I run a small IT service company in India along with 3 of my friends. We are 7 years old now and have team of around 50 developers.

We have 1st and 3rd Saturdays off and we work on rest of them in a month.

Inspired from following article about 40 hour work week culture in Microsoft.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jmeier/archive/2010/10/21/40-hour-work-week-at-microsoft.aspx

We were thinking of having 40 hour work week schedule at our company too.

If we implement 40 hour work week, what should we do about the 2 Saturdays we are working on, assuming everyone will finish their 40 hours from Monday to Friday.

Should we keep those Saturdays completely off?

OR

Should we have some interesting activities, fun games, coding war games, lunch, movies etc on those 2 Saturdays?

What will make developers more happy?

1) A Saturday completely off

OR

2) A Saturday completely for their own selves for doing anything they want, for e.g. a pet project, a blog post, improving writing skills etc.

We want happy developers and great teams in our company so we are seeing this dilemma as an opportunity to do that.

Since HN community comprises mainly of programmers and think tanks of our world, I think I will get the right answer here.

Thank you in advance.