Driven by our pandemic experience, not only the ‘where’ we work is changing, but also the ‘when’. Increasingly businesses are realizing that people don’t need to be chained to their office desk in order to be effective, nor do they need to work the traditional five-day week. Suddenly flexible working options that once seemed radical or simply impractical are gaining acceptance. Could this be the end of the working week as we know it?
Fewer Days, Same Pay
One idea being mooted is a reduced, four-day week without a reduction in pay. Labor unions and economists have extolled the productivity benefits of such an approach for some time, and now the results of a first-of-its-kind experiment in Iceland suggest they have a valid point. From 2015 to 2019, Iceland ran two trials involving more than 2,500 state workers, representing over 1% of the country’s entire working population, who moved from a 40-hour week to a 35 or 36-hour week. What it found is this: working fewer hours does not hurt productivity. In fact, in some cases, people were even more productive. Employees reported feeling less stressed and at risk of burnout, and said their health, wellbeing and work-life balance had improved. They also reported having more energy for other activities such as exercise, friends and hobbies and were able to spend more time with their families.
Similar trials are being run by employers across the world, including at Unilever in New Zealand, while New York’s Kickstarter will be testing it out next year. Governments too are getting on board including in Spain, Ireland and Scotland, and politicians in Japan and New Zealand have voiced their support.
Non-linear Work Days
But what if, rather than being constrained by a set number of days per week, your employer gave you complete freedom to choose exactly when (not to mention where) you’d like to work? If so-called asynchronized working takes off, that could soon be possible. Certainly, the idea of having no fixed hours and being able to choose when you work appeals to employees, particularly younger ones. In a survey of 2,000 UK office workers, two-thirds (62%) said they would choose to work in an asynchronous environment if given the opportunity, rising to 67% of those aged 16-34. Their top reason was the ability to fit work around their personal life and spend more time with friends and family, while more than a third said that they worked more productively outside of traditional hours.
Some employers are already embracing asynchronous working, such as tech firm Dropbox which has introduced ‘non-linear work days’ as part of its virtual first model. Employees are required to be available for “core collaboration hours”, but otherwise can choose when they work. The idea is to cater to individual needs and give employees the ability to work at times that best suits their lifestyle and responsibilities. “We want to prioritize impact and results instead of hours worked,” the company says.
Extending The Working Week
Engineering and design firm Arup is taking things one step further and, following successful trials in the UK and Australia, has decided to let staff choose their working days; employees are able to work their hours flexibly over the course of Monday to Sunday, meaning they aren’t constrained by the traditional working week. Commenting on this new arrangement Jerome Frost, Chair of Arup’s UK, India, Middle East and Africa region, said, “Building significant flexibility into our colleagues’ working lives is something we’ve been experimenting with since before the pandemic. With the opportunity to flex working hours over the course of a seven-day week, we’re empowering our members to find a working pattern that allows them to be at their personal best while delivering high quality work for clients.”
A Break With Tradition, Perhaps
Does this mean that the traditional work week is dead? For many organizations it’s certainly in its final throes as they embrace more and more flexible working patterns. However, widespread four-day week and anytime working is still some way off.
Everyone working one less day a week for the same salary sounds idyllic, but it’s not problem-free. One of the challenges is ensuring that employees don’t end up working longer hours without being compensated and that clients and suppliers are supportive of the arrangement. Equally, empowering people to design their own work schedule is great in theory but if you’re a client-facing organization it’s hardly practical to have your entire workforce exercising its freedom at the same time. There needs to be a certain amount of planning and predictability, plus too much of people doing their own thing and rarely syncing up can be detrimental to company culture.
As a result of the pandemic, long-standing assumptions about how and where we work are changing. Many of us have more flexibility than we ever thought possible, but whether we’ll all be working anytime, anywhere in the future remains to be seen. Now more than ever, companies have the opportunity to shake things up. The power to decide what flexible looks like is theirs – ultimately it all boils down to what’s best for their business, their employees and their clients.
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July 13, 2021 at 08:29PM
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Is This The End Of The Traditional Five-Day Working Week? - Forbes
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