The founder, Bruno Solari, 33, spent the month in Spain. Ibiza first, then Madrid, Málaga, Marbella, Barcelona, and back to Ibiza for a bachelor party. Meetings still happened. Calls still happened. He told himself he would have felt like a hypocrite asking everyone else to badge in while he was gone. So the agency opened the door. Staff scattered across the Jersey Shore, the Hamptons, Florida, Berlin, Prague, London, Portugal, and a handful of other stops. One operations lead split her time between Rhode Island and Minnesota. It was the company’s first work from anywhere August, announced months earlier so nobody treated it like a surprise vacation memo.
Why a Four-Day Office Shop Tried a Fully Remote August
Solari did not come up in a world that romanticized flexibility. He learned the trade in agencies during the peak of hustle culture, the era when being seen late counted as proof you cared. He still leans traditional on culture. In his view, a company is easier to feel when people share a room, not only a screen. Since the firm opened in 2023, the default has been four days on site. Fridays are usually home days that end at 3 p.m., and in summer that cutoff can slide to noon. That is already more air than many agencies offer. Employees still asked, every year, for more days at home.
He did not want to hand over another weekly remote day and watch the office thin out for good. The workaround was narrower and, in a way, braver. Keep the normal year strict. Give the whole company one month of total location freedom. Leadership sketched the idea in January, told the staff in February, and spent the next six months writing the guardrails. That runway matters. A perk dropped on a Friday afternoon is a stunt. A perk designed for half a year is an operating choice.
I’ve found that founders often talk about trust and then design systems that assume nobody has it. This one tried the opposite. The bet was simple. If people already know the standard, a bounded stretch of freedom will not erase it. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is the hypocrisy test Solari set for himself. Plenty of leaders take the good week and leave the policy untouched. He tied his own calendar to the team’s. That is harder to fake.
What the Wider Office Picture Looked Like
The experiment landed in a labor market that has been tilting back toward the employer. Recent workplace surveys put roughly a quarter of full-time American workers in a hybrid setup. The most common pattern is three days in the building, then four. About 65 percent are on site full time. Only about 10 percent are fully remote. Fortune 500 firms requiring five days in the office nearly doubled between mid-2024 and mid-2025, from 13 percent to 24 percent, according to office-requirement tracking used by workplace advisers. Big names have been tightening, not loosening. One ride-hailing giant flagged plans to cut thousands of corporate roles and shrink its remote footprint. An entertainment company pushed more people toward four days on site and later cut hundreds of jobs.
Against that backdrop, a young agency letting everyone vanish for August looks almost old-fashioned in the other direction. Solari said people were surprised he went for it. I believe the surprise is the point. When the market gives bosses leverage, the easy move is to spend it. Spending it on a time-boxed perk is a different kind of signal. It says the office rule is a tool, not a shrine.
You do not need to be chained to a desk to prove that you are doing a good job. The person who answers first is not always the person who moves the result.
Agency founder, on remote pressure
The Rules That Kept the Month from Turning into Drift
Freedom without a frame usually collapses into anxiety. The agency wrote the frame in plain language. Core hours stayed 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Eastern. Cameras on for meetings. Dress for those meetings the way you would dress for the office. Slack status used often, not as decoration. Lunch and breaks were expected, not sneaked. No sensitive calls or screens in public places. Clients, more than eighty of them across healthcare, technology, artificial intelligence, and consumer brands, were told in advance. Natalie Valicenti, 30, associate vice president of operations, helped carry that communication while she worked from Rhode Island and Minnesota.
Those rules sound fussy until you have tried to take a client call from a café with bad wifi and a stranger behind your shoulder. Then they sound like mercy. The dress code on camera is a small thing that protects the client relationship. The time-zone lock is bigger. A team scattered across Europe and the American coasts can pretend it is flexible and still miss each other all day. Anchoring to Eastern hours kept the overlap honest.
- Stay inside Eastern core hours so colleagues are not guessing when you exist.
- Cameras on, clothes on, as if the meeting still had a room.
