Today, I'm bummed to say that we will be shutting down Friday and ceasing operations. The app will be turned off on June 3rd, 2022. 

If you are a Friday customer, please continue to read more about next steps and how we aim to make this transition as smooth as possible for you.

I started Friday (originally it was called Friday Feedback) as a nights and weekends project back in 2016 after spending a few years working remotely. Despite the autonomy and lack of a commute, working from anywhere still felt way too tough. I didn't know what people were working on, I didn't know my coworkers, and I didn't really understand how my work fit into the bigger picture.

After working on this side project for a few years, I decided I had to pursue the opportunity full-time. If I didn't, I would always regret it if I didn't try. In the fall of 2019, we raised a pre-seed round of investment and I jumped in FT and hired a few engineers.

Fast forward a few months - we publicly launched the new version a couple weeks before Covid arrived in the US. For the next two years, remote work became the new normal. We raised a seed round in the Fall of 2020 and continued to build.

Today, the number of organizations that offer remote/flexible work has exploded. It's been amazing to see this change despite the circumstances. This flexibility is good for society and leads to stronger families, engaged local communities, and a better work/life balance.

Despite adding 100k users in the last 12 months, we struggled to answer the following questions:

What is the willingness to pay? Where do we find budget?

Is Friday a replacement to an existing tool like a wiki, or a brand-new one?

Additionally, there's a lot of competition in the "productivity space" and there was a growing interest in investing in this type of tooling. This created a lot more competition in this market.

Ultimately, I didn't have enough clarity to continue pursuing additional investment and as a byproduct, growing the business. The pain-point we aimed to solve is still a very big issue, but I believe over time existing tools (docs, project management, HRIS) will work to solve the problems people face when working outside of the office.

We are suspending billing effective immediately, so you will no longer be charged, but you will continue to have access to the product for the next 60 days. You will have until June 3rd, 2022 to migrate any/all data from Friday before we turn off the application. If you have paid annually, we will be issuing a pro-rated refund for unused time on the subscription.

Our aim is to do everything we can to make sure that the transition is as smooth as possible. 

I have a free account, what happens next?

You will continue to have access to the product for the next 60 days (June 3rd) and will be unable to upgrade to a paid account. After that, you will no longer have access to use the product.

I'd like to export my data, what do I do?

We have created the ability to export all data in a zip file in a variety of formats (CSV, json, PDF). Please visit this page to start this process. For larger teams and organizations, we can provide assistance to accelerate the transition.

Do you have any recommendations for other products I can use instead of Friday?

It all depends on how you use Friday, but we have a few recommendations!

Company Home: checkout Atlas by Atlassian if you want a centralized place to share updates, centralize knowledge, and get to know your team. 

Daily planning/project management: checkout ClickUp or Sunsama (you can get 30 days free if you use this link).

Docs/Wiki: look into Coda, Almanac, or Notion. 

If you are looking for more customization for status updates, you can try building an internal version of Friday check-ins with Zapier or Airtable.

I'd like to talk to someone at Friday, what should I do?

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please drop us a note at support@friday.app or you can email me directly at luke@friday.app. We'd be happy to help.

I want to thank all our users, customers, investors, and employees for giving Friday a shot. I'd also like to thank my awesome wife and family for their support over the last few years. 

While I would have loved for a different outcome, I feel incredibly fortunate to have had this opportunity to serve you. I've learned a lot, and I regret nothing.

We are shutting down Friday. Read more to learn about next steps, exporting your data, and more.

We are shutting down :(

Slack changed the way we work since it first came out in 2009. 

Originally an internal comms tool for Stewart Butterfield’s videogame company, the business spun it out as it’s product and, barely over a decade later, the company was acquired by Salesforce for 27 billion dollars.

If you work in technology, it feels like Slack (and Microsoft Teams - if that’s your taste) is the homebase for your job. I know it is for me: virtually everything from weekly reporting to asynchronous meetings happen on Slack.

