Frequently Raised Concerns
PEOPLE MUST BE PRESENT at work for my industry – you can’t lay bricks with a computer from a café!
Flexibility comes in many forms. Looking back at Chapters 3 and 4, what are the things in your workplace you could change to create a more human environment and schedule? Reduce the day by an hour? Reduce it by two hours and use one of those hours to work on efficiencies and innovations to increase productivity?
Remember, productivity and improvement should be at the heart of flexibility. Give people ownership of their own work and the space to make a difference. Look at the discussions in Chapter 11 of manufacturing and construction for some pointers on how letting people be more human can boost innovation and reduce costs. Every human is capable of this, not just high-level executives or engineers. We all have supercomputers in our heads. Let your people use them.
I’ve heard that people get lonely and depressed if they work from home. Don’t we need to socialize?
Short answer: yes. This barely needs to be discussed after we’ve all experienced social isolation and social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, but, yes, the need to socialize is hardwired into our DNA (see Chapter 3).
For most people, life expectancy literally decreases when we don’t spend enough time around other humans. I don’t, in general, recommend anyone work from home full-time unless they have a vibrant and extensive social life with their family and/or their friends and/or their community, and they consistently talk to and spend quality time with others. See Chapter 7 for some recommendations about working remotely.
If my people end up 20 percent more efficient per hour because I reduced their hours, can’t I just add that time back on and I’ll boost overall output by 20 percent or more? (That is, they’ll maintain that efficiency over more hours.)
You’re still thinking of your employees as robots, with linear productivity in regard to time.
Go back to Chapter 5. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Your people are most likely producing more in those thirty-two hours, at a higher quality, than if they were working forty (and they’re having a healthier and happier life).
Why did you get those gains in the first place? Because people were energized and incentivized. So, what happens if you eat into that energy and those incentives? Will people still be looking for improvements? Will they still be as engaged with their work? Will there still be a high level of innovation for the next set of challenges the business will face?
You insist that we should work fewer hours or fewer days, but where does it stop? Do you want people to work two days a week? One day? Thirty minutes?
This is one of those straw man or slippery slope arguments against reducing working hours. The presumptive question is, “Do you want people to just stop working altogether? Are you a dirty socialist?!”
This question disregards the fact that work is important in our lives beyond money because it provides challenges and growth and learning and participation. But it shouldn’t be the conquering force in our lives. Return to the end of Chapter 3 and the description of flexibility.
People can get a bit lost in the arbitrary nature of the “ideal” number of days or hours to work – four days, three days, one hour. What matters is the attitude toward and reason for questioning the norms around traditional work practices. The actual numbers you end up with depend on your team and your situation.
I’m a firm believer, though, that the forty-hour standard we’ve set for ourselves is too much. The extreme differences to people’s lives that happen when we drop that down even to thirty-two hours demonstrates how unsustainable our lives are with this standard.
I recommend starting simple – decrease the workday by an hour and see for yourself that the same amount of work can be done in that time. Or, if you’re feeling bold, drop down to thirty-two hours per week to see some amazing returns on the human and productivity sides.
I got to where I am because I worked hard and put in the hours. This flexibility stuff isn’t for people who take their career seriously. How can they expect to be truly successful when they’re not putting in the hard yards?
It’s true that putting in those long hours has resulted in many promotions for people over the years. But this is largely due to facetime being the easiest thing to measure in a workplace, so many have benefited just from being present and being seen.
This is what women have had to fight so hard against in the rigid workplace. Although they can do the work, they’re also usually the primary carers if they’ve had children, so they’ve been penalized for not being around as much as the men, who can stay late and become chums with the bosses.
Flex for all is a great weapon against rewarding workers just for being seen. It pushes managers to measure actual results and reward accordingly. With flex for all, when someone’s work is incredible, they won’t be punished for just not being in the office.
Flexibility is seen by some as laziness or a lack of commitment – not willing to do the hard yards – exactly because it goes against the idea that hard work is equivalent to long hours and always being around the office. But hard work and flexibility aren’t mutually exclusive – not even close.
Flexibility takes work and effort. It’s a combination of being smart and working hard in effective ways. It’s aiming our efforts with laser focus to ensure that the work we do is the best work we can possibly do, work that actually provides the business with value. It ensures that we’re putting our whole heart and mind into what we do and not just working hard for the sake of breaking a sweat or looking busy or taking up time.
My employees work two other jobs and still live paycheck to paycheck. They’re constantly demanding more and more hours instead of reduced hours or more flexibility, so I really don’t think this flexibility thing is for my business.
I haven’t forgotten about the minimum-wage workers who struggle to buy food and pay rent even with a full-time job, and I hope you haven’t either. (Yes, I’m talking about America and its incomparable wealth disparity between the haves and have-nots, and the insultingly, devastatingly low minimum wages.).