- Status updates used like a door sign, not a performance.
- Breaks treated as part of the job, not a confession.
- Nothing confidential on a train, a beach, or a hotel lobby screen.
I would add one rule they implied but did not plaster on a slide. Tell the person you live with what the month actually is. A work from anywhere stretch can look, from the kitchen, like a holiday that refuses to end. Partners absorb the slack. Kids absorb the half-attention. If the company will not say that out loud, someone at home will feel it anyway.
What the Survey Actually Said
Twenty-one employees answered the follow-up survey. That is not the full fifty-three, so treat it as a strong sample, not a census. Still, the shape is hard to ignore. Seventy-six percent said they were more productive. Ninety percent said they held a high level of work-life balance. Every respondent wanted the month back the following year. Several people said the stretch sharpened communication and self-management. The commute, or rather the lack of one, was the prize most of them named first.
Revenue was not the goal. It moved anyway. From July to August it rose a modest 4 percent. From August to September it jumped 12 percent. You cannot pin a percentage on a perk and call it science. Client cycles, seasonality, and a few lucky pitches can do the same trick. Solari was careful not to overclaim. Even so, a month of loosened presence did not dent the books. For a young firm, that is the fear that usually kills the idea before it starts.
| Signal | What showed up | How to read it |
| Productivity | 76 percent felt more productive | Self-reported, but consistent with fewer lost hours |
| Balance | 90 percent kept a high work-life balance | Strong, with a caveat about logging off |
| Demand to repeat | 100 percent of respondents wanted it back | Clearest cultural vote in the file |
| July to August revenue | Up about 4 percent | Modest, not the design target |
| August to September revenue | Up about 12 percent | Helpful, not proof of causation |
Numbers like these travel well in a leadership meeting. They travel less well if you forget who did not fill out the form. The quiet third of a company often holds the friction. Maybe they were fine. Maybe they were underwater and too tired to say so. A good operator asks twice.
The Downside Nobody Puts on the Recruiting Page
People also said they felt tied to the machine. Stepping away was harder than it is in an office, where lunch, coffee, and a walk have a shape. At home, or in a rented flat with a nice view, the laptop stays open because closing it feels like quitting. Solari called this the internal pressure to be available. It is the oldest remote-work bruise, and it does not care how pretty the month was.
In my experience, that pressure is worse when the perk is new. Everyone wants to prove the trust was earned. So they answer faster, stay later, and skip the break the policy told them to take. The office, for all its flaws, has social permission to stand up. A hotel room does not. A partner watching from the sofa may not grant it either, because the month was sold as freedom and freedom is not supposed to look like more hours.
Flexibility fails when people think availability is the same thing as value. The fix is repetition, not a nicer slide.
His answer was cultural, not technical. Keep telling people the company is flexible. Keep saying the first reply is not the win. That sounds soft until you have managed a team that treats Slack like a fire alarm. Then it sounds like the only lever you actually have.
How This Lands at Home, Not Just at Work
A month away from the office is also a month inside someone else’s life. Couples who already negotiate chores, bedtime, and whose parents get the holiday weekend now negotiate wifi, closed doors, and whether a client call outranks dinner. I have watched this go well and badly. It goes well when the remote stretch is named. It goes badly when one person treats the kitchen as a branch office and calls it quality time.
Think about Solari’s own trip. Spain for four weeks, bachelor party included, meetings squeezed between cities. That is a founder privilege and also a relationship stress test, even if the write-up never says so. The same pattern shows up one level down. An employee in Berlin might be visiting family. An employee in Florida might be staying with a partner’s parents. The laptop comes with them. So does the mood after a hard call. Couple life absorbs remote policy whether HR writes that sentence or not.
- Name the month before it starts, including which hours are truly off.
- Pick a room, or a corner, that is work and stops being work.
- Protect one shared meal that does not share a table with a screen.
- Agree on what “urgent” means so a ping does not win every evening.
- Plan the return, because coming back to four office days is its own mood.