Yet Slack alone isn’t enough to build your digital HQ at work. 

Slack in particular is a useful collaboration tool. It helps organizations coordinate work from a distance, including here at Friday. Instead of sending emails back and forth, I use Slack instead. It's much more efficient for internal, real-time collaboration.

But the platform has limitations that need to be addressed. It's especially useful for back-and-forth communication, but not on the other elements of work.

They say that old habits die hard - and because Slack was originally built as a communications tool, it still primarily serves as such. 

In this article, we will go over those limitations and how technology companies like Friday make up for them.

Slack Isn't Built for Asynchronous Communication

Workplace chat tools encourage you to respond quickly, oftentimes with half-thought out responses. Almost every workplace issue I've personally been a part of has been a byproduct of a quick-fire response in Slack (sometimes my own doing). Async communication at its best is thoughtful and well-structured. It's an extension of having enough space to think (and calm yourself down). 

The core value of Slack is the quick-fire interactions between coworkers, so they are incentivized to encourage this behavior, especially when onboarding new accounts. It's the "aha" moment after all.

If Slack wanted to create a more flexible workplace, reduce noise, and help people focus - they could make changes and introduce improved default settings for all customers. They have an army of data scientists that could analyze the constant presence problem if it was a top priority.

How to share top-down updates at work (for leaders)

Yet that’s pretty much it. There isn’t any built-in feature that allows you to build a company culture.

Think of Slack being akin to Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets for comms. With the latter two, you can do a lot of things. If you work in innovation, for example, you can create your own internal system of idea management across your organization with a Google Sheet.

But making an innovation management platform using Sheets or Excel, as opposed to using a platform like IdeaScale or BrightIdea, can be disastrous. That’s because companies that build their own idea management systems using Sheets and Excel have to create formulas for managing the intake of ideas, figure out how to communicate that across the organization, and figure out how to gather teammates together to work on an idea that was voted on (let alone figure out how to collect all the votes). 

You can absolutely use Sheets or Excel for such a case, yet it’s going to take a lot more manual work to change anything from the criteria of what kinds of ideas you are collecting to the process of working on those ideas. Why waste time and money when you can use an innovation management platform that automates everything for you?

This analogy works well with what we’re addressing here with Slack. It’s not impossible to attempt to build company culture using Slack. But Slack is like Sheets or Excel for comms: a blank slate where you have to build supporting components on top of each other. Deciding what those components are can be a challenge in itself, and the only way you can do this is via channels.

With Friday’s Kudos feature, you can automatically recognize employees for whatever they did that was remarkable without making it awkward. 

Want to wish a happy birthday to Anna and Kyle but don’t have a public channel on Slack to do that? Don’t worry, Friday’s got you covered - even if their birthday is on a Thursday.

Friday also has a directory of your colleagues and icebreakers for your colleagues to answer.

One thing I learned from sales is that everything is game to ask. Icebreakers makes it easy to do just that.

It should be mentioned that all of these features can be integrated into your Slack.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Slack were truly an ‘everything’ center? More or less, a homepage?

On Slack, it’s easy to make your work life disheveled.

Getting started with Widgets

Instead, Friday provides a central home for your most important things at work, and you can even customize it with easy-to-use widgets.

Want all team members to be reminded of the company’s values every day? Put your company values on the homepage.

Isn’t it a nuisance to have important company events - such as outbound sales calls - separate from your everyday schedule? On your Friday homepage, you can integrate your calendar and sync your events with a planner and to-do list.

Shouldn’t the team be looped in on happenings in the company without hearing about it on the “press releases” page (if you have one)? Instead of having important news being lost in the weeds of your site of #general, you can showcase news in a widget on the homepage.

With Friday, you can keep all of these important items on the same screen. No longer do you have to dig through Slack, while pushing updates to Slack. 

How Friday Works As a Complement to Slack

Friday is a team communication tool that not only is a roadmap for your day, but also is a way to stay connected with your remote team. 

