The Forgotten
THIS IS ALL WELL AND GOOD for knowledge workers with their fancy jobs that they can do from anywhere at any time, Robert, but what about me? I’m a nurse. You think I can just take my patients home with me to look after between my naps and yoga classes? Or get all my checks done in three hours then bugger off for the rest of the day and hope no one dies?
“And what about pilots? Can’t really work for a couple of hours then step out to the gym for a workout, can they? What about process workers? What about tradespeople? What about lawyers and other professionals who bill by the hour?
“None of these are really relevant to your precious flexibility, are they? But they probably need it more than anyone – they work the hardest and are the most stressed. They’re the ones doing the real work. Are you just going to brush them under the carpet?”
Good questions – comments I’ve read and heard over the years personified in one sharp-witted, imaginary nurse. And no, I’m not going to brush you under a carpet or hide you in a cupboard. Actually, here’s a whole chapter, just for you!
Flexibility is often seen as the realm of people who aren’t constrained by location and time – those who could, if they were allowed, work from home, or work at flexible times throughout the day, like the knowledge workers I’ve already talked so much about. Those who don’t have hungry customers or dying patients or bricks that need to be laid.
Part of the reason for that perception is because of the perception of flexibility itself: that there are only two useful types, remote work and flexitime. But if you go back to the first couple of chapters you’ll remember that there are many different types of flexibility. And what matters most isn’t the type, but how it’s used. According to our description:
Flexibility is meant to maximize the positive effects of work on an individual while reducing or eliminating the negative effects.
The concepts of energy buckets, productivity, Parkinson’s Law, and the Pareto Principle are all relevant in any industry. Humans are humans are humans, regardless of their job title. We have greater life satisfaction and do better work the more our needs are taken care of, period.
With these somewhat more restrictive jobs, there just needs to be a little more innovation, a little more boldness, and a slightly different approach to the practicalities of getting the work done. I’ll show you what I mean by discussing examples in three industries that have been mostly “forgotten” in conversations about flexibility: manufacturing, construction, and healthcare.
Flex and Bread (Manufacturing)
I’d been out of work for about six months. My second retrenchment had taken a heavy mental toll, and I was coping by following some dreams: trying my hand at writing a fantasy novel, learning computer-aided design, and attempting to escape the normal working world by playing with entrepreneurship (this is about the time of the Spectacular Men’s Underwear Failure of 2014).
Unfortunately, these pursuits were all revenue negative, and I didn’t have much of a nest egg to fall back on (I had no egg). I needed to get a haircut and get a real job. But no one was hiring. Well, no one was hiring me. Things were getting dire.
Then I went to the gym. I bumped into someone I’d met years earlier and we remembered each other enough to have a polite conversation. I told him I was looking for work; he told me he was recruiting for process workers. That afternoon I passed his company’s physical tests and got a job that, over the next few months, opened my eyes (again) to how needlessly terrible the “normal” working world can be.
At this anonymous garlic bread factory, an ordinary day looked a little like:
3:40 am: Alarm rings. Drag myself out of bed, shower, eat a spoonful of coffee.
4:00 am: Start driving to factory, playing loud metal to stay conscious.
4:45 am: Get changed into whites with a bunch of other sleepy people.
4:50 am: Do some stretches, and warm up shoulders and knees and neck.
4:55 am: Walk into factory with other workers and line managers, wash hands, find a station (position next to a conveyor belt with a specific role).
5:00 am: Production starts. Start loading bread onto conveyors as fast as I can while rolling bread dollies into place with my feet because there’s no time to turn around and position anything with your hands because if you stop loading bread for even a moment the people start shouting at you to “fucking hurry up” and that you’re holding up the line.
5:30 am: Everyone moves one step around the equipment to a new position and I breathe a sigh of relief to be doing something a little different for the next half-hour. (The point of the rotations is to keep you from going insane, and to rest whichever body part was doing the most work at the last position.)
7:02 am: Packets of garlic bread are all over the floor. One of the wrapping machines is broken and has been breaking down continuously for the last hour, but no one is trying to fix it. Every time it breaks, the unsealed packages (with the bread inside) are thrown off the conveyors onto the floor by the process workers nearby. Production continues. The line manager speeds up the machines and tells us to work faster to catch up with the bread that we’ve lost, so now we’re losing bread even faster (LOL).
7:35 am: The wrapping machine breaks badly enough for the line manager to finally stop production and call over the engineer. I help pick up a mountain of bread off the floor and fill up nearby bins.
9:00 am: Half-hour brunch. Eat as many carbs (garlic bread, obviously) as possible to try to restore energy for the next four hours of madness.
2:00 pm: Get changed into my own clothes. Drive home. Too exhausted to think. Sit and watch TV and try not to move body for the rest of the afternoon and night.
No one wanted to be there. Not the workers. Not the line managers. Not the production managers. And certainly not the plant manager, whom I never saw in the factory. A motley bunch of people were putting up with this weird hell until they could find something else to do; for those who had been there for five or ten or more years, this something else was proving elusive.
In the first couple of weeks, with my experience in process improvement and manufacturing, my mind raced with ways the company’s operations could be improved.
I saw the amount of wasted food – mountains of bread were thrown in bins several times a day. Each roll sells for about seven dollars when it finally does make it to the shops.
I saw how many people they needed just to butter bread (too many).
I saw how often their machines broke down, and how little things, like conveyor barriers being set too close or too far apart, were leading to other, bigger issues further down the line. But no one had the time or incentive to permanently fix anything.
I saw safety issues with the way people needed to lift and swing large metal dollies onto other piles of dollies in a split second before the next loaves needed to be slid into place – shoulders and backs were in constant peril.
I saw a room full of people literally being used as robots, and treated with as much cold indifference, and it was hurting not just the people, but the production as well.
I had my list, and I started bringing the items up to the line managers.
“Okay, great,” they’d say, looking at me with red, sallow eyes. “What do you want me to do about it?” They’d then rush off to the next circus of bread packets being ripped out of a misaligned wrapping machine.
