I’m taking August off – and so are all of my staff. It’s the best decision we ever made
Ayear ago, we ran an experiment at work. Emerging from the height of the pandemic, we were exhausted and running on empty. And, as an organisation that works with teachers, care workers, youth and community workers, local authority staff, academics and thousands of others, we found ourselves having the same conversation with everyone. They were burned out too.
So we decided to give our whole team August off. We were inspired originally by a similar initiative at the organisation of well-known researcher Brené Brown – and her explanation of the rationale behind it. We had no idea how it would go, but knew we had to do something radically different from the “keep on keeping on” cycle that we, and everyone else around us, was caught in. It was a rush to get everything finished and wrapped up with clients before we took the break, but it was worth the effort.
And it paid off. We had muchneeded reflection, recreation and family time; people came back feeling motivated and ready to work. Ideas that came into focus over that time have led to us growing our team, and our income this year, by almost 50%. As a result, we’re doing it again. We’ve embedded it in our employee contracts as a permanent feature, alongside working a fully paid four-day week, having an additional 20 or more days holiday annually, and creating a policy for fully paid sabbaticals after long service.
When we tell people about this, they often think it’s hugely radical and impressive, or they think we’re lazy snowflakes who couldn’t possibly be productive. But to me, it’s just common sense. And not really new. Plenty of European countries slow down or stop in August, and the recent four-day working week trial at 61 UK firms was a major success.
When we look at the work systems around us, there are many that are clearly struggling. Poor mental health is costing UK employers £56bn a year due to absenteeism, presenteeism and staff turnover. Half of employees are showing at least one characteristic of burnout due to greater job demands and expectations, lack of social interaction and lack of boundaries between work and home life. Public sector strikes are just another sign that work isn’t working for many of us.
So often, work becomes a system we need to fix, and we forget that our workforce is made up of individual people, living lives, with needs in and outside their jobs. “Listening” to staff often means a half-hearted survey where poor results can be written off by companies as people just being grumpy or disgruntled. However, ignoring the needs of staff is detrimental not only to their wellbeing, but to the productivity of the company too. If you prioritise your bottom line over your staff, the choices you’re making are costing you in the long run.
We’ve seen that putting staff and their needs at the centre of a company can be transformative. Happy, wellrested people are not only less likely to be off sick, but they will communicate better with each other, have more of a sense of purpose and feel more committed to a company that looks after them. For my company, August gives us a moment to reflect and pause (even if for many of us that might include picking fish fingers up off the floor, giving endless lifts and stopping a toddler from falling in a paddling pool). It lets you get off the treadmill and then actively decide to get back on.
I know you’re probably thinking, “but they’re a small company who can afford to take risks”, or “it’s easy for them to talk, but they don’t have 1,000 employees and pressure from shareholders”, and you’re right. We are an organisation of 10 people. But looking at the state of the country at the moment, who can afford not to take
risks? Creativity – the ability to transcend traditional rules, ideas and patterns, and make new ones – is fundamentally vital to the society we live in now. We need fresh ideas. We all have it in us to be creative, but we can’t do it when we’re pushed up against the edge of our limits, when we’re exhausted and trying to juggle everything all at once.
Society seems to have got completely caught up in a never-ending cycle of busyness – and when we don’t stop to pause and question it, we continue to make the same mistakes. Yes, I’ll hold my hands up to being a Guardian-reading woman with anti-capitalist tendencies who (shock, horror) thinks putting people’s wellbeing first is just fundamentally the right thing to do. But it does also make business sense. Without allowing people adequate time to recharge and reset, they suffer. And so will the systems relying on them.
And so, as I write this, I am in my last hour of work for the next four and a half weeks. I’ll delete my email account from my phone and I’ll have extra time to share with family, sort out my life admin, enjoy being outside and maybe, if I’m lucky, actually have a rest.
I know how privileged I am to have made this decision for my company, and that not everyone can stop. But if you’re in the position to make that decision for yourself, or others, maybe have a think about what stopping might mean for you. A day off? A new way of working? Actually taking your lunch break? Radical, maybe; snowflake-y, maybe; absolutely essential to continue functioning as a human being, definitely.
Jo Hunter is the co-founder and CEO of 64 Million Artists
was like a bad drive-time radio show,” says Caroline O’Donoghue, author and co-host of Sentimental in the City, a Sex and the City podcast. The deep misunderstanding it exposed around podcasts and what they actually were was “especially embarrassing” for a show that is often razor-sharp on the inner workings of industries like publishing and magazine media.