How Friday for Teams works

With Friday, you eliminate some of the noise of Slack while participating in asynchronous communication. 

Streamline your meetings with routines that eliminate some of your most frequent meetings

Sync notifications and status updates with Friday & Slack

Use Posts for better, richer discussion away from the constant interruptions of Slack

Send kudos to team members, and partake in fun icebreakers to get to know coworkers

Use Friday as a daily planner with Slack to bring order to the chaos

See more about how Friday works with Slack. 

Slack has forever changed the way we communicate with our colleagues; and thus the way we work with them. However, like everything, we collectively need an update on how we organize companies online so nothing gets lost in the weeds. 

Using Slack alone for your company digital HQ isn't enough. There's too much noise, and not enough signal. Learn how Friday and other tools can help.

Why Slack Alone Isn't Enough For Your Digital HQ

Even before the onset of the pandemic, businesses had already been looking into shifting to a remote working model. Aside from keeping employees safe, remote working is a cost-effective way of doing business. For one, you lessen the cost of office rental, electricity, and internet connectivity.

However, many remote workers feel that their employee experience is somehow lacking. 

In today’s pandemic-ridden times, remote work set-ups are now more prevalent than ever. Besides lessening the risk of exposure to the disease, remote teams are also a cost-effective way to run an office, not needing any rent or amenities. 

However, like any other business, you should still give your work-from-home staff the attention and work culture they need to be productive. It is difficult to provide an employee experience that simulates the office setting when your entire team works remotely. You will need to start accepting that the remote working model is here to stay, then build your employee experience around this fact

Why is the Employee Experience Important?

Employee experience is the overall feeling your employees have working at your company. Your employees need to have a separation between their work and personal life. They also need to feel they’re doing something worthwhile at work. If their work makes them feel like robots in an assembly line, you are not providing them with a good employee experience. 

Your job as an employer is not just to give your employees a job and a steady paycheck. You should also help your team members grow personally and professionally. If your employee experience encourages development, your employees will stay loyal and motivated. Those who choose to move on, on the other hand, will look back fondly at their experience as a time of growth and learning. 

Providing a good employee experience will improve productivity, reduce employee attrition, and help your business build a positive reputation that helps it attract the best talent available.

How can You Improve the Employee Experience?

The employee experience extends beyond the four walls of your office. It involves every facet of your relationship with your remote team members. Here are some things you’ll need to work on:

Investing in these areas will increase morale, improve retention rates, and build a better employer image. Read more for a more detailed guide on improving employee experience.

1. Align Employees with Your Purpose and Mission

When employees are not aware of your company’s values, they often do their daily tasks mechanically. On the other hand, an awareness of your corporate purpose and mission gives them a frame of reference for everything they do. 

Here’s how you can align your workforce with your company’s mission statement:

Mention it every time you have an all-hands meeting.

Refer to it as the end goal whenever an employee proposes a new process, marketing campaign, budget, quarterly roadmap, etc.

Perform employee assessments using your purpose and mission statement as the framework.

You may also create a separate mission statement that focuses on what your team does. For instance, a UX design team mission statement could be something like this: “Deliver a unique user experience that will make the user stop looking elsewhere”.

The distinction between work and life is critical when it comes to a remote setup. A study published by Lehigh University discovered a relationship between the expectation to respond to emails after working hours and emotional exhaustion. If you want your employees to work at a high level, you cannot expect them to stay in work mode when they’re supposed to be resting.

This means respecting the off hours of your employees. When it’s 5 o’clock, it’s time to call it a day. Refrain from sending texts, emails, and calling your employees’ personal numbers when they’re off-duty. This practice will reinforce the separation between work and personal life and keep your employees from being stressed out when they should be resting.

You should also observe this work-life balance for yourself. Operate around the notion that you only have until 5:00 pm to do all your work. As much as you’d always want to be a step ahead of your employees so you can guide them, you need to do this planning during work hours – preferably at the start of the day. 

