Feathr Announces Four-Day Work Week

In response to the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic on our industry, Feathr will be moving to a four-day work week. Beginning July 1 and continuing through at least September 30th, all of Feathr will operate under a four day work week, with Friday being an off-day.

We know that Feathr is not alone in this and that over the last few months you have all been impacted by the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic on the economy and your lives both personal and professional. You have likely experienced multiple waves of challenges to your business that have forced you to adapt. What follows is an explanation of how Feathr is adapting to be able to best serve our employees and customers in the short term and to ensure we are well positioned to continue serving our employees and customers well into the future.

As we plan for the remainder of the year, we have three primary goals:

1. No layoffs
2. In the short term, to be flexible in accommodating our customers
3. In the medium term, to adapt quickly to the new challenges and opportunities that our industry will encounter

It became clear that the quickest and most efficient way we can help our customers is by being flexible with payments and pricing. We are doing our best to offer and accept adjusted timing, terms, and packages to meet your needs. Incorporating the impacts of the macroscopic challenges that all companies are experiencing (reduced sales, marketing, etc.) with the above changes highlighted the difficulty of goal #1.

Therefore, in order to prevent layoffs we are reducing employee compensation by an average of 20% with management taking a larger reduction and employees under a certain threshold remaining unaffected.

The move to a four-day work week, flowed almost directly from that financial requirement and it would not be unfair to say that ultimately our perspective was that if we're paying our employees 20% less, we're going to ask them to work 20% fewer hours.

These were executive decisions, no individuals or groups were given a choice of structure or degree. Including that they are not allowed to continue working on Fridays “for free” even if they would like to.

The predominant nature of the pushback I have received internally is concern for how the service level to our customers will be affected by this change.

We understand this will inevitably cause some delays in the service you receive from us. Part of the analysis that led to choosing a common "off-day" is the belief that attempting to stagger days and build processes to hand off conversations and projects would create more pain for you, our customers, than it would alleviate. We will observe the effects these changes have and if we fail to deliver a level of service that meets both your and our expectations, we will learn and adapt again.

Finally, it feels worth reinforcing that if you feel any concern about the long term health or strength of Feathr - don't. These are the steps we are taking specifically to ensure we are in the best position to help our customers and our industry today, tomorrow, and for many years to come.

Thank you,

Aleksander Levental
CEO and Co-founder