What’s wrong with working 9 to 5?

Your alarm rings at 7 am. You open your eyes and press “Snooze.” And so you wake up every 9 minutes and do the same over and over again, 4 to 7 times, before you actually get up.

Now you’re running a bit late, so you take a quick shower, gulp down a coffee, and get in your car or run to the subway station. Breakfast is an energy bar that you munch on the way through the morning traffic jam or jostling with other office workers in a full subway car. You rush through the office door at 08:59 and beeline for your cubicle. You’re on time but already you feel completely exhausted, so you try to jump-start your brain with another cup of coffee.

Sleep deprivation kills brain productivity, increases the level of the stress hormone cortisol, and affects your general satisfaction with life. Although it’s true that caffeine can stimulate brain activity for a while, it also irritates your nervous system, affecting balanced decision-making. Not many organizations are thinking about changing their working schedule, yet it’s easier than ever to adjust to individual life rhythms in the digital age.

Business owners can also be slaves of their alarm clocks, digital or otherwise. Though nobody is forcing them to get up early, they still do it, knowing if they don’t show up at 8:30 am sharp, before anyone else does, it’s going to kill the discipline in their office.

Sacrificing productivity for the sake of discipline?

For a consultancy business like ours, and most white-collar jobs in fact, the traditional office schedule is totally out of step with the times. Being fully connected and virtually accessible to all our teams, most of us still remain committed to a prescribed physical space for a prescribed period of time.

But there are a few problems with this—and always have been.

For one thing, individual brain productivity peaks don’t always match office schedules. Some of my colleagues produce their Big Ideas at 3 am, and are absolutely unproductive before noon. Others feel much more energy waking up at 6 and getting to work by 7 or 8 am.

For another, a crowded office isn’t always the best place for everyone to perform their best. An organized workplace where teams can work together and build a real bond with each other also generates a lot of distraction. For me, personally, it’s a really big deal. Some time ago, I realized I was totally unproductive when I tried to do my individual assignments in the office. By “individual,” I mean all the work that required my personal input or decisions, with no others involved, such as writing e-mails, putting together articles, or analyzing business decisions.

These days, I try to be at the office only when I have a meeting there, or want to socialize with my project teams. Working on my daily and strategic tasks, I’d rather be sitting at my favorite eatery, where I can turn off all my devices and quietly focus on getting tasks done, one by one. My own best productivity is from 6 pm to 9 pm, when the daily routine doesn’t disturb me anymore and my kids aren’t pestering me with calls about “When’s daddy coming home?”

My example is surprisingly typical for thousands of other business owners and their employees. And yet, many businesses try to keep their staff working during the prescribed working hours and at the prescribed place.

Fitting the procrustean office schedule

For the PR and creative industries, where we come from, not nurturing peak states for our employees’ brains leads to poor concepts and underdeveloped design ideas. For other brain-oriented businesses, like financial consultancies, this can result in mistaken assumptions and calculations, leading to flawed conclusions and poor client recommendations. For the rest of the white-collar world, such as managers and specialists, this can mean ineffective and even wrong business decisions.

It’s not only the time and the place that affect focus and productivity. There are many out-of-work events that can tear our business day apart, like going to a doctor or a hairdresser who has the same 9 to 5 schedule as your office, or, for example, a morning sports competition at your son’s school or an afternoon concert where your daughter is performing. These are the moments that take our attention away from work, even as we sit at our office desks. In many cases, your employees will try to skip work unseen by their very busy boss, with little to no accountability.

Does this mean productivity is being completely lost? Of course not.

For many businesses and employees with big ambitions, a normal working day isn’t the rule. When they focus on a big goal or a BIG IDEA, established timeframes, hobbies and even families can become secondary. For these employees and businesses, many factors can extend working days with no end in sight: extreme project deadlines, late or early client meetings, or conference calls with partners in vastly different time-zones.

This means that, for highly ambitious individuals and organizations, it’s even more important to set conditions that allow the high achievers to perform at their best.

What we did about it

The problem is that the traditional “9 to 5” working schedule comes from a non-digital era. Back then, regular working hours were considered the only way to control employees: put them into a cubicle for a certain number of hours every day. This concept isn’t that efficient anymore, as we all face non-work distractions even when inside the office for the entire day.

At CFC Big Ideas, we thought this through about a year ago and came up with a new approach: flexible work time and place.

This is how we did it:

1.    We got rid of our 9 am to 6 pm schedule, though we kept the 40-hour week for calculating pay. Every quarter, we do a 360° efficiency assessment whose results directly affect all employees’ pay based on a specific quotient formula.

2.    Employees can to work their 40-hour week at whatever times and places they feel their productivity and focus are at their highest.

3.    Hours are calculated not by time spent in the office, but by time spent on work. Everybody tracks working time using Timecamp, one of many desktop apps available today. Most time-tracking apps let you see what your employees are doing without your having to watch their desk every day, control their productivity and results, and track the time they spend on distractions.

4.    While teams are allowed to have their regular working sessions via video conferencing, this flexibility does not apply to strategic sessions or client meetings, of course, where all staff are expected to attend in person.

5.    This flexibility applies to most of the project teams and support staff, while the traditional office hours still apply to secretaries, office managers and other administrative staff where being on time matters no less than being 100% productive.

What results we have seen

With a flexible workday, we now expect 100% commitment to strategic team and client meetings, no matter what the time or the place.

With a flexible workplace, we now expect full accountability for every minute people spend on a work assignment or a project, not for the time spent inside the office.

With a time-tracking app and new pay formulas, we have increased the efficiency of our financial remuneration system, paying our team for the exact time and effort they have contributed to the project and the business.

This relative freedom has also allowed us, the business owners, to shift our focus from disciplining to motivating, building a highly effective internal communication system, and setting the conditions for faster growth and professional development.

This may not be the best solution for every business, but many companies and organizations can benefit from such an approach, and increase their team productivity, individual performance and employee satisfaction rates.

For too many businesses, fear of losing control trumps greater efficiency and employee satisfaction. It may be time to change that.