Balancing 24/7 Defense and Employee Wellbeing with ‘SOCtember’

The pressure in the cyber security industry is constant, and threat actors do not take holidays or weekends off. Yet at SEP2, our motto has always been Tech Driven, People Powered. We believe that to protect our customers effectively, our people need space to rest, recharge, and bring their best selves to work.

Back in 2022, SEP2 joined the national 4-Day Week Campaign with our 4ugust initiative, taking place in the month of August. What started as an experimental summer benefit evolved into an ongoing commitment to well-being. Balancing flexible summer working with a 24/7/365 UK-based SOC demanded a tailored approach, leading us to create SOCtember to ensure our analysts received equal time off while keeping customer defense seamless.

We sat down with Co-Founder and CEO, Paul Starr, to talk honestly about the campaign, discuss operational hiccups, and look at the genuine benefits of running a four-day work week across a growing cyber security business.

Q: What made you want to trial a four-day work week at SEP2 in the first place?

Honestly, it came back to who we are as a business. We talk a lot about being People Powered, and in cyber security, burnout is a massive issue. Our Head of Information Security, Jon Cumiskey, talks about human error as a signal rather than a failure. When people are exhausted, they make mistakes.

As we moved past the pandemic, a concerning pattern emerged within our ranks: annual leave was going unused, and the threat of exhaustion was becoming all too real. With travel restrictions in place, many of our people had fallen into a habit of remaining anchored to their workstations.

To address this head-on and safeguard the wellbeing of our staff, we took decisive action in 2022. We launched a pilot program during the month of August, the precursor to our 4ugust initiative providing every employee with an additional day of rest each week.

Our objectives were straightforward:

• Promote mental clarity by encouraging time away from digital displays, allowing our team to disconnect and focus on personal rejuvenation.
• Enhance operational collaborations by requiring departments to coordinate closely, streamlining handovers and ensuring collective responsibility for service continuity.

This initial response to a challenging period quickly demonstrated its value. Based on the positive outcomes of these early experiments, we officially integrated 4ugust as a cornerstone of our corporate calendar in 2024.

Maintaining 4ugust as an annual commitment remains a key part of our People Powered philosophy. It serves as tangible evidence that we can champion work-life balance and mental health while maintaining the seamless, round-the-clock defense our customers rely on.

Cyber security is a 24/7/365 industry. How did that first experiment go?

Paul Starr

It was definitely a learning curve. For our office-based and technical consultancy teams, it went smoothly, but when you operate a 24/7 Security Operations Centre (SOC), things are rarely simple.

Trying to compress 24/7 shift rotations into a single month made it obvious that our analysts would be under unnecessary strain. We paused the initiative for the SOC during that first run so we could protect our customer service levels, look at the scheduling realistically, and build a framework that actually worked for a round-the-clock team.

Q: How did you fix that challenge for the SOC team?

Paul Starr

That challenge was the start of our very own initiative, ‘SOCtember’. It might not sound quite as catchy as ‘SOCtober’, but ensuring equal treatment for our SOC team was what mattered most. Our front-line analysts needed those same well-being days, but trying to squeeze them all into August created real operational bottlenecks. Spreading them across August and September solved that immediately.

Q: What feedback have you had from employees and clients?

Paul Starr

The feedback from our team has been incredible. People have used their extra time off for childcare over the long summer holidays, short trips away, or simply getting back into personal hobbies.

For our customers, the impact has been purely positive. Because we planned handovers so meticulously, our service delivery remained completely seamless. When you have well-rested, highly motivated analysts monitoring your systems, everyone wins – happy employees lead to happy customers.

Q: What is your advice to other tech or security leaders considering a similar initiative?

Do not treat it as a rigid, one-size-fits-all box-ticking exercise. Be flexible, listen to your team, and measure the results honestly. If something does not work on the first try, adjust the framework rather than abandoning the goal. Investing in your team’s wellbeing is the single best operational decision you can make.