Few of us work a 5-day, 40-hour week anymore.
So if that’s true, and we’ve largely accepted that, why are we still trying to force social business evolution into the bounds of those days and hours?
Fluidity is a continually emerging reality in business. I struggle mightily with this personally, because I don’t believe that even the most entrepreneurial of us are winning medals when we get out there and flaunt our exhaustive, 80-hour workweek and lack of weekends as some kind of masochistic badge of honor. In fact, it tells me that we simply aren’t being smart with how we work, not telling us that we should just keep working and working and working until we break.
Stack that, however, against the ever-present reality that the online world does not tick according to the industrial era clock. We had metered, 8-hour days for a reason. Assembly lines needed to meet quotas and factories needed to meet the demands of their customers but without endangering their workforces.
Yet, the web is a fluid thing that rarely collectively sleeps.
On the one hand, if we force 24/7 accessibility with the same size, scale, and shape of workforce that we’ve always done, we’ll be back in the spot of creating a danger to our workforce, even if – or especially because – it’s knowledge work.
On the other, “9 to 5” simply isn’t how people work, shop, buy, decide, research, connect, talk or function anymore. So we’re faced with a building friction between what we do and how we do it that needs some radical innovation.
Part of the adaptation resistance we feel in businesses trying to become more social is that they’re taking an old model – the 5 day week fit into a daytime 40 hours – and desperately trying to fit it around the inconsistent and differing patterns that define a connected, networked and vastly more nimble global network. Strapping hours on your Twitter bio will not forever meet the needs of customers, employees, partners, supply chain, and the people who deliver on the work we’ve ultimately promised.
Here’s where I have some questions for you.
- What do you think defines a professional commitment in today’s era? As a worker of any kind, what should you expect to commit? Is it different than it has been? If so, what will make that commitment worthwhile?
- How can companies adapt an industrial-era mindset into a modern one while surmounting the challenges of sheer scale and cost of having a larger, more distributed and flexible workforce? Or are there savings in there instead of costs?
- What does that mean for the education and induction that we’re giving to the next generation of workers, whether skilled or knowledge based or both?
I’m thinking a lot about this because as we work with clients at SideraWorks, one chief emergent challenge is the rather immense implications of evolving customer, partner, and employee expectations. We approach each case individually and methodically, but I’m really curious to hear what the world at large is thinking about this challenge (or whether they are).
Have ideas? Points of friction? Challenges of your own? Sound off. The comments belong to you.
Well, I haven’t worked a 9-5, 40-hour a week job in over 15 years. As long as I’ve had any kind of managerial or executive role with a company, the hours have been from “whenever” to “whenever,” and social business hasn’t really changed that for *line* employees. Where the line is getting blurry, however, is in the changing demands upon *staff* employees. Staff employees are meant to support the line, and if that support now entails “after-hours” support, then job descriptions need to be rewritten (which I am sure is part of what your new business deals with). If companies are going to expect “different” from staff employees, it can’t just be by expecting “more” from them. The risks, rewards and expectations all have to shift to make staff positions worthwhile, and not 18-hour a day time sinks. Either that, or the demands of social business call for more line employees over staff, which has HR and cost implications. In any case, much to consider on a Monday morning.
I’d say it’s highly variable by job. People who work in administrative roles or in long-established hours-based careers like nursing can likely stay within a certain amount of hours, on a regular schedule. They might work overtime, but they’re compensated for it. People like doctors and lawyers are used to working over-the-top hours, too, but again — the money they’re paid compensates them for the inconvenience. Growing up, my mother did about 49 things (substitute teacher, seamstress, caterer, artists, etc.), so her hours were inherently fluid (and rarely with compensation to match) and my dad was a minister and a police chaplain, which means he was pretty much always on call. I can remember the phone ringing at 3 am to alert him to a member of the church who had gone into the hospital, or getting up early on Sundays for a full day of church stuff, when all my friends from school were still snoring in bed.
I got used to the idea that being passionate about your work and being good at your work meant you worked outside of normal “office hours”. This was a good thing for the companies I worked for, but with weeks where I worked 120 hours at one job, it burned me out pretty damn fast. Now I’m full-time employed as a strategist / writer and I work freelance on top of that, so the lines continue to be blurred. Whee! Fortunately, I’m able to charge enough for my freelance work that I’m fine with the “OT” nature of it — which is where I draw my line. Gradon, as a community manager, has both office hours and “awareness” hours, where he’s required to be responsive to major situations or outages. The nature of his regulated environment, however (with every post needing compliance approval) means he can only do so much outside of office hours. I’d say most people are required to commit to hours and “awareness” in roles where they are required to respond to customers. But I’m also a little stuck on the notion that, unless you’re offering 24 hour service in-store/in-office or via the phone already (banking, phone/cable, couriers, etc.), it’s a little bonkers for people to expect 24-hour responsiveness from social media. I don’t think it’s a great precedent to set, even if companies like Zappos do it. And I think they only do it because it’s a profitable differentiator. The minute it stopped being financially prudent, would they do it?
