A friend of mine told me point-blank that he only works about four hours each day. His company still makes him log a full eight hours, though, so he spends the other four sifting through the Internet and sending me distracting photos of puppies.
What’s interesting about his situation is that he’s still accomplishing all of his normal work — and then some. The responsibilities of his role within the company haven’t really changed, but because technology has allowed him to work at a much faster pace than someone in that role 20 years ago, he’s been able to open up about half his day.
The most obvious solution here would seem to be giving him more work, but until his company lets go of the myth of the eight-hour workday, he’ll probably continue to waste half of each day he spends in the office.
Why We Demand Eight Hours of Labor
The idea for the eight-hour workday originated in the late 1700s, when Robert Owen began campaigning for businesses to reduce the number of hours in a workday from 10 or 12 to eight. And while his philosophy’s adoption marked significant progress in the fight for workers’ rights, it doesn’t need to dictate all future business practices. His slogan — “Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest” — still guides a lot of our assumptions about work-life balance today.
Why the 8-Hour Workday Doesn’t Work
The eight-hour day is arbitrary. Some weeks, it may make sense for your employees to work five eight-hour days, but your employees may be able to complete the exact same amount of work in five five-hour days. If they’re less distracted, using technology more efficiently, improving within their roles, or even doing different kinds of work, they can accomplish the same work in less time.
If you tie your team to an arbitrary number of hours, you’ll most likely end up with a lot of individuals staring at the clock around 4:55 p.m., counting the minutes until they can stop pretending to read emails and finally head out for the evening.
The 5-Hour Workday
For some companies, an eight-hour workday makes sense, but for others, five-hour — or even completely flexible — workdays are more reasonable. For example, a company we’ve worked with in the past, Tower Paddle Boards, has completely switched to a five-hour workday.
In an article for Mashable, CEO Stephan Aarstol wrote about why his company made the switch: “I run a business that sells stand-up paddleboards, so a shorter workday that freed our employees’ afternoons for extraordinary living was a natural fit for our beach lifestyle brand.”
Tower Paddle Boards was able to implement this change by focusing on results rather than the number of hours worked, using tech to boost productivity, and nixing the “always available” mindset.
The Benefits of Flexible Hours
My company, Influence & Co., takes a different approach but with similar intentions. We simply don’t track hours. We reward results over face time, so the individual who arrives at 8 a.m. and leaves at 5 p.m. but slacks on deliverables isn’t perceived as more valuable than the individual who shows up around 10 a.m. and leaves by 4 p.m. but hits every deadline and overdelivers for clients.
This means that members of our team may work 30 hours some weeks and closer to 50 hours other weeks, but our performance metrics aren’t tied to hours. As long as the desired results are achieved, it doesn’t matter whether an employee takes off early in the afternoon to watch her son’s theater performance and comes in early the next morning to finish some work.
This policy, along with unlimited PTO and our new content creation pod structure, allows for significant flexibility and autonomy. Not only do these flexible hours improve our workflow and production, but they also create an engaged, high-performing company culture.
The Keys to Implementing a Shorter, More Flexible Workweek
To make a shorter and more flexible workweek standard and successful for your team, two very important components must be in place before you begin:
Start with leadership. If your company leadership doesn’t buy into the benefits, a strategy built around flexible hours will never work. Part of why Tower Paddle Boards has adapted so well to its scheduling is because Stephan embraces it. In an interview with Inc., he said he’s “certainly not shy about rolling out at 1 p.m. for weeks at a time.” He explained, “Part of the five-hour workday was that I wanted everyone in the company to have the lifestyle that I’d created for myself.”
Lead by example to set the standard for your team. If you’re serious about an environment like this, you’ve got to take advantage of it yourself and show your team that it really is OK to come in at 10 or 11 a.m. or leave at 2 p.m. My co-founder will even go so far as to tell me I should take a day or two to work from home or take a vacation, and it’s great for our team.
Establish an ownership mentality. To do this, both Tower Paddle Boards and my company offer profit sharing with our teams. When your team performs well, your company performs well, and when your company is doing great, you can — and should — share the wealth with the team members who made it happen. When you offer incentives like this, employees are more motivated to live up to the trust you’ve placed in them and earn a piece of the pie rather than abuse the flexibility.
As more companies begin acknowledging the benefits of flexible scheduling, we’ll begin seeing the eight-hour workday as a thing of the past. Does your company offer shortened workdays or flexible hours? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
John Hall is the CEO of Influence & Co., a company that specializes in expertise extraction and knowledge management that is used to fuel marketing efforts.
