Last week I asked if you were engaged in your work? Another post-Labor question is whether your job should have defined hours. This is the question asked by Mathew Ingram at Gigaom. Many people already do not have defined hours and I am one. However, I do not think there is a blanket answer. For example, many customer facing service jobs require either constant coverage or coverage during defined hours so the staff proving this coverage needs to be scheduled and coordinated. In addition, work that requires synchronous teamwork such as factory production lines need coordinated schedules.
That said, there are a growing number of jobs where defined hours seem irrelevant. I wrote about this last week (see:The Gig Economy – Intrapreneurship – A New Style of Work). This is the case for many who work primarily on-line. Hours used to be a way to determine productivity and for many jobs it is now results, not hours. When I first started doing consulting in the 80s, I did contract work for several large old style companies where many people felt they needed to have their car in the parking lot before their boss arrived.
I also remember several consulting projects where my firm and another firm partnered on several projects. My firm focused on results and the other also focused on appearance. They said they were trying to instill a greater work ethic in the companies they consulted to and part of this was showing up before the regular employees and staying later. We thought this was silly. When we did work together for a UK firm the British clients also thought it was silly. They felt if you were working too long hours you were not being productive with your time and were deficient. Our view on work seemed to win out as each time we partnered with the appearance oriented firm their staffed team members shrank and ours grew as the project progressed.
Later, I was involved in a long term consulting project with a different firm where our entire team was from out of town. We would arrive mid-day on Monday, taking the first flight from our home base, and leave on Friday to get home for dinner. The local employees complained about us arriving late on Monday and leaving early on Friday. However, one weekend I stayed over and left at normal hours. I noticed that the local employees cleared out as soon as the consultants were gone.
I offer these examples to help make the case that for some types of work set hours are counter productive. They place a focus on attendance rather than results. The danger is that employers will placer unrealistic demands on their employees and flexible hours plus constant connectivity means always working. The defined work week was started to protect workers from exploitation and that need remains. Here the challenge is to set realistic expectations. I now am part of the gig economy and done many things so the only person that can exploit me is myself. However, when I still worked for a single firm but had flexible hours, I always felt that I was doing something wrong if I had to work weekends. I would examine what I was doing to correct the situation and was usually successful. The responsibility for making the transition to flexible hours lies with both workers and employees. Those firms that can avoid exploiting their employees in the process will be the winners in the long run.
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