Observing this habit isn’t only beneficial to your health, but it will also prevent you from sending emails to your employees after office hours. Respecting your own work-life balance will also ensure that you respect your employees’ personal time.

3. Create a Culture of Teamwork and Collaboration

Teamwork and collaboration has been shown to increase productivity in businesses of all sizes. In a remote work environment,  it may be difficult to feel the presence of your co-workers, which might prove to be a challenge . That’s one of the downsides to a remote set up since interaction with your co-workers is one of the most precious experiences you’ll have in your employee experience.

Here’s what you can do to create a culture of teamwork and collaboration.

Learn to write better and communicate your ideas well to make your messages more effective.

Look for opportunities for your team members to share their knowledge.

A collaborative team is a productive oneblog p, even if the team members are scattered across time zones. Through team-building activities and knowledge sharing, your team can become familiar with each others’ strengths and capabilities and collaborate on important projects.

Another critical way to bridge the connection gap caused by not being all together in one office is using the latest communication tools. Here’s a list of the applications you’ll be needing to keep your remote team connected.

Messaging and collaboration platform (Slack)

A messaging platform helps people communicate instantly and share files in real-time. Video conferencing allows you to see and hear your co-workers during meetings. Meanwhile, a Kanban board lets you assign tasks and track their progress. 

A knowledge base handler collects all office documents, FAQ blogs for employees, SOPs in writing, and many other pieces of information that employees might want access to. Your company cloud storage is where all company files are stored and also makes it easier for employees to collaborate on files.

Finally, shift management software helps you assign employees to the correct shift. It also allows them to swap working hours or cover for each other. 

These tools make communicating a breeze and encourage your employees to collaborate. With applications such as these, it’s like you’re all together in one spot.

The onboarding process for a remote working business is somewhat different from the new hire orientation programs you’ve attended as an on-site worker. However, there are a few on-site practices you can rework into your remote onboarding process. You may use this checklist as a starting point:

Give a list of company rules that they should follow.

Introduce them to the people they’ll be working with. 

Ensure that they already have the devices and software they need before their start date.

Have something fun and unwinding prepared for the Friday of your new employees’ first week. This can be something like a remote Kahoot game or a movie night. The goal of this is to distinguish between work and off hours properly.

You’d want your new employees to develop healthy habits that fully distinguish their work time from all the distractions at home. A proper onboarding process will make this distinction for your remote employees who’ll take with them as they stay longer in your company.

The employee experience is an important factor in creating a productive workplace, especially if your employees are in different parts of the world. Aside from maintaining a healthy work-life balance, your employee experience encourages personal and professional development, improves team productivity, and increases employee retention.

To create an excellent employee experience for your remote team, start by aligning your team with your company and team mission statements.

You also need to get your team to know each other through team-building activities and collaborative projects using communications software. Finally, rework your onboarding process to suit a remote working setup.

By providing a good employee experience for your remote team, you help them out of their shells and encourage them to perform at their best.

Friday is a top remote working tool to stay connected as a remote team. Empower your team with a company handbook and goal-setting that links to your values and OKRs. Thank each other with kudos, and share water-cooler conversations with our icebreaker questions.

It's really easy to see how your team is trending with automatic reporting. This helps a distributed team stay connected and improves accountability.

Many asynchronous meeting check-ins and templates to benefit your team

Kudos and icebreakers to stay updated with your remote team

Integrates with many tools, such as Asana, Trello, Zoom, Google Meeting, and Github

Company handbook for connecting values to your goals

Free Forever. To-Do List + Calendar Sync + Check-ins + Posts + Unlimited Users.

Individual Pro: $4 per month. Planner View + Task/Calendar sync + Posts + Goals + Reporting

Teams: $6/per person /month. Planner View + Posts + Task/Calendar sync + Check-Ins + Reporting + Kudos/Icebreakers.

Company/Enterprise: A modern intranet & business communication tool customized to your business needs

Use Friday for free. No credit card required.

