An 'antiwork' management strategy is going viral for describing perks like optional Mondays and 10% pay raises, and claiming there was 'no decline in revenue'

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An 'antiwork' management strategy is going viral for describing perks like optional Mondays and 10% pay raises, and claiming there was 'no decline in revenue'
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  • An "antiwork" Reddit post from a user claiming to be a senior manager at a small firm went viral.
  • The author says they proposed 10% pay raises and optional Mondays for a staff of almost 30 workers.
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When a business owner was looking for ideas to reward his team of about 30 workers for booming sales during Covid, he reportedly assumed the answer would be a holiday bonus or some other group activity.

But a Reddit user who claims to be a senior manager at that company, says they had a different proposal — one inspired by the social media platform's rapidly growing r/antiwork Reddit community.

"This sub has really made me question why we spend so much of our life working just to get by, so I put together a proposal — let's work less and give everyone more space in their personal life," the user said in a post that has since gone viral.

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The manager said they gave three recommendations to the owner: a 10% pay raise to all staff, five additional days off, and making Mondays optional.

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"The proposal was accepted 4 months ago, and all I can say is wowwww — what a difference it's made to the team happiness, with no decline in revenue," the post's author wrote.

The post was made using an anonymous account and Insider has not been able to verify any of the author's claims through repeated attempts to contact them.

Even so, the reaction to the viral post has spilled beyond the 2,000-plus comments and 83,000 upvotes and onto the more buttoned-down pages of LinkedIn, where Reddit's official account page shared it and garnered 29,000 reactions and 283 comments.

Many of the LinkedIn commenters were most interested in the optional Monday strategy, which the author described as being a "catch-up" day for what would otherwise be a four-day work week.

The post's author said in a later comment that the company had already been using a relatively flexible schedule with many employees working remotely, but this new policy now makes explicit that no meetings or mandatory commitments will occur on a Monday.

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"Finish all your work from last week? Great, don't come in," they said. "Feeling a little behind? Your Monday is for you to catch up from home."

In addition to reportedly having no negative effect on revenue, the posts author also said that the new policy is shaping up to help the company save money by reducing employee turnover.

"Five years ago this company had terrible turnover and was during a more start-up phase," the author said. "I believe this experience taught him respect for your workers, and allowed me to pitch an idea to spend money on the team to save stress (and potential money loss) in the future."

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