10 things to get your team to love Mondays
A product-approach for People/HR teams
Managers should have one single goal: make your team love Mondays❤️
Loving Mondays is not easy. First, there is a large social construct of “I hate Mondays”. Second, there is significant research that shows >50% of people are unhappy at work. For a manager, this is like building a product and more than half of your users are unhappy before logging in, and while using it.
Now you can do a few things:
a) provide a lot of mentorship and coaching
b) raise your team through the ranks
c) pay decently or above-average salaries…
…but for talented, high-demand roles (like PMs, engineers, designers, etc), these are commodities. Everyone is offering this “just for you to show up”. Do users stay with products that simply meet expectations?
My recommendation is: get allies. Specifically, get your People / HR team to push the boundaries of your “product offering”, aka the role your team engages with 8+ hours a day. And what advice can you give them?
Introduce them to user research. Your team is the user of your “product” i.e. their role. Interview them. Find their problems.
Design a roadmap. If your people are your customers, then the perks and policies are your features. What’s coming next? And communicate it widely. People get really excited
Build a vision for your “features”. What would the future look like if you achieved your mission?
I quickly ran this exercise for you, and here are some things “talent that loves Mondays” (for tech roles) is looking for:
1. 4-day work week (research shows it could be net positive vs 5 days)
2. Polyworking policy (allowing for multiple revenue streams)
3. Work from anywhere (who cares where you are, if you’re delivering?)
4. Flexible hours (who cares when you work, if you’re delivering?)
5. Open learning budgets (let people choose how they learn, not just corporate bs)
6. Hybrid offices (that don’t look like cubicles and optimise for creativity and collaboration)
7. Home-equipment budget (equip people for battle)
8. Stock compensation (Make your team owners, not renters)
9. Unlimited vacations (spoiler: people rarely abuse)
10. Creative offsites focused on team trust (go fast, go alone, go far, go together)
Now you might argue “many of these things are impossible for my company to provide”. Maybe they cost too much. Maybe you don’t believe you should offer them. That’s totally fine. But don’t be surprised that the talent that loves Mondays simply goes somewhere else 🤷.
PS: the cost of implementing each one is often cheaper than you think, rarely abused, and many times the gains outweigh the costs by an order of magnitude.