Weishaupt, a thought leader in the field of remote work thanks to his role as CEO of the Boston-based video-conferencing company, pushed back — just a little bit. “I don’t know if I see it that way,” he said, before immediately cataloging the ingredients: job hugging, career minimalism, employees strategically “billboarding” themselves in the office one day a week while working six. “I just said a bunch of things that don’t sound really good in that mixture,” he said. “So your soup is definitely there, right?”

Acknowledging that the report is “stress-bound” and at times “sounds like a terrible recipe,” Weishaupt insisted there are more nuances to the story. Owl Labs popularized the phrase “coffee badging” to describe the strategic practice of badging into your office building just long enough to have a cup of joe and some face time with your boss before heading back home around 3:00 pm, but that has expanded into what Owl Labs calls “billboard days.”

I suggested that it adds up to a “panopticon,” a conceptual prison from the Victorian age developed by Jeremy Bentham, in which essentially everyone is surveilling everyone else, leaving no room for escape. I pointed out that it’s the title of an especially gnarly progressive-metal album by the unfortunately named Isis (Pitchfork gave it an 8.4). Weishaupt laughed and said he’s a Metallica fan himself, before agreeing that his latest Hybrid Work Report is pretty “heavy metal,” nowhere more so than the disappearing four-day workweek.

The four-day workweek’s six-day afterlife

For years, the four-day workweek was the aspirational endpoint of every hybrid-work conversation. Owl Labs’ data shows that’s dead, Weishaupt said: “We have completely shifted away from a conversation about the four-day workweek,” he said, “and it’s now becoming more of a question of, is Saturday your only day off?”

In fact, 74% of employees say they do some kind of work on a typical Sunday, and 21% call it a full or near-full workday, according to the report. Rather than compressing hours into fewer days, workers have simply had their week stretched into a sixth day, breaking the day into non-linear blocks around parenting, energy levels, or personal errands.

Weishaupt frames this as flexibility given back on employees’ own terms. “If you’re taking that Tuesday afternoon or that Thursday morning… you might be giving it back,” he said, “but as long as that Sunday’s not additive to the whole picture and you can make it work, I see that as flexibility.” This fits into the 2020s-era trend of “microshifting,” or work being split into many small sprints throughout the day rather than a traditional, eight-hour workday.

Weishaupt said he wasn’t sure exactly when it ended, but the window has closed on the four-day work week. “I thought that’s where we’re going to go for a little while and, I think that’s been waved bye-bye a while ago.”

If Sundays are where the extra work goes, “billboard days” are where employees perform the appearance of not needing extra oversight in the first place. Nearly half of workers — 48% — say they’ve picked specific in-office days deliberately to be seen by senior leaders or clients, or plan to start. Bosses, notionally the ones doing the watching, are just as prone to angling for visibility themselves: 40% of billboard-day participants are managers.

The logic is straightforward once you follow Owl Labs’ own return-to-office data. Asked why RTO policies exist at all, 76% of employees say the real driver is leadership oversight — not the 74% who cite productivity and collaboration, or the 71% who point to client service and culture. Employees have concluded, in other words, that showing up is mostly theater for an audience of one manager, on one day, and they’ve adjusted their calendars accordingly.

Job hugging, career minimalism, and the extraction math

Weishaupt touched on generational economics, noting that 53% of employees say they’ve adopted or plan to adopt “career minimalism” — deliberately scaling back ambition to protect health and sustainability instead of chasing promotion. He calls this “one of the more concerning pieces of data,” reading it as a euphemism for surrender: “Maybe you’re giving up a little bit, right? Like, ‘Hey, I’m not gonna be able to go anywhere because it’s too risky to leave my gig, so I’m gonna stay in this job as long as I possibly can.'”

That’s the other half of job hugging — 38% of employees are holding onto roles they’ve outgrown because leaving feels riskier than staying stuck — and Weishaupt draws a straight line from it to the billboarding behavior above. Workers who feel trapped in place compensate by making sure the person who might promote or protect them sees their face on the right Tuesday.

Underneath all of it sits AI, which Weishaupt discusses with the candor of someone who sees data of a workplace still very much in flux. Sixty-nine percent of workers say AI has made them more productive; 46% say it’s hindered them at times. Weishaupt agreed that we’re in a “trade-off period” with AI adoption where it’s making us more and less productive, more and less plugged in, more and less present in the office: “it’s not linear blocks of work like it used to be, which I think is what people wanted if you kind of look back historically at the data that we’ve been providing.”