Learning Day’s impact comes from being rigorous about how people use it. It’s not a day for leisure, but instead a day for a specific kind of hard work. We see and try to counteract the following failure modes so that we can sustain it long term:

Learning Day could be used for work. Learning Day could turn into a normal working day because people may want to accomplish their main project faster (due to internal or external pressure). We prevent this by having Learning Day on the same day for every team. This creates positive peer pressure and encourages everyone to take advantage of Learning Day.

Learning Day could expand in scope to non–Learning Days. We actually haven’t yet observed this happen. Based on what we’ve seen with other organizations, we think this would most likely indicate that the person isn’t excited enough about their main project, and would be a sign to their manager that the person should switch teams or projects.

Learning Day could be used for leisure. Our solution is for every team member to share their progress on Slack via Geekbot⁠(opens in a new window). This keeps the excitement high and provides an accountability mechanism.