Last year I read about the guys at 37 Signals experimenting with 4 day work weeks. Earlier this year I was listening to a podcast from Stanford’s brilliant ecorner series with Jeff Hawkins, Jeff was a founder at Palm, Handspring and is now working a company called Numenta around his passion for memory and technology. What do these two things have in common? Well there was one specific part in Jeff’s interview where he talked about lifestyle, he said “any company could be the best company if they make one decision better then their competitors”, the idea is that you don’t have to work 80 hours a week, you just have to make the right decisions not necessarily working really really hard. You can have a big company where everyone is stressed out working 60 hour weeks, answering emails on their blackberries at all hours and they can lose market to a start up that’s working four day weeks. The difference is the people and the decisions being made. Working smarter, working better or even working harder doesn’t necessarily mean working longer.
As the world’s population gets bigger, as more people are commuting, as more people are working, the impact we’re making on the earth is getting worse and worse. As more people are working there are more meetings with more people to be held. We’re also working internationally more than ever before. I’ve got calls and meetings not just with others on mainland Europe but with others in the UK, Canada and the east and west coasts in the US as well. So I can have calls that start at 9am CET and 9am PST (or 6pm CET). I don’t mind all of this, I just think we have to have more flexibility in the workplace to allow people to make better decisions.
We’re living in a time when you can video conference over Skype, where you can redirect telephone numbers using services like 3jam, Google voice etc. Instant messaging, VPNs, Skype, email etc. do we all need to be in the office 5 days for 40+ hours a week?
Personally, I think there’s something to the University professors having office hours, where for a certain period they’ll be in the office for meetings, but all other hours they’re either lecturing, doing research or doing consulting. People in commercial enterprises should have the same flexibility. Identify a certain number of hours that people will be in the office, but then let people work from home and have more flexibility in their working hours. If I want to work on a Saturday but take a Monday off, that should be okay as long as I’m in the office for Tuesday and Wednesday which could be office hours.
Utah’s experimenting with a four day week, but I’m not sure they have it right, shutting down offices on a Friday isn’t necessarily the way to compete and change. I prefer keeping the office open but just not everyone has to be there. For commercial enterprises, you could say that Monday and Fridays are no meeting days and people can chose to have either of the day off (with a balance so not everyone takes the same day off). I’m not saying that’s the solution, I just think we need to experiment more with making a workplace and a work life balance that works for people and their lives today.
UPDATE Farhan Thawar (@fnthawar) recommended reading Work Sucks, and looking into their Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) model. Sounds good.
