This principle was crucial because Cobry’s approach to four-day workweeks led to some operational challenges. Internally referred to as “20% time,” the policy allows employees to take off 20% of every day, two half days, or one whole day each week. However, if two colleagues opt for one day off on different days, they will only overlap for three days a week, leading to a necessary rise in asynchronous work.
But Cobry was in a fortuitous position because of its existing tools, Bryce says. “We have a really modern, cloud-based tech stack” that includes Asana for work management, Notion as a knowledge base, Hubspot for CRM, and Looker for business intelligence, all built around Google Workspace. With the addition of Google’s Gemini AI model to the mix, each component now has “a significant amount of genAI woven into it,” Bryce says.
Across this tech stack, AI is particularly helpful for documentation and lower-level tasks that free up employees for face-to-face tasks during shared working hours, Bryce says. Cobry uses AI for transcribing meetings, writing strategy documents, and even information-sharing through special bots custom-written by Cobry. Available 24/7, the bots support asynchronous work by providing various pieces of data that are useful for internal teams, such as the latest updates from Google Cloud, a current list of who is on holiday, and even birthday announcements.
