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LOOP offices
03 Jul '13

The idea behind LOOP's sunny hours

Michael John, CEO

It's no secret that agencies aren't the best place to work if the work-life balance is someone's first priority. At LOOP we deal with a lot of different global clients in quite a few time zones. On the one hand, this provides us with the possibility to work on impressive projects from all over the world, but on the other hand, that leads to constant flow of emails throughout all hours of the day and sometimes a project that keeps the ambitious in the office until late into the night. With LOOP's Sunny Hours we have found quite a nice way to give our team some extra time out of the office in the summer. This has worked quite well in the past, so we wanted to share the principle here. Let's call it an "open source employee benefits tool" - feel free to implement it within your organization.

So, what's the thing about LOOP’s Sunny Hours?

The principle is simple but effective. Everyone in the team gets half a day off every week during the summer season over a period of 10 weeks. This means that LOOP gives away an extra week of holiday (in total) to everyone in the team per year. As a result, our team gets to enjoy the sun, the lakes or few extra hours of sleep once a week! For example, it starts with a Monday morning, followed by a Tuesday afternoon, followed by a Wednesday morning and so on. So, at least once a week, every single employee has half a day off with LOOP’s Sunny Hours. As this perk effects more than 30 weeks of absences every summer for us, it’s important to have some basic rules to ensure that our day-by-day tasks are still running smoothly and both clients and employees are kept happy.

  1. The schedule holds the same pattern for everyone. Once a week before lunch, once a week after lunch.
  2. To avoid any chaos, the defined Sunny Hours found in the list are not shiftable and cannot be swapped with someone else.
  3. If someone is on holiday or out of office during their defined Sunny Hours, they cannot get this back.
  4. Consequentially, if someone takes half a day off while they have Sunny Hours, a full day of holiday counts.
  5. We ask them to be available on-call during their Sunny Hours.
  6. A free afternoon means the working day ends at 2pm.
  7. A free morning means the working day starts at 1pm.

The tool

The tool, as the concept, is simple and effective.  We created an Excel file with a predefined grid pattern that outlines the Sunny Hours schedule. We just add the employees’ names, check to see if all departments are available at all times to ensure that projects are kept running smoothly and post it throughout the office.

Feel free to drop me an email at m.john@agentur-loop.com and I would be happy to provide you with the tools and templates so you can use it for your agency too. It’s unbelievable how much LOOP's team liked the idea from the very beginning – and if you check the Instagram feed from your team during their Sunny Hours, you will see that it’s definitely worth it to implement Sunny Hours to keep hard working teams happy and ambitious.

Michael John

LOOP's CEO. Founded the agency at the age of nineteen. Digital advertising addicted. Creative. Sleepless. Entrepreneurial. Always looking for awesome ideas.