I wasn’t the only one with ideas. I spent a lot of time talking to the other workers while in the trenches of bread warfare and during our short lunch breaks. Many of them had incredible ideas for how things could be safer, more productive, and less wasteful. They told me they’d simply stopped bringing them up because the managers didn’t care, or didn’t have any money, or were too busy, or various other reasons why nothing changed.
And eventually, as people do, they’d adapted to this way of operating. They were going through the motions, like machines, while the magical supercomputers in their heads were going to waste, like smartphones being used as bricks.
It didn’t take long for me to join the chorus of tired apathy, the bread zombies. I got used to it. I stopped suggesting improvements. I stopped talking to the line managers at all. Change management from the most junior of ranks wasn’t something I was being paid enough to do. I was there to make my money for the day, try not to wreck my shoulders and back, and then go home.
After a few months I found my “something else” and joyfully called the company to say I wouldn’t be returning the next day. But I think back on that time through the lens of flexibility and wonder how different that story could be.
The plant manager and production managers stood in front of all the workers and line managers in the lunchroom.
“Alright everyone,” the plant manager starts. “We’ve called you in here because we have some interesting news. With the number of injuries we’ve been having, along with the recent product recalls and problems with quality, we’ve decided to try something a little different. And I want you to hear me out before anyone starts yelling. We’re going to reduce the shifts by an hour. But …”
Protests and murmurs.
“But – hold on, hold on! Hear me out. We’re going to reduce shift hours but pay you exactly the same as we normally do for an entire shift: everyone will be going home with the same pay per shift.”
Shouts and cheers.
“Wait, I’m not done.” He beckons for quiet with open hands. “This comes with a catch, and the main reason we’re doing this: we want to shift our focus to doing things right, the first time, not the second time, or the third or fourth time. We’re going to slow everything down, we’re going to stop the lines when something goes wrong, and we’re going to get better at what we do. We’re going to earn that extra hour off by improving our productivity and safety.
“So what we’re gonna do is this: we’re not going to start immediately with an hour off. We’re going to start the lines late, and spend time at the beginning of shifts looking for improvements, as a team. As our productivity improves, then we’ll start reducing the day.
“And the goal is to get that down to an entire hour off, or maybe even more. As a team, we’re going to look over our entire operation and find out what’s causing the problems. We’re going to fix those problems, permanently, and we’re going to find ways to be innovative.”
“I’ve got an idea for a new buttering knife for ya!” one of the workers shouts from the back of the room.
“Whoa, we’ve already got some innovation happening,” one of the line managers laughs.
“Great!’ says the plant manager. “Write it down and let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
The meeting ends and everyone walks out, skeptical but buzzing.
A week later, a new type of knife is put into use that allows double the bread to be buttered in one stroke, thus halving the number of people needed for buttering (which was originally about ten per line).
The unneeded butterers then go and help out on other parts of the operation, where people are stretched to capacity, and to look for issues, and to help find solutions, which they do. And each solution increases the efficiency of the whole operation, reducing safety issues and allowing the machines and the people to slow down (thus increasing safety and efficiency even further).
Everyone is being taught continuous improvement principles by the process engineer, whom they had never had a chance to talk to until this moment. These skills will benefit them now and in their future roles here and elsewhere.
Less and less bread is being thrown onto the floor, each roll getting the tender love and care it deserves. The plant is being shut down earlier and earlier as they easily make their production targets. People are hungry to improve.
The line managers are no longer running from problem to problem. They’re spending time on each solution with the workers, adding their own ideas, which they had had years ago when they first started. Their eyes are brighter and less sallow.
The plant manager is out of his office and down on the floor, every day, amazed at the effects of the program and the number of smiles he sees across the plant.
Outside of work, the employees are sleeping more, they’re more able to move and do activities after work, they’re spending more time with their kids and with friends, and they’re skipping into their shifts and back out again.
Fewer people are calling in “sick.”
They pass the target of seven-hour shifts and get down to six hours within a month; they never look back.
Not a Pipe Dream
Flexibility has been rolled out, in real life, in the forgotten field of manufacturing, to great success – for both the workers and the businesses.
In Utopia for Realists, Rutger Bregman* provides historic examples of manufacturing companies reducing hours and/or days for their workers, and how these changes increased productivity, reduced accident rates, and created better lives for employees.
Back in 1930, W. K. Kellogg (the founder of Kellogg’s, the ones who make Corn Flakes) introduced a six-hour workday for his employees at his factory in Battle Creek, Michigan. As described by Bregman: “It was an unmitigated success: Kellogg was able to hire an additional 300 employees and slashed the accident rate by 41 percent. Moreover, his employees became noticeably more productive.” According to Kellogg himself, “The unit cost of production is so lowered that we can afford to pay as much for six hours as we formerly paid for eight.”1
The employees themselves were also able to experience “real leisure.” They spent more time with their families, and more time reading, gardening, and playing sports, and “churches and community centers were bursting at the seams with citizens who now had time to spend on civic life.”
(The six-hour days gradually reverted back to eight-hour days by the 1980s for various reasons, including new management teams in the 1950s who “denigrated and feminized” shorter hours; gender issues of men’s “status and control” being threatened by spending too much time in the home; and the cost of living increasing faster than wage growth, forcing people in low- to middle-income brackets to work longer hours to survive.)2
Another case described by Bregman occurred in 1974. British Prime Minister Edward Heath imposed a three-day workweek across the country to deal with energy reserve shortages (because of national unrest and miners going on strike).
This experiment lasted for three months. Instead of the predicted 50 percent drop in production across industry, such as steel producers, the final calculated fall in production – again, with two whole days less of work – was six percent.3
That is a drop in total production, but an incredible leap in productivity per unit time; one could argue that the benefit of two extra days of life for employees was worth that small loss in production.
(We can also assume that if the experiment ran longer, the workers, replete with full energy buckets, would have further increased overall productivity with greater engagement and ability to unleash their creativity.)
A more contemporary example of flexibility being embraced in this forgotten industry is Micron Manufacturing Co., a precision machining supplier based in, coincidentally, Michigan, in the town of Walker.