None of that is in the employee handbook. It should be in the conversation. A company can grant location freedom and still export the cost to the person who did not get the perk email.
Why the Commute Kept Winning the Argument
Ask people what they loved and a lot of them will not say Ibiza. They will say the train they did not take. New York commutes are a tax you pay in sleep and temper. Two hours a day is ten hours a week, a part-time job with no paycheck. Give that time back for a month and productivity stories write themselves. Some of the “I got more done” effect is just recovered attention. Some of it is morale. People who feel trusted often work cleaner, not louder.
There is a catch, and it is worth saying plainly. Commute savings are not the same as deep work. A parent who gains ninety minutes and loses them to school pickup did not become a productivity machine. They became less rushed. That still counts. Leaders who only measure output will miss the point and then act surprised when retention improves anyway.
A rough August balance, from the way staff described it: Time reclaimed from commuting Time lost to fuzzy boundaries Attention gained when the office noise dropped Attention lost when home never quite closed
Clients, Cameras, and the Fear of Looking Absent
Agencies sell presence. A client who pays for judgment wants to feel the team is awake. That is why the camera rule and the dress rule were not vanity. They were client management. Telling eighty-plus accounts in advance was the other half. Surprise is what makes a remote month look like neglect. A calendar note makes it look like a plan.
I keep a slightly unfashionable opinion here. Clients rarely hate flexibility. They hate silence. If the work moves and the updates stay sharp, the backdrop can be a rented flat. If the work slips and the Slack goes quiet, the backdrop becomes the story. The month worked, as far as the firm will say, because the operating rhythm did not change as much as the postal code did.
What a Tight Labor Market Does to Perks Like This
When hiring is easy, perks shrink. That is the pattern of the last few years, and it is not mysterious. Five-day mandates spread because they can. Layoff announcements sit next to return-to-office memos so often that employees read them as the same weather system. In that climate, a small firm doing the reverse is either confident or careless. The survey and the revenue line suggest it was closer to confident.
Still, do not romanticize the exception. A 53-person agency can see who is drifting. A 5,000-person company often cannot, or will not, without a layer of tools that start to feel like surveillance. The same month, copied badly, becomes a slide in a board deck and a mess in the regions. Scale is not an excuse to refuse flexibility. It is a reason to write the rules before you announce the beach.
A Practical Design if You Want to Try It
Copying the postcard is easy. Copying the preparation is the job. If I were advising a founder who likes the story and fears the mess, I would steal the sequence more than the destination. Decide in winter. Announce in late winter. Spend spring on the boring parts. Run it once, measure it, and say out loud whether it returns.
- Pick a month when client demand is knowable, not a fantasy quarter.
- Lock a shared clock so “anywhere” does not mean “never overlapping.”
- Write the public-space rule before someone learns it the hard way.
- Tell clients early, in a human note, not a buried footer.
- Survey before and after, and chase the people who stay silent.
- Track revenue, but do not pretend the perk caused every point.
- Plan the emotional landing when the office rule returns.
The last item is the one teams skip. August feels like a gift. September can feel like a withdrawal. People who tasted a month without the commute will do the math on the other eleven. If you have no answer except “because I said so,” the perk becomes a grievance with a sunset date.
Remote month test: shared hours + visible norms + client notice + a real off switchCulture Through a Screen, and Why He Still Wants the Office
Solari has been clear that he does not want culture built only through a screen. That is a fair preference, and it is also a generational one. A lot of millennial managers learned companies as rooms. Younger hires often learned them as tabs. Neither side is lying about what feels real. The August trial did not settle the argument. It put a fence around it. Four days in the building for most of the year. One month where the building is optional. Fridays already shorter. The mix is a compromise that admits both instincts.
Does in-person time actually build trust, or does it mostly build familiarity? I think it does both, and they are not the same. Familiarity greases the small frictions. Trust is built when someone delivers while you are not watching. A remote month is a trust drill. An office month is a familiarity drill. You probably need both, unless you enjoy re-explaining tone over chat forever.
