- Jason Fried is CEO of the project-management-software company Basecamp and a coauthor of "Rework."
- Fried explained why he didn't think conversations on social issues should happen at work.
- He also shared lessons he learned about having a four-day workweek during the summer.
Jason Fried, a cofounder and the CEO of the project-management-software company Basecamp, has built a following for his ideas on leadership.
Over the years, he's written multiple books on the topic, including the entrepreneurial-focused bestseller "Rework," the remote-work and culture exploration "Remote," and the efficiency manifesto "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work."
Because of this, the leadership decisions the tech CEO makes at Basecamp are buzzworthy. In April 2021, Fried announced Basecamp would not make public comments on social issues and barred employees from speaking out about them in company forums.
Within hours of Fried's post, multiple employees announced on Twitter they were leaving the company. At least 20 people, more than one-third of Basecamp's roughly 60 employees at the time, stated their intention to accept severance packages from the company. Business consultants specializing in diversity, equity, and inclusion issued harsh words of criticism. Despite growing research and CEO commentary on the importance of business leaders taking stands on social issues, Fried disagrees. Small companies like his have no play in politics, he said.
Fried has also made headlines for extolling the benefits of his policy of a four-day workweek in the summer, when employees work 32 hours a week. The company adopted the policy in 2008, which was well ahead of the current wave of companies considering similar policies.
Insider asked Fried, 48, about his leadership style, specifically the controversial decision on social issues and his summer four-day-workweek policy. The conversation provided insight into how Fried thinks about the role of business in society.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about how your leadership style has evolved since 1999, when you cofounded Basecamp. How would you describe yourself as a leader now?
We were four people. Now we have 65. So my style has changed with the size of the company. I used to be a lot more hands-on with a lot of the things we were doing, and I'm a lot more hands-off today. I'm a little more strategic, less day-to-day in the weeds.
I've tried to get more hands-off and let other people make more decisions around the work that's being done in different departments. I have enjoyed letting things unfold a bit more than perhaps in the past when I was a little bit more — "controlling" isn't the right word — a bit more, like, deliberate about every decision.
What's been the challenge with becoming more hands-off? And what's the benefit of that adjustment?
I think you have to become more hands-off. You don't really have a choice. Otherwise, you become a micromanager, annoying, and also bad because you can't possibly stay on top of — or stay even in the loop on — 50 or more decisions a day. I think you make the company worse if you try to run a 60-person company like you did a 10-person company or 20-person company.
You have to champion other people and let them make decisions. And you have to stay more focused on the big-picture direction of the company.
On the company's summer 32-hour workweek:
You instituted a summer four-day workweek in 2008. What was the impetus for that?
One of the things that we do at Basecamp is experiment. We see our company as a product, and just like products iterate, companies should be iterating. So we thought, "What would it be like if we squeezed out eight hours of those 40 hours per week and went down to 32? What would happen?"
Why not make it permanent year-round?
We made it seasonal because something that's interesting about life is that when you're growing up, you have seasons: You go to school, and then you have summer break, then you get back to school in the fall. In the corporate world, though, when you grow up, it's all the same all of the time. We wanted to kind of experiment with what seasons would feel like at the company.
It's worked out really well, so we're continuing to do it. We get a little bit less done with fewer hours, but it's fine. And it's worth it because our aim is not to do as much as we possibly can, it's to do as much as we can sustain over the long term.
We want to treat the four-day workweek as special. What we found is that people just enjoy it more when it's a special thing. It starts, and it ends. And by the end of the summer, people are looking forward to getting back, especially in the Northern hemisphere, where it gets dark earlier as winter approaches.
What's one bad thing that's resulted from implementing the four-day workweek?
It's not actually bad, but you have to curb your ambition a bit, like, you just can't get as much stuff done and that's it. You have to come to terms with that. So it's bad on paper, but it's also just fine because it's a shift.
You may take on something that's less ambitious during the summer, but the good thing, again, is people enjoy it. People come back more rested on Monday. They feel better about themselves.
Have you measured the success of the four-day workweek?
We don't have data. It just feels like the right thing to do, and we can afford to do it. It's pretty obvious from employee feedback that it's been a good thing.
On Fried's no-political-talk rule:
You banned employees from talking about politics and social issues at work in 2021, and there was fallout. Can CEOs ban certain workplace conversations but also support the whole employee at the same time?
Sure. Well, "ban" is such a strong word. It has these implications of authoritarian stuff. Basically, we said, "We're not talking politics in the middle of work. If you want to have conversations about this stuff with your coworkers, you're free to do that, but we're not mixing that in with work." Just like we wouldn't mix discussions about religion at work or people's personal lives that are quite personal, or some things are just off-limits. And we're not going to talk about politics that way or sociopolitical issues. These are outside the scope of what we want to talk about at work.
