It’s My Birthday and I’ll Take Off if I Want To

My birthday is next week, and like any reasonable adult, I refuse to work on it. Birthdays should be a day you get to do whatever you want, and I can say with total confidence that the last thing I want is a multihour exam, which I had to do once in residency, frustrated, in a birthday-themed T-shirt. As I’ve advanced in my career, I’ve made a point of taking my birthday off. Sign me up for a massage and a good meal over 500 emails any day.

But what if I didn’t have to use my accrued leave to have the Ferris Bueller day that I want and, instead, having my birthday off was a perk of the job?

Turns out, some institutions already figured this out. I spoke to a few experts from across the country to understand all the possibilities. Furman University has offered a birthday holiday for over a decade. One day off, floatable anywhere within your birthday month, so a can’t-move meeting doesn’t cost you. “The birthday holiday is one of those benefits that is relatively simple to offer, but it can mean a great deal to employees,” explained Sharon Beaulieu, chief human resources officer at Furman. “At its core, it is about recognizing that our employees are people first. We spend a significant portion of our lives at work, and giving someone a little time back to celebrate something personal is one small way for the university to say, ‘We value you and the contributions you make.’”

The research backs this up, even if it isn’t birthday specific. A National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health analysis of nearly two decades of workforce data found that schedule autonomy cut the odds of job stress by 20 percent and raised job satisfaction odds by 62 percent. Separate studies on academic staff tie more schedule control to less emotional exhaustion, a core symptom of burnout.

Beaulieu, however, is careful not to overclaim. Furman’s retention rate has ticked up roughly two points a year, and no one benefit explains that alone. But she says it’s all part of a broader strategy that shows up repeatedly in stay interviews: employees feeling supported. “Our goal is not to offer unusual benefits simply so we can say we have them,” Beaulieu explained. “We want to consider whether our programs support the culture we are trying to create and whether they provide something meaningful to our employees. Sometimes in HR we naturally focus on the larger components of total compensation, like salary, insurance and retirement … Those are incredibly important, but employees also experience an organization through the smaller things.”

One step up from birthday leave: summer Fridays. Higher education’s academic calendar naturally ebbs and flows, and several institutions, Curry College and Franklin & Marshall College among them, have built that slack into a formal perk: a half day or full Friday off in summer.

Summer Fridays for Franklin & Marshall started in 2022 to boost morale, and each fall, HR asks the president and cabinet to renew it. So far, said Melanie DeSantis, associate vice president for human resources, “it has always been a resounding yes.” Implementation isn’t automatic, though, and takes manager oversight and fair administration across departments that don’t all slow down the same way in the summer. Still, DeSantis has found that the work gets done, and the morale boost seems worth it.

Then, some institutions have gone a step further: a year-round four-day workweek. I was surprised to see this policy gaining ground in higher ed at all. The largest broad workforce trial to date, published in Nature Human Behaviour in 2025 and tracking nearly 2,900 employees across 141 organizations (from private businesses to nonprofits, in six countries) found significant reductions in burnout and improvements in job satisfaction and physical and mental health in employees working four days. These were driven largely by better sleep and higher “work ability,” or how capable and productive people feel while working. In higher education, most of the examples are case studies or pilots.

Amelia Ailey, director of systemwide student wellness at the University of Tennessee System, described a successful pilot at her previous institution, the University of South Florida. In a 12-week pilot, employees still worked 80 hours over two weeks but could choose a 4×10 schedule—working four 10-hour days—or a 9/80 model, four nine-hour days and one eight-hour day, with one day off every other week. Ailey explained that 100 percent of the supervisors said productivity held steady or improved, and all wanted to continue the program after the pilot. Trust, as well as strong communication practices (shared calendars, discussions about availability), were keys to success, she said. “We found that a flexible model can support employee productivity, improve work-life balance and maintain operational continuity when implemented with care. Although it was a small pilot, it was one of the most meaningful and impactful employee well-being initiatives I led,” Ailey told me.

D’Youville College in Buffalo, N.Y., went further still: not 4x10s, but four regular workdays, or 32 hours a week total. These shorter weeks started with a pilot in 2021 initiated by the president, and it has grown to be a permanent fixture. The 36-hour week is only suspended during a few key times, such as the first two weeks in August or graduation week, but those are announced well in advance. Danielle W. Nesselbush, dean of students and the Title IX coordinator, commented, “It makes the entire university work more efficiently. Because we’re only there four days a week, we are intentional with our time, our meetings, and find ways to make processes more efficient. I find that higher ed is so slow to change, but we took baby steps and found that it works for us. Now that we’ve been doing this for five years, it’s just part of our culture and it’s how we work.”

When I think of implementation across the country of any of these benefits, I can already hear the “that will never happen here” sigh from readers of this piece. Beaulieu makes a good point when addressing the naysayers. “I would encourage them to start small and to think about flexibility and accountability as things that can coexist. Giving employees flexibility does not mean lowering expectations,” she said. “In many ways, those ideas complement one another—we trust you, we provide some flexibility and we treat you like a professional. In return, we expect you to meet the responsibilities of your role and serve the organization well.”

These approaches are not, by any means, the only solutions to fixing a complicated workplace. As Beaulieu noted, “The birthday holiday cannot compensate for an unhealthy work environment.” Still, sometimes the simplest changes can make the biggest difference. Turns out the most radical HR policy could simply be flexibility. Give me the gift of time, especially on my birthday. I’ll take that over an employee appreciation mug or lanyard every day.