This is a family-owned company that employs thirty-nine people, and each of those thirty-nine people is treated like family. For starters, the owners trust their employees.
They trust them to figure out how to do their work (with the help of good processes) and to make their own decisions. And they trust them to schedule their own work hours and days.
According to the general manager, Dan Vermeesch, “[Employees] determine the days of the week they work, the hours of the day they work, the machines that they work on. It’s up to them. There has to be a primary backup for everything, and they coordinate their schedules amongst themselves [and] the vacation times they take.”4
This approach to building a strong company culture around trust, family, and good systems means that Micron doesn’t need supervisor positions – the teams are “self-directed.”
Yet even though visitors can’t understand how they can run a business like this, considering it to be akin to the Wild West, Vermeesch says it works. They can retain and attract employees in a tight employment market, and they have multiple generations of people in leadership and worker positions. And considering that they’ve been around since 1952, they can’t be going too far wrong.
Yet another case study of flexibility in a mechanized and standardized environment, although not manufacturing, is at the Toyota repair center in Gothenburg, Sweden, where the mechanics have been working a thirty-hour workweek (consisting of five six-hour days) since 2003.
The CEO of this repair center, Martin Banck, tells the story of their journey.5
It started, as these things often do, from a place of darkness and desperation.
Customers were having to wait four to five weeks to get their cars serviced, which was (obviously) resulting in customer dissatisfaction, which was resulting in staff being pressured to work faster and work longer hours, which was resulting in more mistakes (which take time and money to remedy – more on rework in the next section).
Their knee-jerk reaction was to consider expanding their operations: build bigger facilities and bring on more mechanics. But they also wondered if there couldn’t be a better (and less expensive) way.
Toyota literally invented continuous improvement in the form that’s been used by companies around the world. The Toyota Way, which means respect for people and Kaizen (a Japanese term for continuous improvement), has turned Toyota into the most recognized car brand in the world and one of the most successful companies in history. It’s not surprising, then, that before buying a bigger workshop, the repair center decided to sit down and analyze its operations to see if it couldn’t improve what it already had.
Looking at the center’s current state, the managers noticed a lot of stopping and starting of work for the mechanics’ numerous breaks, and there were slow-down and start-up periods for each of these breaks (including a lot of time the workers spent just washing all the grease off their hands).
They also found what I’ve been harping on about for most of the book: non-linear productivity, where the level of productivity changed throughout the day. This was most obvious in the last couple hours of the day, where mechanics were spending more time looking at the clock and looking forward to going home than concentrating on their work. (In fact, this was common throughout the day, as workers looked forward to, and began preparing for, each of the multiple breaks.)
Banck and his team decided to get rid of most of this stopping and starting, and they also decided to take care of their mechanics, who were clock-watching near the end of the day for a reason: it was hard and heavy work!
They did this by introducing six-hour workdays for the mechanics while still paying them for eight. They created two shifts for the week: a morning shift, from 6 am to 12:30 pm, and an afternoon shift, from 11:55 am to 6 pm, both with a half-hour break in the middle. The mechanics alternated between the morning and afternoon shifts each week.
(If you’re following with the math, yes, the afternoon shift is only five hours and thirty-five minutes long. To bring the average week for everyone up to thirty hours, they added short shifts on both Saturday and Sunday, which they worked once every eight weeks.)
An immediate win from this change was that the center’s open hours increased from eight hours a day to twelve, and they were now open on weekends, enabling customers to drop their cars off earlier and pick them up later (or on a day when they’re not working). So they captured more business purely from being more convenient for customers who work during the day.
But these shorter operating times also propelled efficiency through the roof.
The production numbers from 2014 show that for the 45,248 hours that the mechanics worked, they billed for 63,641 hours. Or, on average, for every six hours of work, they were able to charge for 8.4 hours. This is an efficiency factor of 1.4.
Compare this with the industry average, where a mechanic would normally work eight hours and bill for 7.36 hours (an efficiency factor of 0.92). In simpler terms, each of the mechanics at this service center was finishing more work in six hours than a typical mechanic finishes in eight.
To get an idea for how on earth this is possible, we can revisit the productivity graphs from Chapter 5, and imagine what they might look like for a typical employee at the Gothenburg center. Figure 11.1 shows the productivity levels during the eight-hour days and then after the change to six-hour days, based on the descriptions by Banck and our theories from Part Two of this book.
Figure 11.1. The productivity graphs showing the change from eight-hour days to six-hour days (this shows the morning shift; the afternoon shift went from 11:55 am to 6 pm, and would look very similar to the morning graph). As with the productivity graphs in other parts of the book, these are hypothetical and only meant for illustrative purposes.
Much of the stopping and starting was erased with the shorter shifts, since fewer breaks were needed. And true productivity levels (work goodness as opposed to going through the motions) were sustained at high levels for all the reasons outlined in Chapters 5 and 6: the Parkinson Effect was lessened, the workers’ energy buckets were less drained so they weren’t preserving their energy by working more slowly, and they had more incentive to work with purpose – to keep their six-hour shifts and the associated benefits.
The longer open hours and increased productivity saw the center’s sales grow by 30 percent and 25 percent respectively in the first two years of implementation, and profits increase by 25 percent in each of those years.
Like Andrew Barnes with his four-day week, Martin Banck couldn’t find any disadvantages with this new way of operating. The advantages, though, on top of the startling boost in productivity and business performance, were numerous:
• The company saved a butt-load of money by avoiding facility expansion and having to buy new equipment. (Later they did move into a new facility, but it was much smaller than their initial location due to the better utilization of space because of shorter shifts.)
• The company hired more people because of that better utilization of existing space in the workshop (and it was easy to attract those new employees).
• There has been very low employee turnover at the center. Everyone is living more sustainably, so they’re happy and don’t want to leave.
• Employees feel healthier (we can assume due to more time and energy to look after their health).
• Employees also have shorter commute times due to non-peak-hour travel to and from work.
• And yes, the customers have shorter wait times!
