David Moore

In 1995 I was in Dublin working my first job after getting my Masters. I was writing what was then called computer-based training, which would grow up to become online education. I was helping to produce courseware to teach people how to use Microsoft Office products, which even then were bloated and less than intuitive.

Outside of office hours, I was also trying to break into freelance journalism, contributing arts and features pieces to the Irish Times newspaper and other publications. Dublin is full of good writers — you could throw a stone into any pub and it would hit someone better than than me — so it was a struggle, but I really enjoyed crafting 800 smart words about a TV show or movie that would be completely forgotten the day after the paper came out.

The day job wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be doing, but the steady pay was welcome, and my fellow employees were a nice bunch to hang around with, and I even enjoyed the bike ride across town to get to work. But after a few months there, I was being worn down and couldn’t find the time or inclination to work on as much freelance work as I wanted. So I had an idea that seemed to make sense to me, and I was too young to know how unusual a request it might be at the time.I asked to have every Friday off (and take 80% of my salary).

I was smart enough to ask straight after a favourable performance review, and for whatever reason they said yes, for a trial period.

The new arrangement worked out brilliantly, and I ended up staying at the company for much longer than I would have otherwise. Aware that I didn’t want to leave any of my colleagues in the lurch while I was off, I was definitely more than 80% as productive as I had been, and when taxes and the small amount of money I got from my extra freelance work were taken into account, I ended up with more than 80% of my former income.

And I got Fridays to myself. I’d go to press screenings for new films, work on pitching stories, and drift around Dublin bookshops, cafés and bars (a regular afternoon favourite habit was to sit reading the paper in the Stag’s Head pubarmed with a coffee and a gin and tonic). I had a long weekend every week — I was happy, I appreciated the great gift my employers had given me, and I returned to the day job every Monday rested and ready to work hard.

Not Working Just Works

I’m not the only one to discover that four-day weeks have many benefits. This recent excellent video from The Atlantic shows the business and personal benefits of the approach at Treehouse (ironically an online education firm).

Online project management tool Basecamp work four-day weeks over the summer, and their experience of productivity is the same as mine:

“In general, the same amount of stuff gets done in four days than in five, mostly because when you have less time, you tend to compress stuff out that doesn’t matter,” says Basecamp CEO Jason Fried in a Fast Company interview. “We don’t feel like we’re losing a lot of output; maybe 5%.”

It’s not just small firms — KPMG and tax services firm Ryan are two multinationals who have adopted similar flexible approaches. The same Fast Company article reports that after they started four-day weeks, Ryan’s employee turnover rate dropped from 30% to 11%, revenue and profits almost doubled, client satisfaction scores reached an all-time high, and the firm has received multiple “best place to work” awards.

For a time the state of Utah put workers on a compressed work schedule, with staff working four 10-hour days with every Friday off. The Guardian looked at the results:

Eight out of 10 employees liked the four-day week and wanted it to continue. Nearly two-thirds said it made them more productive and many said it reduced conflict at home and work. Only 3% said it made childcare harder. Workplaces across the state reported higher staff morale and lower absenteeism.

40 Hours or 32?

Based on my own experience, and that of Basecamp and Treehouse, I’d say it’s worth just pulling the band-aid off all in one go and only working 32 hours. It’s debatable if there’s really any productivity benefit in the extra hours — it’s filled with what Jason Fried calls the stuff ‘that doesn’t matter’.

So it’s good for employees and good for the organization. It works for tech firms on crazy deadlines, large consulting firms and state government. And why aren’t we doing this, already? As with a reluctance to adopt remote working, the reasons we’re still clinging to the old ways aren’t that great, but what is great is that more and more organizations are showing the vision required to embrace the four-day week.

I love reading stories of intrepid people living as digital nomads, living in exotic places while running their businesses, or freelancing their way around the world.

Aussie digital nomad James Clark has a great list of resources and links to the blogs of other folks doing a similar thing, which often revolves doing web-related or at least web-enabled work that doesn’t depend on being in a particular location to fund their living in relatively affordable countries (often in south-east Asia).

Having travelled reasonably widely, lived in three countries and even written a travel book about my adventures, I have a great deal of time for people prepared to head out on their own and use remote working to travel. But now I’m at a different stage in my life, I see how remote work is also key to ensuring quality of life even if you’re not going anywhere.