The Self-Management Skill Nobody Trains
Several employees said the month strengthened communication and self-management. That phrase is easy to skim. It means they had to decide, without a manager walking by, what “done” looked like before 5:30. It means they had to flag a blocker before it became a missed deadline in another time zone. It means they had to look available without being glued. Those are adult skills. Offices often hide the lack of them behind presence.
If a remote month reveals that half the team cannot self-manage, that is useful information. It is not an argument to ban the month. It is an argument to teach the skill on purpose. Status updates, written priorities, a midday check that is not a guilt ritual. None of this requires a new platform. It requires a manager who will model the off switch. If the founder answers at midnight from Marbella, the handbook is fiction.
Revenue Moved, and What That Does Not Prove
A 4 percent lift into August and a 12 percent lift into September will get quoted more than the caveats. Fine. Quote them, then keep your head. A PR firm can have a hot client month for reasons that have nothing to do with Ibiza. The useful reading is negative. The policy did not obviously hurt. In a business that sells responsiveness, that is the hurdle. Everything above it is a bonus.
I would still want a second year of data before I called it a growth strategy. Solari does not need my permission. He has already said the program returns, and not in a hedged way. His line was closer to a thousand percent yes. The next run, he has said, is aimed at August 2027. That gap is odd at first glance. It may be calendar caution, client timing, or simply the time it takes to do the boring preparation again. Either way, the commitment is public enough that walking it back would cost him inside the building.
Who This Kind of Month Is Actually For
Not every job can vanish for thirty days. A nurse cannot. A line cook cannot. A lot of retail cannot. The honest version of this story is about knowledge work with clients who will accept a camera and a deadline. Within that world, the fit is still uneven. People with caregiving loads may gain the most, because the commute was eating the margin around school and appointments. People who live alone in a small apartment may gain less than the postcard suggests. Anywhere can mean a better view. It can also mean the same four walls, minus the colleagues who made the day bearable.
Travelers had the cinematic version. Family visitors had the practical version. Both count. A policy that only celebrates the person with a passport and a spare budget will breed a quiet class split. Stipends, equipment, and a clear note that “anywhere” includes your own kitchen help more than another photo of a coastline.
Mistakes That Would Sink the Second Try
The first run had a long runway. The second run will have expectations. That is riskier. People will book flights earlier. Partners will plan around it. If leadership then nibbles the month down to three weeks in a panic, the trust hit will outweigh the original gift. Other ways to ruin it are less dramatic and more common.
- Announcing it late, so childcare and travel cannot adjust.
- Keeping core hours and then scheduling over them anyway.
- Praising the person who never logged off.
- Forgetting clients until a stakeholder asks where everyone went.
- Using the month as cover for a hiring freeze or a quiet layoff.
- Measuring only happiness and ignoring slipped deadlines.
- Measuring only deadlines and ignoring who burned out.
The fifth one is the cynical read, and employees are not wrong to watch for it. A perk that arrives next to a cost cut feels like a trade, not a thank you. This firm did not frame August that way. Others will be tempted to.
A Manager’s Week Inside the Experiment
Picture the middle of the month, not the announcement. A lead has three client calls, a junior who is in a different country and slightly seasick from the time shift, and a deck that needs a human pass before it goes out. The camera rule helps. The status rule helps. What helps more is a ten-minute written plan at the start of the day. Not a novel. Three lines. What will move. What is stuck. When you will be dark. That is unglamorous management, and it is the difference between a remote month and a rumor.
I have sat in versions of that week. The work is fine. The mood is the variable. If the manager treats silence as danger, everyone performs busyness. If the manager treats a clear update as enough, people do the work and then close the lid. The founder’s line about not being chained to a desk only works if the person one level down repeats it when a client gets twitchy. Culture is a relay, not a quote.