Fortunately, there’s certainly something timely about And Just Like That’s use of Jackie Nee, i.e. the cis het male perspective in Bradshaw’s And Just Like That podcast. He kicks off X, Y and Me with a question likely borrowed from a frat afterparty: “Why don’t you see women jerking off on the subway?” On TikTok, the hashtag #menwithpodcasts has 18.4 million podcasts and videos often show women utilising the beard filter and parodying Joe Roganlike figures. Their videos spoof male takes on issues like why women “suddenly don’t like being stared at”, “the problem with women who read” or those who wear makeup. These sexist caricatures come from a very real genre of male podcasting, where men boast about living an “alpha male” lifestyle, and while Nee is a lighthearted poke at the scene, many actual podcast bros are deeply sexist, regressive and offensive. Last year, the male hosts of the NoFilterPod received backlash for claiming they would end a relationship if a partner “let themselves go” after giving birth, while Jack Denmo, host of Good Bro Bad Bro, went viral for claiming he’d never met a woman with hobbies. Nee’s bro-y humour is an open invitation to cringe and eye-roll.
Other than And Just Like That,several shows are taking aim at true crime podcasters. The genre, which exploded after the success of Serial nine years ago, has galvanised everyday people to involve themselves with murder cases but also treat real tragedies as social media whodunits. Naturally, this aspect of culture has opened the door to satire and sarcasm on TV recently.
ITV’s crime drama Karen Pirie, an adaptation of one of crime writer Val McDermid’s bestsellers, The Distant Echo, follows the murder of barmaid Rosie Duff. Despite a lack of new evidence, the case is brought up again 25 years later because “some woke millennial’s found a microphone”– i.e. a true crime podcaster jumped on the case. “This? This is what passes for journalism now, is it? A sultry voice and a bit of a jingle?” a disgruntled superintendent says.
The podcaster in question, Bel Richmond, played by Rakhee Thakrar, perfectly encapsulates the underlying arrogance at the heart of many everyday true crime podcasters or armchair detectives who assume they’re a force for good.
Podcasting has become “sort of a shorthand for a punchline for a certain kind of millennial-ness”, says O’Donoghue. For “Gen Xers, it’s being sort of cynical yet absurdly wealthy; boomers being incredibly egotistical. And for millennials, I think the punchline is that they’re sort of hand-wringing, overly concerned about things and pay a lot of lip service to ideologies that they don’t necessarily follow.” She uses the example of recycling, and how many will talk about the issue without actually recycling. “I think podcasting surmises that attitude in a very visible way and it’s the art form that most reflects us as a generation.” Richmond cares about justice, she says, but is happy to suggest that one or three of the young students who found the body are guilty without any evidence.
While undeniably irritating, Richmond barely reaches the Cruella De Vil level of malevolence of Cinda Canning, played by Tina Fey, in Only Murders in the Building. Canning, also the host of a hugely successful true crime show called All Is Not OK in Oklahoma, is a new interpretation of the amoral, ruthless reporter. Not only is she awful to work with (she steals her assistant’s name for a new true crime podcast and threatens her “stocking the NPR fridge with LaCroix until [she’s] 50” if she tells anyone) but she’s later found to have fudged the reporting for it.
Her approach to the tragic subject matter, a missing girl, is also cartoonishly evil too. Upon hearing about the case from her assistant, she says: “Well, let’s hope she’s dead. Ideally, murdered – ooh, and by that mayor would be amazing.”
Caning’s flippant approach to murders and crime is the basis for Peacock’s series Based on a True Story,starring Kaley Cuoco and Chris Messina, as a husband and a true-crime podcaster who discover their extremely attractive and charming plumber is a serial killer. Rather than turn him in, the pair blackmail him into joining them on a podcast about his murders in the hopes the project will be a gigantic financial and cultural success. The series, like Only Murders in the Building, draws on the stereotype of rabid true crime fans, the widespread hunger for violent content, and criticism that many podcasters capitalise on gruesome acts and individuals to further their own careers and finances.
In many ways, podcasts have opened up a new portal in TV. Millennials have also grown up in fractured employment, and the life Bradshaw once led as just a freelance columnist isn’t possible for most younger people; we’re a generation of side-hustlers. This allows characters to traverse more boundaries. Previously, scandinoirs and whodunits were limited to detective or police main characters, but thanks to true crime podcasting, that limitation is no longer the case. “Any sort of millennial with a day job,” says O’Donoghue, “give them a podcast and it gives them a reason to investigate into worlds they wouldn’t normally be in.” This plot point allows the unexpected, kooky characters in Based on a True Story and Only Murders in the Building to become the leading detectives.
But comedy also works to raise some very real anxieties around podcasting, says Bethany Klein a , professor of media and communications at University of Leeds. Narratives of the morally dubious true crime podcaster or everyday person wading into a crime investigation “draw attention to how some of the people with the greatest media reach are wholly unqualified, or dangerous, or don’t have the training or the ethics that we might expect from people dealing with important issues”.
It’s easy to see why podcast bros and true crime armchair detectives have made their way on to TV. These new character tropes reflect the wacky and ludicrous realities of new media, where anyone can buy a microphone and broadcast their questionable views to millions of people. Their unparalleled arrogance and brashness make them a bright-red target for comedy, but the real joke is why they’re so famous in the first place: us, their listeners.