In Banck’s words, “It’s very simple, really: We work when we work, and then we have free time.”
Nothing fancy. Nothing complex. Nothing technical.
It seems that even in heavily mechanized and standardized environments there’s still room for humans to be human, and we’ll see this again in the following industry.
Trade Up (Construction)
Here’s a not-so-fun fact: men who work in construction kill themselves at 3.7 times the national average in the United Kingdom. The story is similar in the United States and Australia and, most likely, the rest of the world.6,7,8
Some might say it’s because of the high representation of young men in the industry, those who are statistically more likely to take their lives anyway. Or that the industry attracts people with a propensity for mental health problems.
I have another theory: this industry is structured in a way that drains employees’ energy buckets to the point where their lives are completely unsustainable, resulting in an obscene number of people feeling that life is simply not worth the pain. It uses humans as cheap, replaceable robots, who often end up escaping by self-destructing.
A study on suicide in the construction industry in Queensland, Australia, found that the following work elements caused issues in the personal and professional lives of workers.9 We can look at these through the lens of fundamental human needs and see how they may be creating numerous poverties for people in the industry.
• Long hours: typically ten to twelve hours per day plus travel; sixty to seventy hours per week isn’t uncommon. This causes poverties of almost all human needs, but specifically freedom, nature, affection (relationship issues are common due to exhaustion and time constraints), identity (becomes centered around work with little room for anything else), and leisure.
• Low job security: work comes and goes, and quite often there isn’t any guarantee of continuing employment. This causes poverties of protection, affection (financial conflicts at home) and freedom (people can rarely feel relaxed and secure enough to be free from the burden of financial pressure).
• Low job control: hours and methods are usually set, with little room to choose when, where, or how to do the job. This causes poverties of freedom, understanding (it’s difficult to feel mastery and to use your mind to its fullest), creation (little opportunity or an ability to develop creative solutions or innovations) and identity (similarly, it’s difficult to feel proud and respected when you have little autonomy).
• Male-dominated industry: endorses drinking, drugs, bullying, and toughness and makes it harder to seek help or show emotions, especially with less exposure to women. This causes poverties of affection, participation, identity, and protection.
• High stress: pressure to get the job done quickly, the requirement to be the breadwinner due to long hours that hinder their partners’ ability to work (if they have a family), and the other work elements already mentioned, which all cause increased levels of stress. This causes poverties of all needs (drains the entire bucket).*
Taking these elements into account, Figure 11.2 is an example of what a construction worker’s energy bucket may look like. Freedom, affection, and leisure would be the hardest hit of the needs. It would be safe to say these are rarely if ever filled for a construction worker.
Similarly, protection, creation, and understanding would be crying out.
The needs for nature (being that construction workers are often outside in the sun), participation, and identity (since they work with other people and have some fun conversations during the day), would be at least partially filled (albeit still quite drained for the reasons in the list above).
Subsistence would likely be the only need that has a chance to be filled, because there’s usually enough money, albeit from an unsecure source, to be made in this industry to look after food, medical, and housing requirements.
Remember what Max-Neef said about needs? If any fundamental human need is not adequately satisfied, a human poverty will be revealed, and each poverty generates pathologies. Well, here we have a poverty of at least six needs, and a partial poverty of another three. In other words, this bucket, and the corresponding well-being of the person, is fucking dry!
Suicide is the tip of the iceberg for the resultant pathologies. For starters, for each recorded suicide as many as 30 people attempt to take their lives, resulting in injury and trauma for them and their families.10 And what about the plethora of other less-newsworthy issues generated by these empty buckets?
What about depression and anxiety, relationship breakdowns, drug and alcohol addiction, gambling addiction, violence, poor health? These issues are all systemic in the industry, and they’re all directly related to how little these people are enabled to look after their human needs.
If possible, this story is about to get worse.
As highlighted in other parts of this book, the high social cost of rigidity seems to come at no value whatsoever to the businesses that employ these people. Let me rephrase that. It comes at a high cost to these businesses. These businesses pay extra to operate in a way that empties buckets and destroys lives.
One of the major and highly avoidable costs borne by construction businesses operating in this way is called rework, otherwise known as doing a job more than once because it wasn’t done correctly the first time things like installing a door on the wrong side of a building, cutting a steel angle to the wrong length, using the wrong paint, leaving a roof with gaps, or redoing an entire section of a building because it’s not what the customer wanted.
Figure 11.2. A bucket chart of needs fulfillment for a typical construction worker. This is a bird’s-eye view of the energy bucket presented in Chapter 5, quantitatively showing how satisfied (filled) each need (compartment) is, where 1 = not satisfied at all (empty) and 5 = fully satisfied (full).
The cost of rework in the construction industry is immense. One report on Australian businesses found that rework cost 12.3 percent of the total contract value for the projects investigated.11 That overall cost comprised 6.4 percent from direct costs (rectifying the issue, e.g., rebuilding a wall) and 5.9 percent from indirect costs (e.g., loss of time, hiring specialists to redesign a solution).
The report also found that these extra costs of rework are either underestimated or hidden because they’re deemed acceptable and normal parts of construction operations, and “managers tend to bury the errors on site without determining the causes and effects of those errors.”
Another paper that analyzed 19,605 rework events from 346 construction projects found that errors and their rectification reduced the profits from these projects by 28 percent.12
In a country like Australia, or the United States, or the United Kingdom, this amount of rework costs billions for the industry and the economy. It also drastically increases production times, thus producing even greater stress for supervisors and workers to rush and work long hours (consequently producing more issues).
And that’s where these issues lie. It’s become normal for people in construction to work long hours, and to rush to meet extreme deadlines. This reduces the time and energy to check things and confirm quality before moving on, and for good working relationships to develop between designers and supervisors and workers, which further increases pressure and the need to rush and work long hours. It’s a nasty cycle, but it’s expected.
