Our calendar was invented for astronomy and agriculture, not for the 21st century knowledge worker in the midst of COVID-19.
As we adopt to the weird new COVID-19 reality of working at home, and days blend into weeks and months, we might stop for a moment and look how far our reality in the working world has drifted from what the calendar was originally meant to do.
When COVID-19 Came to Town
Pre-pandemic, the modern office worker’s working week was spent putting in 8 hours at work, with time spent going back and forth to work. There was in-between time, and of course sleep.
But with COVID-19, many of us are working from home. For some of us, this isn’t a new experience. We have already been blurring the line between office hours and working hours with mobile devices and WFM solutions. But now, we’re asking: how many of us should work remotely? And how should we do it?
You and your manager and may have different views on this answer.
You: The boundary between work and home was getting blurry already. Now it’s even more blurred. I feel like I’m never quite “off” work.
Your Manager: How much work is so-and-so really doing at home? And what about all of that time they don’t spend commuting anymore?
We all want to know that we are doing a good job. But you know the old saying: you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Measuring productivity is about how much you are producing during a set time. Here’s the issue:
If we continue to define productivity as time spent in an eight-hour day, following a 12-month, Monday-Friday calendar, we are going to be doing it wrong.
Our Relationship Has Always Been Messy
That four-quarter, twelve-month, seven-day calendar is the product of a lot of ancient things trying to get along with each other. A long time ago, sectioning out the year mattered when you were thinking about seasons: planting, growing, harvesting, and hunkering down for winter. We used to keep track of our progress through the seasons by counting out the number of times the moon went through its phases. That in itself is a little wonky, because we see the moon go through a complete phase (from our sidereal perspective) every 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes. What makes this messier is that different civilizations liked to break down the 24-hour days during a lunar phase into segments, and through our history we’ve settled on a four-segment cycle of seven days. Throughout Babylonian, Egyptian, Roman, and modern times we’ve done all of this tinkering to reconcile the schedule of the moon with the orbit of the sun. As a result, we have an inconsistent set of days per month.
Most western civilization, before the 20th century, defined six of the weekdays as work, and one for the sabbath. For reasons largely attributed to Henry Ford’s assembly line and the evolution worker representation and bargaining power, we conceded another day in the 20th century, resulting in the 5-day work week. But that created even more calendar inconsistency. Not only are some months shorter than others, but some also have fewer working days than others. And finally, whether in the United States or elsewhere, we have a growing number of official holidays that grant us time off for additional worship or remembrance.
For example, here’s the differences in 2020’s working days by month and by quarter in the United States, accounting for government holidays:
On the surface of it, a six day difference between 3Q and 4Q may not seem like much, but it amounts to real differences in financial and productivity results when considering fixed costs.
Should We Take Some Time Off?
Along with the forty-hour work week, the 20th century also brought a progressive definition of the ideal amount of time off for workers. As the 20th century came to a close, and the 21st century began, we have evolved into a flexible system of Paid Time Off (PTO) that includes vacation, sick time, and floating holidays, recognizing the diversity of our workforce.
Then, there’s that tricky subject of Fridays, and with it, mobile technology for remote working. Who hasn’t felt a sense of relief on Friday as the weekend approaches. And as mobile technology has improved our ability to work remotely, who hasn’t taken off early on one of these Fridays? If you’ve been an office worker, commuting to and from work, you’ve wanted to avoid the commuter snarl. Especially a Friday before a holiday weekend. Or even…most Fridays?
Backlash and Breakup
A few years back, I worked for a bank where this growing trend of flexible PTO and mobile computing came to a head. Our COO decided to walk the office on a Friday afternoon and saw…empty seats. Lots of them. A nice way of describing his reaction was that he felt his bank and his shareholders were being cheated out of labor hours and the real estate expense that came with it. Those labor hours, and that office space expense, was big, and real, and clearly not being put to work during traditional office hours.
I ended up with a project that attempted to make some sense of all of this, and ideally, help encourage a better situation. But the project quickly ran into problems, because we were being asked to use the 12-month, 5-day, 8-hour way of thinking to judge the performance of our workers. It was based on when office space was being used, rather than what was actually being done by the employees. What you see below definitely wasn’t the view that we showed the COO, but surely in his mind the story ended up looking like this:
Looks like a broken mirror? Well, it was. We were only using office attendance as a measure of productivity. And when we tried to compare productivity month-over-month, quarter over quarter, we ran into all of the caveats in the data. Structural differences between calendar months. Holidays. Vacation seasons. And yes, Fridays. Adding it all up, it didn’t look too impressive. And because of all the variability that came from structural differences and how employees used PTO, it was hard to tell how we were doing, month over month, quarter over quarter.
Where Do We Go From Here?
As we redefine worker productivity measures, we have an opportunity to get it right, but it’s going to require time, patience, and investment. We’ve put a tremendous amount of tradition, infrastructure, and general orientation toward the 5-day, 8-hour workweek. This is not a call to work longer hours. Rather, it’s meant to ask us to look at the same thing, differently:
Rather than measuring only the where and the when of doing something, can we measure more of the what and how?
What did we get done, together, and how well did we do it?
Some industries have already moved beyond a four-quarter financial performance year that begins in January and ends in December. Retail firms have seasonality; accounting firms in the United States often center around a busy season for tax preparation, with a fiscal year ending in June, not December.
To be clear, we are a long way from abandoning quarterly reporting. But we need to find a new convention for considering the performance of firms, especially those involved in pharmaceuticals or technology whose product development, releases, and performances aren’t intrinsically tied to a calendar.
That’s at the company level. At the employee level, the same. As of 2016, Harvard Business Review estimated that nearly 1/3 of companies had already abandoned annual reviews, with famous companies like Adobe, Deloitte, and Accenture leading the way.
One thing is very clear: under COVID-19, office attendance as a productivity measure is out the window. And, with so much uncertainty with what will happen this quarter and the next, it’s time to put much more emphasis on what you get done, when it’s due, rather than arbitrary calendar comparisons. Should we abandon the annual review? How about a project-by-project, or even Kaizen approach, evaluating for small, incremental, continuous improvements?
What ideas are you seeing that can help us move to a better way of measuring productivity and performance over time?