Nicole at Buffer recently wrote a great article about what their remote working structures meant for their team (and the team’s families), and what really stood out was how brilliantly mundane a lot of their experiences were.

Helping to bring family members on the company retreats (and realizing that families might want different accommodation from single people) is a great example. It’s obvious that one parent traveling for work will necessarily create some disruption at home, but it’s a rare organization that would even think of this as an issue, let alone help pay to bring the family along.

Similarly, Buffer’s Kevan Lee looks after his son during the day, and works more in the mornings and evenings. It doesn’t sound much, but Buffer grasps that this means a great deal to one of their employees and their family, and then takes steps to accommodate that need. This flexibility can change lives and create loyal happy people who want to work of you, and yet it is still so rare as to be worth commenting on.

I love this appreciation of flexibility either in a day, or in geographic location, not just for abstract reasons, but for very personal ones too. I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico with my wife and daughter. It’s a nice town to be in, my daughter loves her school, her friends and her soccer team, and my wife runs her own architecture firm — we have no plans to leave any time soon.

But staying here while working remotely would open up a wider range of professional opportunities for me. I expand all the possible jobs for me to all the remote-friendly opening in the world, rather than looking just within my town of 80,000 souls. I don’t have to compromise on the job I want to live in the place i want.

That’s looking at things from a macro level — the job I do and where I live — but as Kevan Lee’s example shows, remote working has lots of micro-level benefits: small daily improvements that add up to a markedly better quality of life both for the employee and their family. Being in the town you like is great, but not so great if you never get the chance to see much of it during the day, or you can’t coach your kid’s sports team or attend their end of year concert because you’re always in the office.

Remote teams replace showing up to a particular location for a set time with a much more nuanced set of tools for measuring performance and communicating with their colleagues regardless of time and space, giving everyone more flexibility to set their own hours and working arrangements.

So digital nomads might be the poster children for this new way of working, but creating opportunities for globe-hopping is really just a fringe benefit of the move to remote working. The key changes are more mundane, but much more far-reaching and valuable — the potential to change the way a huge number of families live, even if they stay exactly where they are.

Some (but not all) of the organizations pursuing the widest range of innovative working practices seem to be software or web-related firms. Buffer, Automattic, Treehouse and Lullabot spring to mind, but there are many others, and that’s not a huge surprise, since these firms work in a virtual world where their raw materials, and the labour and the delivery of their products all happen digitally. They also have a predominantly younger set of employees, who are comfortable both with the technology of remote working, and also with a philosophy that doesn’t define work as showing up at a physical location and being told what to do.

But many non-profit organizations would also see a great range of benefits from adopting similar approaches, and in many ways non-profits have more to gain from these measures, including helping to attract smarter people and allowing them to do more while spending less money.

Let’s look at some of the key reasons non-profits should be in the vanguard of these future work approaches:

1) Attract and retain better employees

If you can’t pay top dollar, then you need other ways attract talented employees. Offering them a flexible and/or completely distributed working environment can be a great draw, as can self-managing teams. Especially for younger people, the appeal of no commuting, increased autonomy, generous vacation time and other thoughtful benefits can outweigh purely monetary gains, especially if they will also be working on something they consider worthwhile.

For the non-profit, the ability to recruit from a global talent pool rather than one limited by geography can mean they get the best person for the job, not just the least bad candidate in their town.

2) Lower overhead

For better or worse (and it’s often worse), funders look carefully at non-profits’ operating expenses, especially as they compare to the amount they put into their programs. There’s a strong case to be made that this can be very short-sighted: if my expenses are $1,000 and I raise $20,000 for my programs, is that really better than if my expenses are $3,000 and I used that extra expenditure to raise $500,000? That said, there’s no doubt that a commitment to reduce unnecessary overheads can funnel more money towards programs and development. The cost of running an office is increasingly becoming an expensive and unnecessary overhead.

3) Lower carbon footprint

If your non-profit works in the environmental arena (but even it if doesn’t), you should make sure you’re causing as little environmental damage as you can while doing your work. In the same way as investors and consumers are increasingly interested in a company’s corporate social responsibility, so foundations and individual donors are looking to non-profits to do the right thing in all their dealings, not just their core mission.