And instead of the classic woodworking wisdom “measure twice, cut once,” the normal situation is “measure poorly, cut, find out it doesn’t fit, swear loudly and throw the piece away, walk all the way back to the saw, remeasure, cut again”; or worse, “the client didn’t ask for this type of window, swear loudly, take the window out and throw it away, call the engineer back to redesign the wall so that the new type of window fits, and then wait a week for it to arrive and be reinstalled.”
It’s Simple
Flexibility can change this entire industry to one that not only looks after its people and allows them to live sustainably but also reaches significantly higher levels of efficiency and good business practices. And it doesn’t need to be complicated.
Major solutions to rework issues (and other problems in the industry, such as general wastage of materials and time not associated with rework) are mainly based on improving the humanity of the work and how that improvement subsequently influences the technical results.
For example, a study from Nigeria on the cost of rework in the industry found that the biggest solutions to the causes of rework were team building, improved communication, greater commitment from managers and supervisors, and greater collaboration between trades workers and designers (which would, for example, enable trades workers to pick up practical issues during the design phase, before materials are ordered and work has started).13
And the Australian report from above stated that better quality assurance – taking the time to check and record the quality of work before moving on to the next step, and analyzing errors – was paramount in reducing rework.
These solutions come from workers and managers being wholly human: being engaged with their work, caring about and working effectively with other people (including clients), looking for problems and using the full potential of their minds to permanently solve them, and having managers who are committed to building the skills and abilities of the workers.
A prominent construction company in Australia, Mirvac, is blazing a trail in the industry by showing that it’s possible and profitable to treat their employees as humans.
They’re doing this by providing flexibility en masse to all employees, including construction crews. And, importantly, they’re showing that it can be simple.
Mirvac wanted to help more employees work with flexibility to increase engagement among the workforce, improve diversity and inclusion (and reap the associated benefits of improved business decisions), and “lead in agile workplaces” (they create contemporary and sustainable environments for other companies, and wanted to lead this philosophy by example).14
Being a construction company, the biggest challenge in implementation was to convince the construction workers and supervisors (85 percent of whom were male) that they needed and deserved flexibility, and that it was even possible for them to use it. Many of these employees had traditional views about the workplace, thinking that flexibility was only for “working mums.”
To help change these attitudes and encourage a greater uptake of flexibility among construction workers (and to normalize it across the whole business), Mirvac launched a strategic program called Building Balance. Part of that program turned out to be a masterclass in rolling out flexibility in this type of industry. It was called My Simple Thing, and it looked like this:
This initiative asked construction employees to think of one simple change they could incorporate into their work lives to improve their work-life quality, such as starting later to drop off the kids [to] school or finishing earlier one day per week for sports training. This simple idea, without significant infrastructure to support it, snowballed and drove significant change.15
It wasn’t just simplicity that made My Simple Thing successful. They incorporated other crucial elements into their program that I’ve already described in previous chapters.
They used The Talk. Teams discussed among themselves how the hell they could make this work, what their “simple things” were, and what they meant to them, and then they worked out the practicalities, without any systems or policies in place. (Ah, to be a fly on the wall when these blokes were figuring out how to help each other have more life outside of work!)
Leaders were role models. The CEO, Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, was an unwavering supporter of the program, and even asked her “entire executive team to report back in two weeks with their My Simple Thing and how they were making it work.” Other leaders were highly visible with their use of flexibility, including the head of construction, who “undertook a roadshow” to share his simple thing with other employees and what it meant for his personal and professional life.
They created a flexible working policy (as part of their overall program and strategy) and a charter to emphasise respect for each other and a focus on productivity over “time spent working.” These helped to formalize the program and provide a basis for what the company was trying to achieve.
An innovative training program was rolled out to help both employees and managers have the conversations about flexibility “that ensured both individual and business needs were being achieved.” This included “hiring actors to play out typical scenarios where employees request flexible working arrangements.”
If you revisit the Flex Scale in Chapter 2, you’ll see that Mirvac’s program easily sits at Level 3: Good Program, the highest you can get in an industry where people need to be present. Although in this case I would be tempted to call it a great program! The results speak loudly:
• The use of flexible working by construction employees increased by 181 percent, from 27 percent in 2015 to 76 percent in 2017.
• These employees reported a better balance between their work and life.
• Men have opened up more about their responsibilities as carers and parents, thus helping to shift traditional perceptions about gender in the business.
• Mirvac’s flexible working program is now one of the top four reasons new recruits are attracted to the company.
• Employee engagement is at 90 percent (when it was measured in 2018), which is “above the top global norm for their survey provider.” This high level of engagement improves multiple performance measures, as described in Chapter 5, such as productivity, absenteeism, turnover, theft, safety incidents, quality defects, and overall profits.
• Indeed, productivity improved at the company. Even with the high percentage of people accessing flexibility (including reduced hours, reduced days, part-time work, etc.), they found that the overall output from the workforce didn’t drop.
Sustainability and Scheduling
It’s true that construction companies need to compete with others in the tendering process, and the speed at which a project can be completed is an important selling point – clients don’t want to be sitting around waiting while they’re missing out on rent or expanding their business or whatever the structure is going to be used for.
This has been a driving force for many issues within the industry, including the high stress, long hours, lack of flexibility, and then the consequent rushing, errors, and rework.
But it seems like construction companies are trapped in a Catch-22: if they relax this pressure, if they try to reduce work hours and increase flexibility, wouldn’t they need to add more time onto their schedules, which would hurt their chances of winning work? If the other companies are still driving their workers as hard as possible, the one that relaxes will be left behind, won’t it?
Not necessarily.
Treating workers like humans by allowing them to rest and spend more time with their loved ones (and fill their buckets in all the other ways) will help with the bidding process in a number of ways.
The first reason is one we’ve discussed throughout the book: employees who are well-rested and able to fulfill their human needs on a regular basis are less likely to make mistakes, are going to be more engaged with their work, will have fewer safety incidents, will be more creative with solutions and ideas for improvement, and so on, all contributing to getting work done faster.
This won’t happen instantly, so it may take an investment in time for the full productivity benefits of more human ways of working to come through. But it will be worth it in the long term, especially when clients begin to realize that by relaxing schedules, they end up avoiding cost and time blowouts often faced in these projects.
