Work harder or go home is one approach to productivity we've seen in action in 2022, which suggests ... [+]
Have you noticed that attitudes to productivity this year have become more polarized?
One side is perhaps best summed up by this photo of a Twitter employee stealing a few hours of sleep on the office floor at around 2AM local time. “When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #sleepwhereyouwork,” she later wrote in a caption.
It’s a good example of the “extremely hardcore” approach to work demanded by the company’s new boss Elon Musk, who gave employees an ultimatum to agree to “working long hours at high intensity” or leave. Some staff have reportedly been told to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week in order to meet deadlines, according to CNBC.
At the same time, 70 UK businesses spent six months taking part in what is believed to be the world’s biggest trial of the four-day working week, involving more than 3,300 workers. The full results won’t be available until next year but, when questioned at the half-way point in September, 88% of the companies said it was working “well” for their business, while around 95% said productivity had either stayed the same or improved.
Roughly 100 companies in the UK have now signed up to move to a four-day working week–with no pay reductions–permanently.
This second approach takes into account what much evidence has long made clear: putting in longer hours doesn’t always result in achieving more.
Yet, as the situation at Twitter demonstrates, the hard work myth is an enduring one. The same tension has played out in other arenas of the world of work in 2022.
Plans for a full-scale return to the office have been abandoned in many workplaces after the pandemic proved employees could complete their work just as well from home, and a hybrid arrangement is now the norm for many workers.
In the U.S. 58% of employees said they had the opportunity to work from home at least one day a week, while 35% had the option of remote working five days a week, according to a McKinsey survey. In the UK, more than eight in 10 workers who worked remotely during the pandemic told the Office for National Statistics they planned to work between home and work going forward.
In fact, a recent change in the law has given UK workers more rights around flexible working–allowing them to make requests from day one in a job–in a move the new small business minister Kevin Hollinrake said would result in “more productive businesses”.
Yet some have strongly resisted this trend. Sir James Dyson said allowing employees to request to work from home was “economically illiterate and staggeringly self-defeating”. His concern? That remote working is “deeply inefficient” and hampers a business’s ability to be competitive.
And the long-held suspicion that employees cannot work productively from home appears to linger even when employers have adopted some degree of remote working. A recent study by Microsoft pointed to the rise of “productivity paranoia”, with 85% of leaders saying the shift to hybrid work had made it challenging to have confidence that employees were actually being productive (even as 87% of employees reported being productive at work).
Some have responded to this fear by introducing employee monitoring software to track what their staff are up to. Yet this can be highly counterintuitive: 36% of staff stressed by the use of surveillance devices said they felt under pressure to work longer hours and 32% took fewer breaks throughout the day, one survey found – strategies that are likely to result in lower, not higher, productivity.
So what’s the answer? While there is clearly still a divergence in opinion, the tide is evidently flowing in the direction of greater autonomy for workers in terms of when and how they work.
How to make flexible working a success
Yet in order to fully reap the benefits of this trend going into 2023, there are some important skills that employees will need to master, particularly determining how to figure out what tasks to focus on and when.
This means prioritizing high value tasks that are both important and urgent while looking for ways to reduce or eliminate time-consuming low value tasks (such as by automating or delegating them).
It means taking control of your timetable, deciding in advance exactly what to tackle on a particular day (and what order to tackle it in, being mindful of your personal energy highs and lows throughout the day) and when to take breaks.
It means banishing distractions wherever possible, whether by ring-fencing a single hour during the day to go through your inbox, rather than checking it repeatedly, or blocking social media sites from your browser. Strategies like this, which are about working smarter not harder, will allow employees to achieve more in less time.
Employers can play an important role by encouraging these practices as well as doing what they can to save staff time. For example: limiting the number of meetings and testing new software to speed up admin tasks.
Crucially, firms must trust staff to be able to exercise their autonomy at work responsibly.
With the right skills in place, 2023 could be the year productivity approaches that value smarter working over longer and harder working prevail.
