New ways of working will require the breaking of old habits, and managers will need to work with employees to ensure they don’t end up overworking with the loss of a formal structure, says Amrit Sandhar. But a new approach can replace the rigid working of nine-to-five, allowing us to maximise organisational output, and personal wellbeing
It seems that hybrid working and working entirely from home will become a permanent aspect of work going forward, with 73% of workers saying they want flexible work options to continue, according to the recently released Microsoft future trends report 2021.
According to the report, ‘extreme flexibility and hybrid work will define the post-pandemic workplace’ with 67% of leaders saying they are looking to redesign their offices for hybrid working.
But what is flexible working?
Is flexible working simply the ability to work from home on the days we choose to?
Most employees have been working from home for at least a year, so one would think they would have benefited from the improvements to their work life balance. But according to the Microsoft report, four out of five employees feel overworked, while 39% feel exhausted.
The impact? It seems that 41% of employees are considering leaving their employment once the pandemic is over. The Prudential’s Pulse of American Work Survey report showed that of those employees looking to leave, the number one reason which would influence whether they stayed with their current employer, would be flexible work schedules.
Many organisations have historically been reluctant to break away from the status quo of working in the office/ work location, and from a rigid 9am to 5pm schedule. Now that we have seen another approach is possible, is it worth considering what flexible working could really mean, and how it could improve organisational productivity and employee wellbeing?
How did the nine-to-five way of working come about?
Was there a scientific basis for the nine-to-five, which showed people perform at their best during this time, to drive greater productivity whilst maximising personal wellbeing?
I don’t think you will be too surprised to hear that whilst it was introduced to limit employees working excessive hours, at that time, no one could have conceived that when we work might be as important as how long we work.
It’s worth reminding ourselves of where the eight-hour day came from. Very few people in employee engagement circles or beyond, are aware of the impact and changes introduced by the early industrialist Robert Owen (1771-1858).
Owen became the owner of a textile mill in New Lanark, Scotland and saw the conditions young children and adults were working in. He wanted to limit the hours people were expected to work, ban the employment of those under 10 and provide education for those aged below 18. While his ideas were too radical to be adopted by other mill owners, he sought to free himself of micromanaging, by introducing a method that allowed ‘managers’ or superintendents, to appraise work of employees, implementing a crude appraisal system.
It took until 1867 for the US to pass labour laws to protect employees from working excessive hours, and through the influence of Henry Ford who adopted the 8-hour day, the world of work changed forever.
Back to the present day, and the very act that was meant to protect employees, didn’t take into account one thing: when those eight hours would be worked. This might seem like a minor point, but it could be having a significant impact on our ability to perform. How we function is governed by our internal body clocks.
This has been the focus of a field of science called chronobiology, which looks at our natural 24-hour body rhythms. Our bodies have internal rhythms that control when we sleep, when we wake and when in the day, we experience peaks and dips in our levels of alertness. Broadly speaking, most people sit into two main camps when it comes to our internal body clocks: the early ‘larks’ and the night ‘owls’. The larks represent those of us who tend to be early to bed and early to rise, whilst the owls represent those of us who go to bed late and subsequently wake up late. The larks do their best work in the mornings, and the owls generally work best at night.
Many of us know how hard it is to get teenagers out of bed in the mornings – they could easily sleep well into the afternoon given the opportunity. They need much more sleep – their brains experience peak alertness when many adults are feeling tired and want to sleep.
Generally, the older we get, the more our internal body clock shifts from being owls to larks, meaning we feel more tired, earlier, and feel more alert in the mornings. Despite this knowledge, our schooling and structure of working has continued to be set to a rigid timetable that may be negatively impacting upon our wellbeing and productivity.
Changing the way we work
During 2020 and 2021, every organisation was forced to change the way people worked, relying on home working to keep businesses profitable and operating. Despite the challenges, employees made this a success and demonstrated that home working could make a significant difference to the way we work, especially for those who had suffered long commutes, who could now enjoy more time asleep. With organisations forced to trust employees, one would have hoped that this was the beginning of the great ‘reset’, where the world of work could be looked upon through a fresh perspective.
However, with companies like Apple recently announcing that it is expecting all its employees to return to their offices through a hybrid approach by September 2021, and with more organisations likely to follow suit, it looks like we may be missing an opportunity to fundamentally change the way we work, to align to our natural biological rhythms.
We are at the stage where we may have up to 5 generations in the workplace, whose sleeping patterns, levels of alertness and health and wellbeing will be impacted because of a way of working forcing them all into a rigid nine-to-five structure. The younger generations could be adversely affected because they usually need to sleep for longer and later. They may prefer working late at night, whereas older generations may find they feel tired in the afternoons and would benefit from a mid-afternoon nap to recharge themselves. For them, they may do their best work early in the morning.
In a global economy, so many of us are used to working with people in different time zones. We expect there to be a delay in when people may reply to us, but we make use of the time when we cannot communicate, as well as making the most of the small overlaps when the time zones allow both parties to collaborate. We don’t work with them in the same offices, see them daily, yet somehow, we find ways of getting work done. We trust that people will engage with us as soon as they can, and expect pauses in responses due to this – we factor them in. Yet as soon as we begin thinking about our domestic employees working from home, where they can ‘choose’ the hours they work best within a 24-hour cycle, suddenly questions can get raised of ‘how will we manage them?’, or ‘how will we know they are actually working?’
Breaking the structure
Breaking free of a nine-to-five structure also means breaking free from the mindset that people need managing. We stand at the threshold of an opportunity to fundamentally change the way we work, aligned to our natural biological cycles, allowing us to sleep when we need it, wake up fresh, get great work done when we experience those peak levels of alertness, take naps when we feel those dips in energy, and going to bed aligned to when our bodies need the rest. This approach will not only have a positive impact on our physical health & wellbeing but will also mean we’re focused and fully present at work, without having to constantly demonstrate being present in work. We often hear phrases of how trust must be earned. Think about it though, when most employees join an organisation, they join engaged – disengagement is what happens because of what we do to them – the experiences they have.
The focus should be on bringing out the best of every employee. This requires being clear with them of what needs to be done, why it’s important and how it fits into the strategy and objectives of the organisation, the standards required, and timescales the work needs to be completed by. Then we need to provide employees with an environment where they have full flexibility to work when they work best, accepting that people will email each other at any time within the 24-hour cycle, because we all work differently. Afterall, it is this approach that has resulted in the success of sites where freelancers offer their services from across the world.
While this new way of working will require the breaking of old habits, and managers will need to work with employees to ensure they don’t end up overworking with the loss of a formal structure, through this approach we might finally be able to replace the rigid working of nine-to-five, allowing us to maximise organisational output, and personal wellbeing.
Amrit Sandhar, founder of The Engagement Coach, is on a mission to ignite the passion back into work through developing great cultures and great leaders. He uses a data-driven approach to identify the issues organisations are struggling with, and to help them create solutions for sustainable change and improved productivity.