Here are five tips that can help improve your employee experience, especially for your remote workforce. Put these tips into practice and reap the benefits!

5 Tips To Improve The Remote Employee Experience

Use These 5 Tips to Improve the Employee Experience for Your Remote Team

When it comes to check in questions for meetings, there are a few key things you want to keep in mind. The questions you ask should help everyone involved get on the same page, and make sure that everyone is aware of what's going on. They should also help to facilitate better team collaborations and one-on-ones.

In this blog post, we will discuss the best check in questions for meetings, and how you can use them to improve your team productivity!

How to reduce time spent in team meetings by 50%

The point of the daily standup meeting is to aid team coordination. This fast feedback loop helps teams align and stay on track. If an issue pops up, you can address it quickly and keep projects on track. Use this Friday template for your daily stand-ups! 

if you’re just giving a quick status update, written communication is the way to go. There’s no real reason a status update should require a meeting, unless there’s some kind of collective decision-making to do. Otherwise, you risk losing lots of time with side discussions that aren’t relevant to everyone present.  

Weekly Check-Ins: how to get started

4. What are some things we should check in on from last time, to make sure we're still on track? 

5. Are there any updates or changes that we need to be aware of? 

6. What do each of you aim to accomplish this week? 

7. Is there anything stopping you from being productive right now? 

9. How did you feel about the team progress last month? 

10. How effective do you think you were this month? 

11. What do you think we should work on next as a team? 

12. What would you like. to work on next? 

Sprint retrospectives (also known as retros) are meetings held at the end of a particular project or sprint, with the goal of helping teams look back, reflect, and discover ways to change future behavior and outcomes. Weekly retrospectives are popular in agile circles in the workplace, as they promote the spirit of continuous improvement. It’s possible that many teams will only look at the future when a quick reflection of the past can help identify issues that limit productivity (and happiness). In addition, the combination of perspectives can help teams capture a full view of what’s going on. 

13. How effective was this sprint or project?  

Progress, Plans, and Problems Check-In Meeting Questions

Plans, Progress, Problems (an easy way to do status updates)

17. What is your progress on this project? 

18. What are your future plans for this project? 

19. What are the problems with this project? 

Receive status updates on the project, project challenges, and align team members towards the same goal and outcomes. Use this template to get started in Friday.

21. What are the potential blockers on this project? 

24. What can we improve with the launch of Project XYZ compared to last time? 

1-1 Meetings (how they work and how to get setup)

The key with one-on-ones is to ask open-ended questions. Dig deeper in every response to uncover motivations and what your reports are passionate about. Here is a post on more 1-1 meeting questions to help you kickstart better conversations.

25. How are you feeling about your work? 

26. What are the roadblocks that you see? 

27. If you were in charge, what would you change about the company? 

28. What are you looking forward to working on next? 

29. Anything else you would like to share? 

BONUS:  5 Questions To Ask Before Making a New Meeting Request

Not every meeting or check-in needs to happen! They can even be asynchronous (Friday makes this easy! See below). Before adding a new meeting or check-in to your calendar, check in with yourself to see if a meeting is necessary and then set the right meeting cadence. 

2. Can this meeting happen asynchronously? 

3. Is this a high-priority or urgent task?

4. Do these types of meetings regularly run over the allotted time?

5. Do we run out of items to discuss in these types of meetings?

How To Use Friday To Streamline Your Check-In Meetings

Introducing: The all-new Routine Builder

Is it worth holding a meeting? It’s often more appropriate to hold asynchronous meetings (on Friday!) to avoid wasting time pointlessly gathering.

There is also the potential to have too many meetings, meaning that something drastic needs to be done… absolutely nothing. 

Taking a break from relentless meetups, the so-called no-meeting day, is brilliant if your team is over scheduled.

Friday is a team collaboration tool that helps keep teams on track and connected even when working remotely.

Think of Friday as your digital HQ for your most important things at work. You can set up check-ins on a regular basis to gauge what everyone is working.