Comparing the Month to a Normal Hybrid Week
Most hybrid debates get stuck on the weekly count. Three days or four. Badge data. Badge excuses. This experiment sidestepped that fight by changing the unit of time. Not another Friday. A whole month. That is smarter than it looks. Weekly remote days tend to creep. A month has edges. People can see the start and the end. The office remains the default, which matters to a founder who still wants a room. The exception remains real, which matters to a staff that has asked for air every year.
Could they have offered two remote days a week instead? Yes. He did not want to. The fear, stated pretty openly, was that another standing remote day would hollow out the office. A bounded month lets him keep the culture he believes in and still answer the survey. Whether that bargain holds after people taste the alternative is the open question. One hundred percent of respondents wanting it back is not a subtle hint.
What Employees Seemed to Learn About Themselves
Self-management is a dull phrase for a vivid experience. You learn whether you work better with a little friction or none. You learn whether you need the office to start, or only to be seen starting. You learn how long you can sit before your back files a complaint. You learn, if you travel with a partner, whether shared downtime survives a 9 a.m. Eastern call in a city that is already at lunch.
Some of that learning is flattering. Some of it is not. A few people will discover they liked the idea of anywhere more than the reality. The view does not write the email. The bachelor party does not move the deadline. Coming home to that knowledge is useful. It keeps the next request honest. Ask for flexibility because the work holds, not because the photo looked good.
The Office as a Tool, Not a Moral Test
A lot of return-to-office talk has a moral smell. Serious people show up. Everyone else is coasting. The August trial is a small rebuttal. Serious people also showed up from Portugal, with cameras on and the sensitive deck closed in public. The moral test was the output and the way colleagues were treated, not the turnstile. I do not think every company should copy the month. I do think every company still using presence as a character reference is behind its own results.
Solari can hold both ideas without exploding. He wants the office most of the year. He also refused to be the guy on a Spanish terrace telling everyone else to badge in. That combination is rarer than another manifesto about culture. It is also easier to trust. Policies that bind the person who wrote them tend to last.
If You Are the Partner Watching the Laptop
You did not get the all-staff note, but you got the month. A few ground rules help, and they are not unromantic. They are how the month stays a shared story instead of a one-person project. Ask which hours are fake-off and which are real. Claim one block that belongs to the household. If travel is involved, split the pretty parts from the call blocks so nobody spends the good light resenting a headset. If the month is at home, the same split applies to the sofa.
Resentment in these stretches usually comes from a mismatch of stories. One person thinks they are seizing a rare professional gift. The other thinks they are living with a colleague. Both can be true before lunch. Saying it early is cheaper than saying it in September, when the suitcases are unpacked and the mood is still in the room.
What to Watch if the Month Returns
The next version should be slightly less magical and slightly more measured. Response rates above twenty-one out of fifty-three. A split between people who traveled and people who stayed. A note on whether breaks actually happened. Client feedback that is not only internal cheer. A check on whether junior staff felt as free as senior staff, because freedom often pools at the top. And a plain question for partners and families, even if it never hits a dashboard. Did the month cost the household more than it gave?
If those answers stay healthy, the perk earns its repeat. If they sour, the honest move is to adjust the guardrails, not to pretend the postcard was the whole truth. Solari already has the line he will need if the second run wobbles. Value is not the same as being first to reply. He should keep saying it until the team believes he means it on a random Tuesday, not only in August.
A Closing Read on a Small, Useful Risk
Most workplace stories right now run in one direction. More days in the building. Fewer exceptions. A tighter market, a louder mandate. This one ran the other way for thirty days and did not fall over. Productivity feelings rose for most people who answered. Balance scores were high. Everyone who responded wanted another turn. Revenue ticked up, modestly and then more. The bruise was the old one. People struggled to step away, and the company will have to keep saying that availability is not the job.
I do not think the lesson is that offices are finished. The founder does not think that either. The lesson is narrower, and better. A rule can be real without being total. A month can be a laboratory. A leader can take the trip and still owe the team the same air. And the people at home, who never signed the offer letter, deserve a sentence in the plan. Anywhere is a work policy. It is also a household event. Treat both, and the experiment has a chance of becoming a habit instead of a story you tell once.
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