The next reason is the increase in improvements across the business when people of all levels are able to spend time and energy developing themselves and upskilling. Greater flexibility allows people to decentralize their skills away from their primary job and learn other skills that will help them and the business overall.
For example, imagine the power of tradespeople learning computer-aided design. They can use this for better planning of resources and their own scheduling. They can attain a greater understanding of the design process and can have effective input at the beginning stages of a job. And they can move more easily into other positions of a company.
This is one example, but it shows that a business can become much more agile and ready for big changes (such as the impending AI revolution) when its people are more free and able to upskill and develop themselves.
The last reason flexibility helps with the tendering and bidding process is the business case for human sustainability. Many companies are looking more closely at their supply chains, not just their own operations, for ethics and social responsibility. This is being driven by employees and consumers, and it includes how workers are treated.
Companies need to impress employees to make sure that they can attract and retain them. And they need to impress consumers so that they keep buying stuff. Social responsibility is important to both these groups.
An article in the Telegraph described studies that found that “three quarters of employees wanted their companies to balance commercial success with social responsibility strategies,” and “93 per cent of consumers say they would buy a product because of its association with a good cause.”16
It’s not hard to see, then, that a business that’s looking to contract a company for a project (such as building an office tower) would be less likely to award a tender to a construction company that’s still creating toxic work environments for its employees.
That business will be much more attracted to the company that has proven that it cares about its employees by prioritizing their health and well-being. That business will be more likely to hire a company that publicly states that it treats its people with respect and that a high proportion of its people work with flexibility, thus enabling them to have a great work-life balance and fulfilling lives outside of their jobs.
Mirvac gets it. An article describing its CEO Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz’s success with the company summarizes her approach beautifully:
If you want people to join your company, to bring their best selves to work and stay with you, you need to treat them with understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for their welfare, the same way that you should treat the environment…. It is all about respect. Given the company was a sustainability champion, could it not extend that respect to its own workers?17
Caregivers with Empty Buckets (Healthcare)
The strongest skeptics of flexibility can be found in the quaint little trillion-dollar industry of healthcare. They’re not the loudest, they just dismiss the idea quickly and quietly as lunacy, something that doesn’t make sense or isn’t necessary.
We don’t have enough staff to reduce anyone’s hours or provide flexibility.
They’re used to working long shifts, and that’s how we know we’ve got the best: they can handle it.
If you start increasing handovers because of shorter shifts, there’ll be more mistakes. Patients will get hurt.
This is serious; it’s life and death. We can’t be messing around with the current systems.
It is serious. It is life and death. For patients and medical professionals.
The estimates for how many patients die in U.S. hospitals due to “preventable harm” (medical errors) range widely.
One study puts it at 250,000 to over 400,000 people per year18 (which would place medical errors as the third leading cause of death in the country, with 647,457 deaths due to heart disease and 599,108 due to cancer in 2017).19
Another study puts this figure at a more conservative rate of 123,603 deaths over the twenty-six years between 1990 and 2016, or roughly 4,754 per year.20
The enormous variation between these numbers is due to the filtering methods used by the researchers in determining what constitutes death due to medical error. But either way, it’s not good news. Each unit is a human life that was lost due to a mistake, something that could and should have been avoided.
What’s worse is that for each death, ten to twenty times more people suffer from serious non-lethal harm due to preventable errors. And, unlike construction, when mistakes are made in the healthcare industry, rework isn’t always possible.
What might be a major cause of these errors?
A common feature that is shared between healthcare and construction is the long, inflexible hours that the people in each of these industries are expected to work.
But the hours worked by doctors, the people with real lives in their hands, dwarf those of construction workers (and every other profession in the world). This is especially the case for doctors working in hospitals, and those in training (residents and interns), whose long hours are notoriously normal.
According to an article in The Atlantic, “residents in America are expected to spend up to eighty hours a week in the hospital and endure single shifts that routinely last up to twenty-eight hours – with such workdays required about four times a month, on average.”21
A study from the Australian Medical Association (AMA) found that “one in two doctors (53 percent) are working unsafe shifts that place them at a higher risk of fatigue,” and that shifts of seventy-two hours, fifty-nine hours, and fifty-three hours were reported.22
I could bore you now with studies that show that sleep deprivation has an effect on performance and alertness similar to that of a high blood alcohol content (BAC). (For example, after seventeen to nineteen hours without sleep, performance by subjects in one study across a range of physical and mental tests was equivalent to a BAC of 0.05 percent, and after longer periods of being awake it was equivalent to a BAC of 0.1 percent,23 double the legal limit for driving in Australia.) But why not go straight to the studies that link long shifts to increases in errors?
Research into the working hours of 2,737 residents in the United States found that when they worked between one and four extended-duration shifts (24 hours or more) in a month, in that month they were:
• More likely to report a fatigue-related medical error – by 250 percent
• More likely to report a fatigue-related preventable adverse event – by 770 percent
And when they worked five or more extended-duration shifts in a month, they were:
• More likely to report a fatigue-related medical error – by 650 percent
• More likely to report a fatigue-related preventable adverse event – by 600 percent
• More likely to have a patient die due to a preventable adverse event) – by 300 percent24
It’s not surprising, then, that according to a poll of U.S. residents, 80 percent would ask for a different doctor if they knew theirs had already been working for twenty-four hours or more.25
Most people have a good, common-sense idea about the effects of long hours on a human’s ability to do stuff accurately. And doctors are, regardless of how much their crappy system may try to disagree, human. And because they’re human, and they have human needs and human capabilities, these long and rigid hours end up hurting them as well.
A survey of 1,958 junior doctors in New South Wales, Australia, found that more than 56 percent of respondents “were concerned about their own health or safety because of the hours they work.”26
And another survey, with data from 12,252 junior doctors across Australia, found that those “who worked over fifty-five hours a week were more than twice as likely to report common mental health disorders and suicide ideation, compared to those working forty to forty-four hours per week.”27 (The average workweek for these doctors was fifty hours, and one in four were working more than fifty-five hours per week.)
