Your 24%
In my roughly 25 years in the workforce, change has been prevalent. I agree likely none more than COVID, but technology has certainly had a major impact.
I remember the days when my father in the 80’s would carry a briefcase of files home. As a kid, I never knew what the heck was in there but my mother knew it meant a night alone on the couch. In the roughly 15 year period from 1990–2005 or so, I believe we saw three major technological changes that impacted the workday. Prior if you didn’t bring “files” home there was likely nothing to work on outside of strategic vision, and networking of course when not at the office.
1 — The home computer. I was in High School in the early 90’s and I vividly remember our first word processor and later massive home computer. (Wow am I aging myself). Prior to this all my school reports were done with the typewriter. Loved that white powder eraser and later white out. Anyway the home computer replaced many of those paper files that my dad brought home and now he could and did work from home using the old floppy disk.
2 — The laptop. Now it wasn’t just an ability to work from home but for me in 1999 I got a laptop from BankBoston and traveled New England and the country with that thing. I enjoyed logging on via a telephone cord and dialing into some server, somewhere. Was that AWS? Maybe? This lead to many hours working in a hotel or at home which extended the work day for this eager internal auditor and later corporate accountant.
3 — The smartphone. My opinion, even more than COVID, the smartphone changed the modern workforce more than anything prior and since (In my 25 years of work anyway, some may have other thoughts). I know BlackBerry started producing phones in 2000 or so, but I would say in the 2004–2005 timeframe, the Blackberry, The Palm Trio and I am sure other smart phones, changed work forever. Gone were the days of needing a big laptop, and hope for WiFi at home or in a hotel, to connect to the office. With a Cell Network and one of these early smart phones, work was connected to your hip (literally for some) 24/7/365. At that time I was working for a global public company of more than 20k employees. There was always emails coming in and going out and I haven’t looked back since, ask my wife. Most “office” workers then, for a price of cell service or a generous company policy, carried work around with them all day everyday. At least for me, it sometimes became hard to separate personal and professional time.
While I could go on related to the above thoughts, I hope I provoked some fond memories for some and deep thinking for others but now on to my thoughts on why this blog is called Your 24% and the fourth item that could change work as we know it, while not really being related to technology but related to lifestyle.
So I am rounding but there is 168 hours in a week and a standard work week in the US is still 40 hours, which is 24% of the week. I get that not all jobs can even think of this, but they’re large chunks that can. What if as employers we allow certain weeks and/or certain positions to be “Any 24’s”. An employee could work any 24%/40 hours of the week they chose. I realize on a pendulum this is one end to the other end, 9–5, M-F in the office. At least for most, in office 5 days a week and during these specific hours is, in theory, long gone. We as employers are struggling with remote, hybrid, flexible, in-person, etc. If we think of the work week closer to Any 24, instead of those specific 40 hours, could we get more productivity from employees?
I am curious, my guess is at this point most people will fall into one of 2 camps if you made it this far into this blog:
1 — Thought provoking. What controls would we need to make this work. Maybe not any 24, but maybe we can allow more flexibility to accommodate a busy family work/life balance that maybe includes weekends.
2 — What an a..hole this guy is. This would never work and our employees would abuse it and how could we ever communicate on Teams if we don’t know when people will work.
I am not saying this is the answer to all of our HR problems with our workforce or this is even a viable option. I am just putting out a thought that for certain positions and certain emails we send, does it really matter if and when they are responded to. Why is Saturday and Sunday the only days the “Normal” office job should be off. Police, Fire, EMT, Hospitals, Retail, etc — individuals in those jobs many times work their normal workdays on the weekend, why not us?
My belief is we need to think in these extreme ways to come up with more flexibility for our workforce and I feel it could garner more productivity than we think. As a CFO who oversees HR, I am always thinking of ways to differentiate our company from others to be an employer of choice to attract and retain talent. And for sure, many people reading this will work closer to 30%+ anyway. I know I work numerous nights and weekends, as many of you do.
That damn BlackBerry.