I think workshifting, remote work, and flex work are saving money for “always on” companies, and many are also learning to add certain environmental or compensatory benefits to make the extra / weird hours worthwhile. On-site daycare, on-site catering, clinics, concierges, etc. can reduce the stress of not having extra hours to get things done. Start-ups often offer some sort of equity in exchange for the crazy hours, so their employees feel compelled to make things work because they’ll profit from it, rather than just for the overall good of the company.
That said, it still feels like a lot of people still do 9-5. We work with a lot of healthcare, cultural, and academic clients (on the development / communications side), and they’ve all got pretty rigid hours that they don’t respond outside of. To the third question, I’d say lot of the young workers I know belong to two camps: the “hustlers” who believe that working longer is a badge of honor (and doable, since they don’t have families yet), and the “future of work” people who believe in setting their own hours and who accept work / life balance as a given. If they work overtime, they get a day off later. If they’re supposed to be in at 7 for a call, they leave at 3. And if corporate life doesn’t give them that freedom, they want to go into business for themselves (until they realize that’s not the road to less hours, unless you’re crazily successful.)
I think that in today’s connected professional environment a “commitment” entails performing a defined set of tasks (be they line, production, admin, etc.) within an agreed period of time for a mutually defined price (value/cost). Recognizing the limitations of some roles in regards to access to communication tools and tele-commuting, I think that any job can be done outside of traditional 9-5 hours as long as your customer is looking to receive/consume your product. I like the idea of “accessible hours” as a defined job role that isn’t also considered required overtime. Nice share. Thanks
One of the pressures I am seeing is that there are some businesses (industries) that do need to ‘go social’ quickly while others do not. Not all jobs can be done remotely (nurses, doctors, welders, janitors, construction work, etc.) If we are training and retraining people to work in a social environment we must also recognize that there will be tensions between where and when it is appropriate, how to start to shift the culture, how to manage competing interests. For example, in the late 90s the concept of flexible work schedules became the buzz and it is still discussed with some conflict today. In any given organization a flexible schedule may be great for some roles and not for others and managers need to understand how to manage those expectations and to make understanding why part of the culture. Now there are more and more roles than can be done remotely using technology-but that can not change for roles that require face-to-face human interaction. Figuring out how to build a strong culture that accommodates diverse needs is not easy. In the case of ‘social business’ we have internal organizational cultures to shift and individual personal cultural beliefs to shift. All while recognizing what is too much too soon, or too little too late. 🙂
I’ve never worked a 40-hour a week job, either. My feelings (and when I manage, I try to adhere to this) is for people to have a clearly defined task list and reasonable work load. If they get those things done, I don’t really care when they work (as long as they are available for clients and coworkers). My last few jobs have had top people who are very focused on the actual hours people work, and I think that’s very short-sighted. They would measure commitment by the time in and out. I heard my last manager say, “It’s 7pm, and no one’s in the office.” Well, people have lives, and this is a job that could be flexible, and people can do work from home. I prefer to actually see my daughter and then work again later in the night if I need to get stuff done. I think jobs (and agencies in particular) have too much of a focus on how many hours people are working, as opposed to how much they get done and how creative they are (and sometimes, you need less busywork to come up with creative solutions).
This is kind of my pet peeve. I’m not totally sure how it relates to education, other than I think that management skills are completely neglected in business. There’s an article about teaching in the NY Times, and what I came away with was, “Wow, management skills are seriously lacking in basically every job.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/confessions-of-a-bad-teacher.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general
Also: meetings. Many companies have WAY too many meetings that are ineffective and everyone in the world needs to be invited. If people could learn when to call meetings, how to run them and who to invite, so much time would be freed up.
I was told early in my career that ‘we dont leave at 5’. It didnt matter what time I got there (usually by 8 to get some quiet time in), I was expected to do more than 40 hours. I dont want to get all stereotypical but I am nervous about the ‘new’ workforce. We have a co-op (paid salary) that counts out her 8 hours to the minute. If she happens to get in at 8:55am, she will leave right at 4:55pm. Others out of college refuse to sync their email with their smartphones because they dont want to have to respond when they are not physically in the office. Ive been told (by parents and mentors) that I am an extreme, type-A overachiever which may attribute to my commitment and my expectations of others. But I will share that as much as I work, I enjoy an environment which simply holds me accountable. What that means is, there is no babysitting. I can come and go as I please, leave early on a Friday, come in late on a Monday – all as long as I get the job done and meet my goals.
I really think the 9-5, 8 hour days with a 1 hour ‘punched out’ lunch are behind us. At least in the corporate, cubicle land that isnt regulated by unions. Those that come at 9 and leave promptly at 5 every day will be noticed.
Its not a must to work 40-hours a week if you have time management, and you meet deadlines or things need to accomplished before the deadline. If you are fast and internet savy, intelligent to find way how to fasten your work with good quality. Well you cannot work that kind of long hours. There’s a lot of stuff to manage your time, outsource your task or even pay some social media tools that can manage your social media sites. If you want to save your time, you can do it. Just plan your schedule and it will definitely a good news for you. Get rid of stress.