Live a Little, Learn a Little
At this stage of the year, it’s fair to say that many of us often find ourselves running at a million miles an hour, with vacations feeling like they happened eons ago. There are lots of goals to accomplish before year end and between work, family and personal lives things can get pretty hectic.
We noticed that the normal end-of-year craziness started to have a greater impact on our bandmates after we slowly started to come out of the shadows of the Covid pandemic in 2021. Vacation time was helpful and restful, but the toll of working from home and juggling work, family and personal priorities was something we hadn’t seen before. Like some other companies at the time, we believed that the power of taking a collective week off where we put down and pick up our work at the same time as our colleagues, would deliver a different kind of reset – that’s when our Wellness Week was born.
Wellness Week is one week when all Spotifiers simultaneously log off, go meeting-free, and spend time with friends and family, or on their own wellbeing. Some bandmates travel, others use the time to catch up on things at home.
This is the fourth consecutive year that we closed our laptops collectively as a company and turned inwards for a week, and this year, we’ve encouraged our band members to spend the time to learn something new.
We know that several other companies offer learning-focused weeks – a similar concept, where everyone steps away from work at the same time but in our view, learning and training is an always-on activity that teams and individuals can incorporate into their rhythms in a way that suits them. Still, we like the idea of learning something new at the same time as stepping away from your everyday work and for that reason, we asked all Spotifiers to study up – but we didn’t prescribe what they needed to learn, or how much.
Some of our bandmates began learning a new language; others honed their home improvement/DIY skills, and we heard from several band members that they took a classic approach to learning and enrolled in a LinkedIn Learning or Masterclass course (topic du jour? AI, of course!).
All in all, allowing everyone to hit pause at the same time gives us a kind of re-energizing and mental reset that sets us up for long term success. And whether our bandmates are now fluent in French or handier with a paintbrush, we know that it improves us all while we both stretch ourselves in new ways and rest the parts of our brains that are always on.
It’s clear that our belief in this type of time off is paying off – well-rested and energized bandmates make Spotify amazing. And while it’s not a standard offering and we continue to be one of the only companies taking this approach to time off, in our minds, it’s part of what makes Spotify truly a people-first company.
