Дизайнер из Дубая уволила клиентов, требующих работы в выходные, чтобы сохранить баланс жизни и труда

When a design project starts running late, most bosses would probably ask the team to put in a few extra hours. Sarah Sham does something different. The Mumbai-born interior designer, who is based in Dubai/Mumbai and runs projects across 18 cities, says she’d rather hire another person than ask her existing team to work late, give up a Saturday or answer calls on a Sunday. Her studio works from 9 am to 6 pm, five days a week. That’s it. And yes, she knows the policy can cost her business. Some clients have left because they wanted a design team that would be available outside regular working hours. Sham says she’s had to choose between keeping those clients and keeping the rule she set for her employees. She chose the rule. “I let them go and kept the rule,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post that has since attracted plenty of attention. It’s a decision that makes more sense when you look at how Sham used to work herself. Earlier in her career, she says she believed long hours were simply part of doing good design. If a deadline was approaching, she’d stay back until the work was done. Saturdays could disappear too, sometimes at the expense of dinner with her children and time with her family. But eventually, she started questioning whether all those extra hours were actually producing better work. She noticed that some of the projects she was most proud of weren’t necessarily the ones created during exhausting stretches of late nights and endless revisions. In some cases, the better ideas came after designers had stepped away, rested and returned with a fresh perspective. That changed her thinking about creativity. ‘Creativity is a well, not a tap’ Sham has a simple way of explaining it. She compares creativity to a well, rather than a tap. A tap can keep running as long as you leave it on. A well can run dry. For designers, constantly demanding new ideas can work in much the same way. You can keep asking for more, but that doesn’t mean the quality of those ideas will stay the same. “A tired designer does not run out of ideas all at once,” Sham wrote. “The work just slowly gets less interesting, and nobody notices until a client points it out.” That’s probably the part of her argument that many people can relate to. Burnout doesn’t always look like someone suddenly walking away from their job. Sometimes it’s much quieter. The work becomes slower. Ideas become predictable. People stop bringing the same energy to the table. And by the time anyone notices, the damage may already be there. So Sham has built a fairly straightforward system around her belief. If a project needs more people, she adds people. She doesn’t expect the same employees to stretch their working week every time a deadline gets tight. That approach isn’t exactly cheap. A client who expects calls on Saturday or wants a team working late may simply go somewhere else. Sham has accepted that as part of the deal. The business case for switching off Her argument isn’t that deadlines suddenly stop mattering at 6 pm. It’s that the solution to every tight deadline shouldn’t be asking the same people to work longer. There’s some wider research and corporate experience behind the idea, too. Microsoft Japan’s well-known four-day workweek experiment in 2019 gave employees Fridays off while keeping their pay unchanged. Microsoft reported that sales per employee increased by almost 40% compared with the same period a year earlier, while more than 90% of employees who responded to the survey said they were happy with the arrangement. It was only a month-long experiment, and the productivity figures came from Microsoft itself. So it doesn’t prove that every company would see the same results from cutting working hours. Still, it adds an interesting angle to Sham’s argument. For her, the question isn’t simply how many hours someone is sitting at their desk. It’s what they’re actually producing during those hours. A designer who works all Saturday may give a client more time on paper. But if that person is exhausted and the work becomes less creative, those extra hours might not be worth much. She chose the rule over the client What makes Sham’s approach stand out is that she hasn’t presented work-life balance as something that sounds nice in theory but disappears when business gets difficult. She has actually accepted the consequences. Some clients have walked away. She let them. When a project starts slipping, she doesn’t quietly tell the team to cancel their weekend plans. She hires another designer instead. That doesn’t mean her approach will work for every company or every industry. Some jobs simply have emergencies or schedules that can’t be switched off at 6 pm. But in a creative business, where ideas and judgement are the product, Sham believes rest is part of the work rather than something employees have to earn after the work is finished. And that may be the real point behind her strict weekend rule. She’s not saying deadlines don’t matter. She’s saying that people shouldn’t always be the thing a business spends when a deadline gets difficult.