While most of the internet was refreshing its inbox the week after the Fourth of July, one Bowe Digital teammate was two-stepping to live music at the Grand Ole Opry. Another was having her first-ever spa day with her husband. Someone else spent four days doing nothing more productive than sitting at the pool with her kids. Nobody felt guilty about any of it.

That’s because nobody was working. The whole company was closed.

We’ve already told you we close every Friday, and we made that call in 2022. But once a year, we take it a step further: the entire office shuts down for a full week in the middle of summer. Not staggered PTO. Not “check Slack if something’s on fire.” Everyone, off, at the same time.

Here’s what you notice when an entire company goes dark for a week, told through the people who lived it.

“I Got Bowe Digital Culture Shock In The Best Possible Way”

Robin Asher spent her break the way you’d hope everyone could: camper hitched, motorcycle loaded, headed to Nashville for a run of live shows at the Opry, the Station Inn, the Nashville Symphony and Music City Bar & Grill. But the better story happened before the trip.

Robin was a teacher for 16 years. She joined Bowe part-time during COVID, and it took about six weeks before she asked what she needed to do to go full-time. “I miss my students and the people at school,” she said, “but I got Bowe Digital culture shock in the best possible way.”

What shifted for her wasn’t just the vacation days. It was learning to believe there’s such a thing as being done. “I’ve learned in our industry that we are never done, so there will always be things to do,” she said. “I do what I can in the time given for work, and the same in my life. Staying present anywhere these days is hard, but we have to keep trying.”

“Bowe Values You AND Your Family — and That Speaks Volumes”

Heather Lunsford’s break looked simpler on paper: swimming, fishing, playing outside with her kids, soaking up summer days with, as she put it, her favorite humans. Nothing fancy. That was the point.

“These breaks are such a game changer for me mentally,” she said. “Knowing I have a summer break with the kids helps SO MUCH.” Fridays carry their own weight too, and chores get done without eating into weekend family time. Heather says she’s never had benefits like this before, saying: “Bowe values you AND your family, and that speaks volumes for me.”

“It’s Night and Day”

Jim Moorman spent years in salaried finance roles logging 50-plus-hour weeks while leadership still asked for more. Now he’s got two kids at home and one on the way, and he says the extra time off has been “a lifesaver.” His take on why it works: “All companies claim they care about work-life balance, but very few practice what they preach. At Bowe, leadership really does care about your home life and your mental health.”

Dorinda Davis puts an even finer point on it, comparing Bowe to a company she worked for over three decades: “I was expected to drop everything to work whenever needed, and never felt valued as a person. In contrast, Bowe does not expect us to work on our days off.” Now, she says, she comes back on Mondays “truly ready to work” instead of dreading it, and it’s made her appreciate her job more than she expected to.

Meanwhile, Everyone Else Was Just Living Their Lives

Some of our team just used the week the way a week off is supposed to be used: Alyssa Cazee and her husband finally tried a spa day. Katie Hunt spent a few days at the lake with her mom and came home to deep-clean her apartment for fun (her words, and we believe her). Macey Northern flew to Florida with no laptop and no notifications. Abigail Geary hosted family for the country’s 250th and finally tackled the household to-do list that never gets touched during a normal work week. Jill Voris knocked out DIY projects, got in some reading and spent extra time with her grandkids — no big trip, just a week that was actually hers.

That range is the whole point. A mandated team retreat (we’ve done those, too) tells people how to spend their time off. A real week off hands the time back and gets out of the way.

Trust Goes Both Ways

Macey Northern described what this kind of time off signals better than we could: “It says the company actually trusts people to manage their workload rather than measuring commitment by hours logged.” Katie Hunt explained: because the whole company closes at once, she doesn’t have to worry about dumping her tasks on a teammate the way she would if she were the only one on vacation.

But none of this works without trust and communication on the other side of the table, too. You can’t close an entire company for a week if your customers spend that week wondering where their work went. That trust is earned by communicating and working ahead of deadlines, so nobody’s ever waiting on us when the out-of-office message goes up. We also have a dedicated support email our customers can use on Fridays, for anything that genuinely can’t wait. 

All in all, our customers treat us like an extension of their own team, because that’s how we show up for them the other 51 weeks of the year. 

The Research Backs This Up

If our teammates haven’t convinced you to take the week off, the data might. Looking into why some time-off policies work and others fail, a few things surprised us. 

• Unlimited PTO by itself tends to backfire. A 2026 roundup of unlimited PTO statistics found employees with it typically take fewer days off than those with a set allotment, and a separate 2026 Patriot Software survey found two-thirds still cap themselves at 15 days or fewer even with no limit. Without a number, people take less freedom, not more.
• The real barrier is guilt about coworkers, not the policy. A CNBC-reported survey found roughly 30% of employees worry about falling behind. A 2025 report on vacation guilt found nearly half of American workers don’t use all their time off, often citing guilt. Closing the whole company removes that math entirely.
• Leadership has to visibly take the time, not just allow it. A 2026 breakdown of Gallup’s manager research shows managers account for most of the difference in how engaged their teams feel, including whether people feel safe stepping away. A benefit that’s technically available but never modeled from the top usually goes unused.
• Most people never learn what “finished” feels like. Surveys on vacation habits consistently find most employees still check in while away. A full office closure (well communicated to customers in advance) where there’s genuinely little to nothing to check is one of the few ways people will fully disconnect instead of just being told to.

None of this takes a massive overhaul. It takes treating time off as something worth protecting on purpose, not something people have to figure out on their own.

What Does Your Team Say About You?

We didn’t write this post because we think we’ve solved company culture. We wrote it because we run a business, and running a business well is part of what we bring to every client relationship.

If you asked your own team questions about your company culture, what would come back? That’s worth sitting with. Getting real feedback like this is valuable for more than internal culture. It’s some of the best marketing material a business can have, because it’s human instead of manufactured. If you want help turning your own team’s or customers’ feedback into stories like this one, that’s exactly what we do.