Now, some people weren't happy with that. A lot of critics weren't happy with that. We had a number of employees who left over that, and that's totally understandable. I can appreciate why some people don't feel like that's not where they want to be. But we also had a lot of people who stayed. We've hired a lot of people since, and I think the company's in a much, much better place now than we were before.
What's cool about a small business like ours is that different companies can try different things. And if this isn't the place for you, that's totally fine. A lot of people see a refuge here because they want to focus on work. They want to hone their craft. The outside world to them is something they deal with their friends and their family.
People don't want to get into debates. They just want to focus on the work. So this is a place where you can do that. And there are many other places you can do that. And there are many other companies that want to engage in political discussions. We've just decided that's not what we want to do here.
It was a painful transition. It was sad. But we've since moved on, and other people have moved on, and we're in a much, much better place today than we ever had been in the past three or four years.
We're in a highly politicized environment, and when people don't trust each other right off the bat, because they assume something about you, it becomes very hard to work with people when they don't like you. They don't trust you. They think you're the worst version of X, Y, or Z. There were so many discussions and debates that were happening internally that were just completely unrelated to work that made work difficult. So that's why we drew the line in. We don't really have anything else to say about it other than what we said publicly, and just that, you know, we wish everyone well, and we moved on and, and they've moved on.
We don't take positions on things politically as a company unless they directly affect us as a company. For example, we are involved in antitrust-legislation discussions because that affects us as a company directly, but that's sort of one of the limits of what we're willing to talk about these days.
I just did a panel with Muslim professionals who said they want CEOs to talk more about religion in the workplace because they feel excluded, for example, when they're fasting during Ramadan. They want managers to proactively ask them about workplace accommodations when they pray five times a day and they want that to be OK, to be celebrated in the workplace. Similarly, many women want CEOs to act on antiabortion bills. How can you lead on DEI issues without having these conversations?
I'm not saying anyone can't pray at work. That's not what we're doing here. Thing is, we're not having a discussion of whether or not praying at work is something you should do. If your religion says you should pray at work five times a day, I'm going to accommodate that. We're not having debates about fundamental political or religious or personal issues at work. That's not what work is for here.
If you have an issue about something that's personal, you can talk to your manager about it, but we're not making every issue a companywide discussion. So you're free to talk to your manager about things that concern you, but it's when things become a companywide discussion, and then there's a political debate internally among people with different points of view, and it spills out into everything. And before you know it, people can't work with each other anymore. That — I'm not on board with that at all.
In terms of being fair and equitable, we are probably the most fair and equitable company there is on pay. We pay everybody the same. Nobody has to ever negotiate their pay. We pay people, no matter where they live in the world, the same. We also have minimum salaries. Everybody at Basecamp makes at least $70,000 a year. So there are a lot of things that we do that are very fair, very equitable, very progressive, but I don't want political debates and religious debates boiling over at work. It just doesn't get us anywhere.
My question wasn't suggesting that you wouldn't be fair and equitable on those issues. It was more that research shows that employees are looking to CEOs to lead on issues beyond the workplace.
I hear that. I just don't agree with it. I don't think our employees are looking for that from us. That might be the case if you work at a company with 60,000 employees, and they're massive lobbyists, and they can have all this influence over policy or something like that. We're a 60-person company. I'm not going to change the laws of X, Y, or Z. I'm not going to push a politician. It has to do with scale. So my guess is, whatever these surveys you're referring to, I'm not sure which ones they are, but they probably aren't surveying companies with 30 people or 40 people because those companies don't have even the ability to nudge anything anyway, and they're not really focused on that stuff.
I can understand how large corporations could change the conversation in some way. I could see how people feel like they should use that leverage, perhaps. But I don't think that we're in that boat. I think we have a lot of influence over our own industry, over the kinds of software that we make, over the kinds of design decisions that we make, over antitrust legislation, over supporting small businesses. We are active in those areas that are actually relevant, where we can apply our pressure and our influence. But I don't think, for example, the law in — was it Texas?
Texas and Oklahoma. [In March, the Texas Supreme Court ruled on the state's restrictive abortion law, effectively preventing most challenges to it. Oklahoma also recently passed its own restrictive abortion law.]
What am I going to do there? It's just not for me to get involved with at a company level. I might have personal beliefs about it, but there's so many issues around the world that everybody has. I just don't want to get in this place where we have to speak out on every possible thing because that's what, ultimately, the end is here.
We don't say our employees can't talk about their causes publicly. They can do whatever they want, but as a company, we're not going to wade into every potential issue that's in the news right now, or isn't in the news because there are, technically, an unlimited number of those. And it's just not really our place to wade into those things. That's my take. And that's our position.