Thirty percent of workers around the world surveyed last year said they would consider seeking a new job if their current employer required them to return to the office full time. Millennials are especially resistant. In response to the Covid pandemic, PepsiCo, Meta and General Motors, among others, have incorporated remote work into their corporate cultures.
But in a truly flexible workplace, people would control not just where they work but also when. Southwest Airlines allows pilots to choose between morning and evening flight schedules. A few tech companies, including Automattic and DuckDuckGo, have work-anytime policies that enable employees to become nomadic and travel the world or simply run weekday errands. But such opportunities remain rare.
“I think it’s really a shame that more companies don’t take advantage of it,” said Azad Abbasi-Ruby, the senior market research analyst at DuckDuckGo. He added, “We get so much done, and I think a lot of it has to do with this flexibility, letting people work when they’re most productive.”
Flextime is an employee handbook buzzword, but in practice it is not widely used. Whereas some roles are legitimately time-dependent (teachers need to be at school in the morning), many are not. If more employers truly embraced flexible schedules and allowed employees to work at the times that are best for them, experts say, the benefits would be a healthier and more productive, creative and loyal work force.
There are any number of reasons workers might want more control over when they work. People may live in one time zone and work in another; for example, financial analysts in Seattle or Los Angeles might not want to start their day at 6:30 a.m. to coincide with the opening of the New York Stock Exchange.
Or they may have a life situation, such as a disability or caregiving responsibility, that requires attention during standard work hours. Some 700,000 parents of young children left the U.S. work force in 2020, many of them because their children were suddenly schooling from home. Surveys by the Pew Research Center indicate that even before the pandemic, many mothers, in particular, felt that conflicts between work and family obligations had damaged their careers.
Our bodies also would benefit from more flexibility. Each of us has a personalized rhythm known as a chronotype — an internal timer that governs when we naturally fall asleep and when we are most alert. For more than half of adults, biological bedtime falls after midnight, which means that a typical 9-to-5 work schedule throws many of us out of sync.
Our early-bird-gets-the-worm ethic often gets applied to office workers who could do their work just as effectively on their own time. A 2014 study found that supervisors who are early risers perceive employees who arrive later as less conscientious, regardless of job performance. Other studies show that workers are more creative and leaders more charismatic when they are not sleep deprived and when their work and biological sleep schedules align.
Recent pandemic upheavals could open the door for new kinds of workplace flexibility, according to Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a technology forecaster and the author of the books ‘Shorter’ and ‘Rest.’ “I’ve interviewed company owners who said, ‘In February 2020, work from home was the hill I would die on. I absolutely knew my company could never do it. And my people proved me wrong in three weeks,’” he told me. “What this tells us is that there is no assumption about how we work that should not be open to challenge.”
Dr. Pang suggested that employers should think less about time spent working and more about quality. He has identified about 130 employers, including Kickstarter and the government of Iceland, that have adopted a four-day, reduced-hour week without cutting salaries or sacrificing productivity. “The most impressive, most professional person is not the one who needs 80 hours a week to finish the job,” he said. “It’s the person who can finish it in 30 hours.”
With time flexibility, workers could devote their most energetic hours — typically mornings for early risers and afternoons or evenings for night people — to their most intellectually demanding tasks. People could attend their children’s sporting events or prepare lunch for an infirm parent. Workers with a chronic illness could absent themselves for an hour or two to manage a mild flare-up without having to take a sick day.
Dawna Ballard, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, who focuses on time and work, has a story she likes to tell to illustrate the importance of letting people work on their own schedules. Several years ago, her family got hooked on the delicious eggs with bright orange yolks laid by pasture-raised chickens from a local market. One week, there were no eggs because, she was told, the chickens were molting.
Chickens periodically drop their feathers and regrow them, a process so physiologically demanding that many stop laying until it’s over. Industrial farms accelerate molting through starvation, but here was evidence that seemed to suggest that when left to follow their natural cycle, chickens can produce superlative eggs.
Dr. Ballard immediately saw an analogy to people. Though often forced into rigid, standardized routines, we are biological beings whose productivity ebbs and flows not only over the course of a single day but also when weeks of intense labor create the need to recharge.
A few simple tweaks to work culture would make a big difference, Dr. Ballard and others say. Scrap all but the most essential meetings. Don’t expect remote workers to be always available or use invasive software to keep them on task. Focus on results and normalize later start times. To foster collaboration among workers who are on different schedules, companies could set limited core hours.
“The chickens, they had the pace that they’d like to go at. We all actually have that,” Dr. Ballard said. She added, “Every day, every minute can’t be the same.”
She said that this may be how machines work. But, she said, “that’s not how we work. We break down.”
(Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com)