Indian-origin founder says her team never works on weekends. But it has a cost

Mumbai-born interior designer Sarah Sham says her studio shuts down at 6 pm every day, with no weekend calls or Sunday deadlines. Her reasoning has gone viral.Interior designer Sarah Sham's Linkedin post about not compromising with employees' rest is viral. (Photo: Linkedin/Sarah Sham)When a project starts falling behind schedule, Mumbai-born entrepreneur and interior designer Sarah Sham has a simple solution. She hires another person.What she does not do is ask her team to work late, give up their weekends or take calls on Sundays.Sham, who is based in Dubai and runs design projects across 18 cities, has built her studio around a strict rule: employees work from 9 am to 6 pm, five days a week. There are no weekend calls and no Sunday deadlines, even when projects fall behind schedule.And the rule has come at a cost.Some clients have walked away because they wanted a design team that would remain available on Saturdays or work late into the night. When faced with a choice between keeping those clients and sticking to her policy, Sham chose the latter.“I let them go and kept the rule,” she wrote in a LinkedIn post that has since drawn attention online.See her post here:For Sham, the decision came after years of doing the opposite.Earlier in her career, she believed good design required long hours and constant availability. When deadlines approached, she would stay back until the work was finished, often missing dinner with her children or spending Saturdays at work.But over time, she began noticing a pattern.The projects that turned out best, she said, were not necessarily the ones completed after sleepless nights and endless revisions. Some of the strongest ideas came from designers who had taken a proper break and returned to work rested.That changed the way she thought about creativity.‘CREATIVITY IS A WELL, NOT A TAP’Sham compared creativity to a well rather than a tap.A tap can keep running as long as it is turned on. A well, however, can eventually run dry.In her view, designers may appear capable of continuously producing ideas, but pushing them without enough rest can gradually drain the creativity their work depends on.“I started comparing creativity to a well instead of a tap,” she wrote. “A tap never runs empty. A well does, and once it does, no amount of pushing brings the water back faster.”That thinking eventually became part of how her studio operates.Employees work five days a week, from 9 am to 6 pm. If a project starts falling behind, Sham says she would rather add another designer to the team than ask existing employees to sacrifice their weekend.It is a decision that can have a very real commercial cost.Clients who expect their designers to be available outside working hours may choose another firm. Sham says she accepts that trade-off.For her, protecting employees’ time is not something that can be sacrificed whenever business gets difficult.THE COST OF SWITCHING OFFSham’s argument is not that deadlines do not matter. It is that the answer to a deadline should not automatically be more hours from the same people.She also pointed to Microsoft Japan’s 2019 four-day workweek experiment as an example of how reducing working time can challenge conventional assumptions about productivity.During the month-long trial, Microsoft Japan gave employees Fridays off while maintaining their pay. The company reported that sales per employee rose by nearly 40% compared with the same period the previous year. More than 90% of employees who responded to a survey said they were satisfied with the arrangement.It was a short pilot, and the productivity figure was reported by Microsoft itself, rather than being evidence that a shorter workweek will produce the same result everywhere.For Sham, however, her own experience has led her to a similar conclusion: rested employees often produce better work.And burnout, she argues, does not necessarily arrive as a dramatic breaking point.“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, perhaps, is the business case behind her seemingly expensive rule.A designer who works through Saturday may technically give a client more hours. But if exhaustion makes the work slower, less creative or less interesting, those extra hours may not deliver the value the client is paying for.SHE CHOSE THE RULE OVER THE CLIENTSham’s post struck a chord with LinkedIn users, with several praising her decision to put boundaries ahead of client demands.But the more interesting part of her approach is not simply that she believes weekends should belong to employees. It is that she has accepted the business consequences of that belief.She has lost clients because of the rule.Her response is not to quietly make an exception when the next big deadline arrives. It is to keep the rule and change the size of the team when the workload demands it.When the work piles up, she hires another designer.In an industry where being permanently available can still be mistaken for commitment, Sham has chosen a different calculation: fewer hours for her employees, more people when necessary, and the possibility of losing business along the way.- EndsPublished By: Srimoyee ChowdhuryPublished On: Aug 13, 2026 08:28 IST