Although a discussion of minimum wage is outside the scope of this book, I hope that the philosophies within it can help leaders reconsider the purpose of their business and introduce humanity into this area too.
Does your business exist to milk its workers for everything they have while getting away with paying them as little as possible, thereby increasing profits for execs and shareholders? Or, possibly, could your company help people live wholesome, enjoyable lives and create profits for execs and shareholders?
After reading this book, you can see that enabling people to be fully human, including paying them enough to live comfortably without needing another job, produces workers who are energized and engaged and loyal, who will give their best to their work and provide true value to the company and its shareholders.
A famous example of this concept is the founder and CEO of the tech company Gravity Payments, Dan Price. Price took a pay cut to give his employees a minimum “living wage” of $70,000.1 This experiment started in 2015 and contradicts the notion that “socialist” practices don’t work in business.
Today, the average salary at Gravity is $103,000, and the company has grown substantially in that time, with 80 percent more clients. Price saw the importance of helping all people live with dignity and his responsibility as someone with the power to decide if they can or not:
We keep taking away from the basic needs of the vast majority of human beings on earth so that we can glorify a very tiny percentage with wealth and power.
And he decided to do better.
I like driving. You assume that everyone wants to stop driving, but I find it relaxing and a great bridge between work and home – it lets me unwind before I’m bombarded with kids and other responsibilities.
This is true for many people, especially the car-loving Aussie. But giving you the chance to not have to drive to and from work every day doesn’t take away your right and opportunity to drive.
And you might find other ways to unwind from work before family time, such as going to the gym, the pool, or a yoga class, or reading a book in the park, or any other of the million things you can do that add much more to your existence than sitting in traffic. (See Chapter 7 for some more ideas.)
There are a lot of people who would prefer not to drive every day. Don’t argue against their need because you enjoy driving. You should be able to drive when you want, just as they should be able to not drive when they want. Choice is king.
I don’t need “flexibility.” I love work. It’s all I do! I rise at five, hustle for twelve hours, sleep, then rinse and repeat. And I’m gonna be so much more successful than all you normies!
Addiction is addiction is addiction, even if it’s “productive” or “beneficial,” like exercising, or eating kale, or working. If it’s an actual addiction, if you can’t exist without it, and start to shake when you haven’t had it for a day or two, it’s bad.
As Johann Hari wrote in Lost Connections, addiction is the opposite of connection. It’s used to fill the gaps within us, to numb pain, to give temporary relief, to avoid something you don’t want to face. This isn’t healthy.
If work is an addiction for someone, it probably means that that person is trying to escape a demon or fill a void. And as soon as they stop working, they’re going to be face to face with whatever they’re trying to elude.
It’s not commendable. It shouldn’t be a badge of honor. These people have a gap, a disconnection, and they’re filling it with work. And I’ll take an educated stab in the dark and say that, more likely than not, that gap was created by the very work that they’re now using to fill that gap.
Let’s not celebrate the workaholics. Let’s help them reconnect with other people and themselves and their needs. Let’s also stop creating this one-dimensional work-person by ensuring that everyone has time to enrich their lives and battle demons in constructive ways.
You’re missing a big concept! What about the meaningfulness of work? People won’t hate work so much if they’re doing something they love. Maybe you should focus more on the quality of work itself and getting people to follow purposeful careers.
The more passionate someone is about their work, the less they’ll notice the clock – that’s clear. But that’s a whole other book (check out Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber).
With this work on flexibility I’m assuming that there’s a spectrum of enjoyable to non-enjoyable work. Some of us have jobs that are deeply fulfilling, such as research or game development, and some of us are middle managers or accountants (LOL, sorry!). I hope I’ve made the point, though, that workers at any point on this spectrum will benefit from greater fulfillment outside of work.
It would be lovely if we could all do work that we love. But a lot of the time, in the real world, it’s about finding and doing whatever pays the bills – a situation millions of people around the world find themselves in. But this shouldn’t exclude anyone from having deeply fulfilling lives, and flexibility is incredibly important for that.
At the other end of the spectrum, the people who are fortunate enough to be doing work that doesn’t feel like work can still miss out on important parts of life by giving too much of themselves to their jobs, and they can also benefit greatly from having true flexibility. Or people can find themselves locked out of these jobs because the jobs don’t allow enough flexibility. So, people will miss out on work they would love to do, and jobs will miss out on people who would love to do them.
It’s a great idea; but it’s just not for me or my business. (The Polite Skeptic)
Why? Have you tried it? Have you seriously sat down and thought about what’s really stopping you from trying it? Have you discussed this with your workforce and made a purposeful effort to understand what they need, and what they’re willing to do to make this work, even for a short trial period, so that you and your team leaders and everyone involved have a chance to challenge deeply held perceptions and beliefs that may not be true? You have? OK, then maybe it’s not for you or your business.