Nurses (and their patients) are not immune to the effects of the long, rigid hours expected in the industry either.
One study of 11,516 registered nurses in the United States looked at the relationship between working hours and “adverse events and errors, which included needlestick injuries, work-related injuries, patient falls with injury, nosocomial infections [acquired or occurring in a hospital], and medication errors.”28
It found that when nurses worked over forty hours per week, the chances for each of these adverse events occurring increased by the following:
• Wrong medication or dose – 28 percent
• Patient falls with injury – 17 percent
• Nosocomial infections – 14 percent
• Work injuries (for the nurse) – 25 percent
• Needlestick injuries (for the nurse) – 28 percent
As with the doctors discussed previously, nurses who work longer hours are doing so not because they enjoy working long hours, but because of how the industry is set up. There are too few nurses, each of whom is stretched beyond their physical and mental capacities, and they have no other option than to do what they can with what they have, without complaint, of course, because people’s lives are at stake.
But it’s a travesty that an industry intended to help people ends up inflicting harm on those people who need help and the people whose life mission is to help others during their darkest and scariest moments.
The question of this chapter persists: does it need to be this way?
The Necessity of Flex
There are strong arguments, from within the industry itself, against any sort of increase in flexibility (such as reducing shift hours). But when they’re examined thoroughly, these arguments turn out to be good reasons for increased levels of flexibility. Here are the arguments, in no particular order:
• Argument 1: Longer shifts are valuable in the medical profession so that doctors in training can observe patients through the entirety of their visit and treatment. This is so they can gain a better understanding of the processes from beginning to end.
• Counterargument 1: Being exhausted and fatigued is not good for memory retention and learning, so even if the intern is observing more, less of that information will be translated to understanding and long-term memory.
In one of the studies about doctors discussed previously, it was demonstrated that “extended-duration work shifts adversely affected medical education, as the odds of falling asleep in lectures and while on rounds with attending physicians increased significantly.”29
Also, are there no other ways these interns or residents can observe and experience the spectrum of cases without having to see it for themselves?
Technology is constantly improving. What about simulations that speed up the overall process and focus on the important bits? Or simply more digital storytelling and demonstrations from one doctor to another, regardless of where they are on the planet?
As with any problem, there are always solutions; this situation sounds ripe for innovation, which flexibility has a habit of enhancing.
• Argument 2. Longer shifts are important to reduce the number of handovers from one doctor or nurse to the next. Handovers can create errors (e.g., due to the incoming health professional not having “all the information”), therefore more handovers can potentially increase rates of patient harm.
• Counterargument 2: This is more an issue with the handover process and systems than anything else. As people of science, doctors and nurses should be able to accurately describe what they’ve been observing with their patients, what actions have already been taken, what they expect to see next, and the next necessary steps.
But a doctor or nurse who has been working for twenty-four hours, or forty-eight hours, or seventy-two hours (!) will have trouble keeping their eyes open at the end of a shift, let alone be able to provide accurate descriptions of all the work they’ve done and what needs to be done next for all their patients.
What this system needs is professionals with energy left in their buckets at the end of their shift so they can effectively hand over patients to other professionals who are also recharged because they’ve had adequate time to rest. It needs professionals who have the energy and time to improve the handover system itself.
• Argument 3: There are simply not enough doctors and nurses, and budgets are consistently stretched to their limits, so it would be impossible to hire more people to cover for reductions in shift hours or days of work, or to cover flexible start and finish times, or to provide greater amounts of leave during the year.
• Counterargument 3: One of the difficulties in attracting people into the profession is that people (strangely enough) consider their own quality of life when applying for a job or starting a career. Yes, these potential employees may have a natural propensity to care for others, but they are also more aware than the average person of how work can and does impact their well-being, and that’s a sacrifice they are decreasingly willing to make.
An article from The Guardian reported that in the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom, 10,257 employees left the industry between June 2017 and June 2018 because of concerns over their long working hours. This was an increase of 178 percent compared to those who left for the same reason back in 2010–2011.30
This is bad news for an industry that is already stretched far too thin. (From that same article, the NHS has a current shortfall of almost 103,000 people, including over 40,000 unfilled nursing positions and over 9,000 unfilled doctor positions.) Medical systems will require increased growth as populations around the world get older and healthcare becomes more complex.
People in every industry are demanding and expecting higher levels of work–life balance, for all the reasons outlined in this book; those in healthcare are no exception. The only way to keep up with the modern working world and attract people is to provide flexibility.
The NHS has acknowledged this fact and has appointed a Head of Flexible Working to cope with the increasing demand for flexibility, especially from younger workers, including shorter shifts, part-time work, and other forms of flexibility.31
It Can Be Done
Flexibility can indeed be tricky in healthcare.
As with most of the other forgotten industries, employees need to be present to take care of patients, and there needs to be a certain number of people present at certain times (all the time in a hospital). In healthcare, if these criteria aren’t fulfilled, people die.
So something like remote work is mostly out of the question (excluding the growth in telehealth – being able to see patients and work with other medical professionals through digital media – where we’ve seen a drastic uptick due to the coronavirus pandemic.)
But flexibility in healthcare is far from impossible.
A two-year experiment in Gothenburg, Sweden (again!), saw the workdays of seventy aged-care nurses reduced from eight hours to six while maintaining their regular pay.
The results were similar to those found in the other experiments featuring shorter hours mentioned in the book: positive! The nurses took fewer sick days, reported better health and higher energy levels, and from a productivity and quality-of-care perspective, organized 85 percent more activities for patients, such as nature walks and sing-a-longs.32
One of the nurses, forty-one-year-old Lise-Lotte Pettersson, said, “I used to be exhausted all the time. I would come home from work and pass out on the sofa. But not now. I am much more alert: I have much more energy for my work, and also for family life.”
That increase in energy was found across the board. With their standard eight-hour days, only one in five of the nurses had energy remaining at the end of their shifts, but this shot up to four-fifths during the trial of shorter days. That’s 400 percent more nurses with energy left to exercise, work on passions, spend quality time with their families, develop themselves, and so on.
