective progress. The problem arises when flexible work becomes so individualized that it erodes shared rhythms altogether. The time use data I analyzed suggests that remote capable employees now spread their work more unevenly across the week with less overlap in real time. Eventually, that can make it harder to sustain the informal interactions and team cohesion that once happened organically when everyone left the office together at the end of the week. As some of my other research has shown, that also can reduce job satisfaction and increase turnover in jobs requiring greater coordination. The Future of Work to be sure, allowing employees to do remote work and have some scheduling flexibility on any day of the week isn't necessary necessarily bad for business. The benefits in terms of work life balance, autonomy, recruitment, and reducing turnover can be very real. Flexible and remote arrangements expand the pool of potential applicants by freeing employers from strict geographic limits. A company based in Chicago can now hire a software engineer in Boise or a designer in Atlanta without requiring relocation. This wider reach increases the supply of qualified candidates. It can, particularly in jobs requiring more coordination, also improve retention by allowing employees to adjust their work schedules around family or personal needs, rather than having to choose between relocating or quitting. What's more, many women who might have had to exit the labor force altogether when they became parents have been able to remain employed, at least on a part time basis. But in my view, the erosion of Fridays may go beyond what began as an informal tradition, leaving the office early before the weekend begins. It is part of a broader shift toward individualized schedules that expand autonomy but reduce shared time for coordination. Christos Makridis is an associate research professor of information systems at Arizona State University Institute for Humane Studies. That's all today from Fast Company. Talk to you tomorrow.

Spoken Layer.

Curious about the future of energy and how batteries and storage are powering everything from our phones to smart cities? Join in on the conversation and tune into the Battery and Storage Podcast hosted by me, Bill Durasmo, energy partner at Troutman Pepper Lock. Each episode explores the latest trends and features conversations with leading experts to answer your burning questions about batteries, renewables and the future of the grid. Listen to the Battery and Storage podcast on all major platforms.