Making people commute to work increases greenhouse gas emissions from transportation (unless everyone is riding their bikes or driving a solar-charged Tesla), but the biggest source of emissions for most organizations is their building itself. In the US, building operations (which includes heating, lighting, cooling, running the computers) areresponsible for nearly half of all CO2 emissions. And that doesn’t factor in the embodied carbon in the materials used to construct the buildings in the first place.

Some nonprofits take this issue seriously — the Packard Foundation have a great zero-net energy headquarters that generates all the energy it uses — but others would better not to have an office at all. We all need a place to rest our heads, but having a completely separate place to do work that we could do at home is environmentally hard to justify.

4) Flexible working forces better management

It’s harder to run a nonprofit than a commercial organization. This is partly because of the misguided efforts to cut operating expenses explored above, which leave most organizations understaffed and overworked, but also because of the unique challenges that non-profits face. Their goals are often harder to measure, and their teams and boards expect much more consensus-building than more traditional top-down companies have to deal with.

The detailed communication and clear procedures that distributed teams and self-management require can provide a much more solid basis for success in this context than the more usual death-by-a-hundred-meetings management style seen in non-profits.

5) Progressive organizations should work progressively

By their very nature, most non-profits are working to make the world a better place. They see the current situation as flawed, and want to improve it. It’s ironic then that this aspirational approach in many cases doesn’t extend to how they plan to bring about this change. There’s something wrong if you’re aiming towards the future, but doing so in an old-fashioned way. Progressive organizations should be the first to consider new ways of working, rather than not even thinking about how they do things.

If I were a foundation looking to fund a non-profit or one of its programs, I’d be looking for evidence that the non-profit was carefully examining and reflecting on not just what its mission was, but on how it was going to achieve it. Which includes considering how to express its values through the way it works.

And non-profits don’t have to be a distributed team to reap some of these benefits. For example, a recent job advertisement from the MacArthur Foundation for a Director of People and Culture clearly shows they are asking good questions about how they want their organization to succeed.

If other non-profits started addressing their working practices with a similar bravery and imagination, the sector could achieve so much more, which would benefit everyone.

Dear America, you have cruel and unusual work practices

Dear America, you have cruel and unusual work practices

Dear America,

You know I love you. You’re funny and generous and have a great attitude. You’re pretty and you’ve been really good to me since we first got together in the late 90s. But we need to talk.

You’ve got some destructive habits, especially when it comes to work. And it’s making you look heartless and dumb (or maybe even cruel and unusual).

I know I’m from Europe where we do things a little bit differently, but it’s not just a style problem — what you’re doing is hurting millions of people. Where I’m from we have things like a minimum of four weeks paid holiday (what we call vacation) for full-time salaried workers. That’s the law. We also have more public holidays, which is particularly apposite as I started writing this post on Good Friday while in the office.

As you know, here in your land of the free, there’s no legally required amount of paid vacation time. None. A lot of organizations think they’re going out of their way to give you 10 days, and you know what’s weird? You guys accept it. Just as you accept longer working weeks. At least partly in the name of greater productivity.

Except it doesn’t work. Those slackers in Scandinavia and the Netherlands work fewer hours per week, and way fewer days per year, and I hate to tell you this, America, but they’re getting almost as much done, while spending more time with their families or on their hobbies. And they are healthier and happier.

A misplaced idea of productivity is part of the reason you do this to yourself, but it’s not just productivity for its own sake. It’s about your sense of self, America. So much of your identity comes from your work, and the presenteeism you espouse is important to how your see yourself, even if it’s damaging. Lots of you don’t even take all the limited holiday time you’re given. Learning to accept that there’s a better way is going take time, and I’m not discounting the power of big businesses who misguidedly think that more hours must mean more work. But as I said, individuals and business owners have a lot of responsibility for accepting this.

Come on America, I thought you were all about fearless experimentation and refusal to accept the status quo, so let’s see a bit of that for the benefit of everyone — workers, families and businesses. Fortunately, there is an increasing number of companies that are showing the way — real American heroes who want to work less, but better.

All the best,

David

By David Moore on April 10, 2015.

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Exported from Medium on October 17, 2020.