There’s a phrase I’ve used a handful of times over the last number of years that goes something like this:

“We need to work with skiers’ lives instead of against them.”

It’s why I’m such a big fan of night skiing and extended stays and touting aspects of hotel rooms that would let people visit and work instead of just one of the other.

Most people have to work to afford to ski, so if we can make it so they don’t have to choose between them?

Now that’s interesting.

Two Trends

Folks working remotely is great, but unless their kids are also in remote school (a trend that is all but over) this freedom only opens the door for them to move to your area which potentially exacerbate real estate and housing issues.

That trend is the 4-day work week.

A few weeks ago I sat in on a webinar attended by hundreds of business owners who wanted to hear from four CEOs who had taken the plunge. I’d had a four day work week during an internship in college. We worked 4-10s, so I was surprised by both the panel’s approaches (working fewer hours, no spreading them out over fewer days):

“We don’t make people work 40 hours, we just cut out a day.”
“Same, we’re essentially a 32 hour work week now.”
“We’re doing Thursday – Friday, but we also just cut out a day instead of spreading that day across the other 4.”

As well as the results that were unanimous across the panel:

“Our productivity and output hasn’t gone down at all.”
“Agreed, in our case, I think it’s actually gone up. People come back so refreshed and get so much more done.”
“That’s especially true for me as a parent. I get a day home alone instead of chasing kids around for my entire weekend.”

Mix in a fresh focus on mental health, and these organizations all agreed they’ll never go back. Morale is up, productivity is level or up, retention is way up, and the health of their employees has neve been higher.

Ski Resorts

Instead of folks having more general flexibility with their lives due to remote work, a four day work week frees up an extra day. It essentially makes every weekend a holiday weekend.

Dave Belin could confirm with some deeper math, but my back-of-napkin effort suggests that this could have the largest effect of any existing trend that’s happening within work, life, and business. Heck, do it on your own napkin and see what 3-day weekends every week would do for your revenue.

We lobby for a lot of things in this industry, but…man…something tells me this should be one of them.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.