Digital HQ that centralizes your most important work in one place.

Posts make it easy to share company-wide announcements and see who viewed them

Check-Ins: You are able to create and see team members’ weekly goals that motivate you to accomplish projects in the given week.

Team profiles and employee directory to get to know coworkers.

Add-ons make Friday simple at first, yet extendable over time.

Integrates with all systems of record, like HRIS, project management, and work chat.

Check out these meeting templates in Friday with check-in questions:

What questions should you ask during a check-in meeting? How do you know if you even need a meeting? Review these top questions and see how Friday can help you.

29 Check In Questions for Meetings (And How To Use Them)

29 Check-In Questions for Meetings (+ 5 Bonus Q's)

“A memorandum is not written to inform the reader, but to protect the writer,” as former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson quipped satirically, taking a dig at governmental bureaucracy. His actual point is that whilst memos should absolutely be written to inform readers, they often provide little to no value.

Ineffective memos arise when those writing haven’t truly grasped the actual purpose of this specific kind of correspondence. It’s crucial to know what situations merit a memorandum, as well as the associated rules. Otherwise, you’re just adding to the pile of pointless paperwork.

Becoming adept with this type of internal communication is an essential skill, one which can aid you in many aspects of work and career. If you’re looking to brush up on how to write a business memo, we’ve got you covered.

3 of The Greatest Business Memos of All Time

An immeasurable amount of memos are sent daily, so of course there are plenty of great examples out there. Some rise above the rest, however, showing precisely how informative, persuasive or inspiring a simple page or two can be.

Some memos even become cultural documents, a still-shot into the specific time and place of a company or industry. 

Here are our entries into the memo hall of fame:

1. Bill Gates on Surfing the Internet Tidal Wave

In 1995, aka the infancy of the digital world, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates sent out an executive memo on an impending internet tidal wave. 

Aside from being an interesting glimpse into history, this document serves as an outstanding example of what a memo is designed to do.

“In this memo, I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to every part of our business,” reads an introductory paragraph. Each section is tied together to this central theme, making the memo a relevant, coherent discussion that actually adds value to recipients.

The text is filled with technical information presented (crucially) in context. Gates first touches on the conception of the internet, before moving along to subheadings ‘The Internet Today’, ‘Competition’, ‘Next Steps’, and finally ‘The Future’.

And how does Gates finish up? Exactly as he should, courteously leaving the door open for suggestions: “I am looking forward to your input on how we can improve our strategy to continue our track record of incredible success.”

2. Howard Schultz on the Overexpansion of Starbucks

A year after his return as CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz penned a memo to discuss the consequences of an overly-ambitious strategy, i.e. the rapid rate at which the company grew. Masterfully, it takes only two paragraphs for us to gauge exactly how this document is going to read, an absolute must for a memo hall of famer.

He details specific business decisions that came under the previous strategy, providing his opinions on the reason they went ahead and the results. The writer does not scold specific people, nor does he smugly look back in hindsight and say “Why on Earth did they do that?”

What’s the best way to write a business memo? This skill will help your team communicate in a clear and concise way. See how Friday can help.

Friday Blog

We are shutting down :(

Why Slack Alone Isn't Enough For Your Digital HQ

Use These 5 Tips to Improve the Employee Experience for Your Remote Team

29 Check-In Questions for Meetings (+ 5 Bonus Q's)

How to Write a Business Memo (With Examples)

24 Funny Weekend Memes To Celebrate the Weekend!

Be Productive on Friday? Shorter Work Weeks? Your Questions Answered

How To Make Time Go Faster at Work: 10 Ways To Help

What's New: An all-new chrome extension, customizable team pages, and goal improvements

50+ Success Quotes From Top Leaders, Entrepreneurs, and Entertainers

50 Hustle Quotes to Keep You Motivated & Productive

Happy Friday! 30 Great Quotes to Celebrate the Weekend

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