What they argue for instead is a decentralization of our work. That rather than being the center of our lives and our time, work is simply a transaction. We give you output, you pay us. That’s it. It’s all there is.
That’s the revolution they are looking for. It might seem like a simple change, but it’s actually quite a different way to look at the world of work. Go read more and listen to the episode. It’s interesting to consider.
There is more at the link that you may want to read and consider, but the big point is that what workers want is sort of all over the place. As we all stop and consider what role or work should play in our lives, we are making a number of different choices. Leaders who simply assume they can make everyone do the same thing are going to appear out of touch, and that is also exactly what we are seeing. Flexibility sells when it comes to hiring and retaining talent, lack of it just makes you look callous and distant.
What Sherri talks about in regards to the security industry is something I’m seeing over and over again when reading about diversity. The child care question.
Let me share another resource on the topic with you. In December, there was an episode of People I Mostly Admire with Claudia Goldin, where she talked about the concept of “Greedy work”.
The topic she was chatting about was the gender pay gap and how much child care contributes to it, and one of the reasons we have a gender pay cap, aside from the percentage that is actually discrimination, is that greedy work doesn’t account for child care, but it pays more. So in many families, they have to make a choice between less pay and the flexibility to equally share the child care. The economics of that don’t usually make sense, so one parent takes on the greedy work to maximize the family income while the other steps back to a more flexible role in order to provide the majority of child care. With social norms being what they are, and the other issues that contribute to a gender pay gap, that most often means the man in a heterosexual couple, and here we are with women being vastly underrepresented in these types of positions.
Pre-2020 we spent 8+ hours in the office, plus maybe an hour or more commuting, turning our workday into about 10-11 hours of our day, on average. But, as I mentioned, part of that was just commuting, and part of that in-office time was spent interacting socially with coworkers, going to get lunch, etc. Now? We wake up and start working. (If you’re lucky and plan you might even get a chance to shower before work.) You eat at your desk. You work right up until 5-6PM and you simply shut down. Again, you’re lucky if someone doesn’t still email or “ping” you after that. So, for many of us, our workday might still be 10-11 hours, or it might even be a bit shorter, but it’s ALL work, and as we just saw, the reality is that around the 6-hour mark our productivity started to dip. The key then, to not burning out, is to make that day flexible. Instead of demanding you put in “x” hours each day/week/month, we should simply lay out what work needs to be completed, what the deadlines are, and give workers the freedom to find the best way to accomplish that. Maybe, for some, they will want to really focus for 4 days per week and have the extra day to live their lives. For others, it might look like working some in the morning, some in the afternoon, and then again in the evening. Not everyone is going to fit into the same bucket when it comes to finding the balance that allows them to do their best work, and also have a life. Don’t force them to fit into the bucket you like. That’s how you burn them out.
Of course, the real question is will hiring managers also shift their perspectives and hiring practices? All the LinkedIn details for a gap in the world won’t change the culture if hiring managers immediately toss any resumes with one before even trying to understand why it’s there.
Hopefully, that is coming. There are a whole lot of really talented folks who’ve been forced to take a gap in their employment in the last couple of years. Good organizations have the opportunity to scoop them up while all those bad managers are turning up their noses at “employment gaps”.
It’s not so much that everyone wants a four-day work week, we just want something other than what we have now, and ultimately, I think most of us would much rather work around the rest of our lives as opposed to living the rest of our lives around work.