In early 2022, business was booming for digital publisher Alpha Brand Media, and staff were struggling to keep up with demand.
“We were going through classic growing pains, needing to scale the company’s infrastructure and workflows and processes and policies, and it was quite disruptive,” recalls CEO Jenise Uehara. “It was chaos, honestly, and we started to lose people—people who had been with us for a long time—and that hurt.”
The fully remote company of 34 was hiring as fast as it could, but finding staff was a challenge, and there was little time and energy left to onboard and train them. Instead, Uehara adopted a solution that she admits sounded counterintuitive at first. Last summer, Alpha Brand Media implemented summer Fridays, giving staff an extra day off every other week, and in October began operating on a four-day, 32-hour schedule.
“When I started to look at it a bit closer, I realized it was really an operational excellence initiative in disguise that provides motivation for your people—a carrot—to make the changes to the processes that they know are inefficient,” she says.
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the early-rate deadline, May 3.