Other signs of improved health and well-being of the nurses were that they were less stressed, had less back, neck, and shoulder pain, and increased their physical activity by 24 percent.33 These nurses were moving up the health spectrum (see Chapter 4) in multiple ways.
There were, of course, skeptics of the experiment, especially those from the conservative side of Swedish politics who said that it was “crazy and irresponsible” to spend so much money to improve the lives of nurses; the cost was about twelve million krona (US$1.2 million) to hire the extra staff needed to fill the day at each facility.
But there would be savings for the healthcare system and the government as a whole beyond those measured in the trial, including some that wouldn’t become apparent until further into the future, such as:
• Reduced attrition rates and longer careers of the nurses
• Lower healthcare costs for the nurses due to improved health
• Lower healthcare and associated costs due to improved care of the patients and fewer medical errors
• Fewer and smaller claims due to work-related injuries of the nurses
• The benefits received by the broader community due to having more people who can give back in other ways besides their work (e.g., volunteering)
Also, there was seemingly no effort during the trial to recover costs through the gains in productivity, by optimizing staff numbers, for example. Given more time and support, the extra energy and motivation of the nurses could have been translated into improvements and innovations that either resulted in lower staff numbers or enabled more patients to be cared for per employee.
But, sadly, this program was only about a Level 2: Basic Program on the Flex Scale, thus it was doomed to be cut. It didn’t have full commitment from those at the highest levels of government, they didn’t incorporate continuous improvement principles to reduce costs, and the returns, financial and otherwise, weren’t measured in their entirety.
It’s likely that this could have been a much more successful program if these elements were in place. Then it would have been made permanent, and these nurses in Sweden would still be happy, energetic, and spiraling up the health spectrum.
Contrary to the financial findings from the trial above, when flexibility was implemented at Mercy Health, a health service provider in Victoria, Australia, savings of $23 million were found in its operations, comprising higher levels of productivity, higher retention levels, lower recruitment costs, and lower absenteeism.34
Mercy used a variety of types of flexibility to cater to different needs – a mature (and flexible) approach to the practice. The most popular types were part-time work (51 percent), flexitime (26 percent) and time-in-lieu (21 percent). The hospital took the approach that even though there are unique challenges in the industry, “there will always be a way to make some form of flexibility work for everyone.”
The final case comes from the Cleveland Clinic, one of the world’s leading medical institutions, and it’s a rather bold example.
What makes it bold? This healthcare provider has committed to prioritizing the health of patients and caregivers (by caregiver they mean any person who is employed by the organization, from bus drivers to doctors, because they’re all there for the benefit of the patient), and they do this by focusing on preventative healthcare and functional medicine. They get to the root causes of why people are getting sick in the first place, and they do something about it.
As the former CEO, Dr. Toby Cosgrove, puts it, they’ve moved from “sick care to health care.”35 Keeping people healthy and well is their overarching approach for both patients and employees. In their view, you can’t have one without the other; it makes no sense, financially or ethically or practically, to have one without the other.
Flexible work is simply one aspect of this committed and holistic approach to prioritizing people. The clinic provides part-time roles, flexible schedules, remote work (for an increasing number of roles where this is possible), and good paid-leave options.36 But, as with Mercy Health, and Mirvac in the construction section, the type of flexibility isn’t nearly as important as the attitude about why they are providing it – and their attitude is spot on.
From a business perspective, the clinic’s investments in the health of their employees, which include work flexibility and a comprehensive well-being program, have resulted in a savings of $3 for every dollar spent.37
In an industry that, unfortunately and ironically, hasn’t prioritized the health and lives of its staff, these cases show that it’s both possible and worthwhile to care for our caregivers.
In Conclusion
I’ve only discussed three, albeit important, forgotten industries in this chapter, but there are others that suffer from rigidity in their own unique ways, where these exact same principles can be applied to wonderful effect. Retail, transport, academia, hospitality, and mining are all areas that would benefit greatly from improved flexibility and general human-centeredness.
When looking into any of these industries, the principles in this chapter can be boiled down to one simple concept: any person who works for you is a human being. They have fundamental needs that if unfulfilled result in poor-quality lives and poor-quality work, and if fulfilled result in enriched lives and work that far surpasses what is commonly acceptable.
Practically speaking, all that we’ve learned in this part of the book about how to implement flexibility – and the suggested steps for how to roll it out – are also highly applicable to these industries. They will help you figure out what people need, and how it can be made to work for your business.
Just remember that the most important aspects are your level of commitment and your attitude toward the people themselves; and when you give them more time and freedom to be human, they’ll give back to you ten-fold.
Something else to consider is this: if I owned a construction company, or managed a hospital, or was the CEO of a retail chain, or managed a manufacturing plant, or headed a university, I would be very, very concerned if the people who worked at my organization weren’t consistently finding safer, more effective, more creative ways of doing things, as well as regularly upgrading their own knowledge and skills for the future.
No industry is safe from massive upheaval and (don’t hate me for using this word) disruption. Ensuring that your employees are at their best, consistently upskilling for what’s needed tomorrow, and searching like hounds for ways to improve the business puts you in a position to be the disruptor rather than the disruptee. And you ensure that your employees are at their best by looking after their needs and giving them space to reach their full potential as humans.
What if taxi drivers had had the time and energy and incentive to improve their own industry before Uber arrived, before there was a need for Uber to exist?
What if, instead of driving twelve hours a day for minimum pay, they had a more human way of working that gave them time to look after their needs, and they personally benefitted from having happy customers, and they were encouraged and given space to develop in varied ways besides driving cars?
Might that whole story have been a little different? Would Uber exist if the taxi industry was agile and flexible and human-centered, and customers were already thrilled with their services? We’ll never know.
* Bregman has seen the light and understands non-linear productivity: “Productivity and long work hours do not go hand in hand.”
* As an interesting exercise, I recommend comparing this list to Jeffrey Pfeffer’s ten toxic workplace exposures in the Health section of Chapter 4. See how many you can tick off.
