There were two really good articles recently about work culture that prompted this article. The first was about Microsoft experimenting with 4-day weeks in Japan and the second was about the workaholic culture of the US which suggested a 4-day week as well. So how would that ever work? Would the productivity that the US is so known for collapse? Is the US really more productive than other countries? Can a four day work week really work in the long term?

I was speaking at a conference last year about remote work. At the end of it, a guest came up to me and said, “We may need to hire you. We have teams in two different countries and we just can’t seem to make it work.” It turned out that the UK team went home for the weekend at 5:00pm on Friday and came back on Monday morning at 9:00am. The US team checked their phones and messages all weekend - and if their work was piled up, they also worked all weekend to stay ahead. The complaint was that the UK team members were “lazy”. 

Needless to say, they didn’t continue the conversation with me, much less hire me; after my response that went like this: “This tells me more about you as a manager than it does about the UK team. You have built a culture in the US where people feel they have to work, and the workload has not been managed to eliminate this need.”  Teams don’t have to overwork to be productive. It’s actually a bad sign if your team feels the need to put in overtime on a regular basis.

HOW CAN YOU MAKE A REDUCED WORK-WEEK HAPPEN?

Let’s unpack how a reduced work week could actually happen. If your workforce is working in iterations such as Sprints, then by definition, you are time-boxing the work period in which certain things will be completed. You are also working under the premise that only the most important items are being built - not every little thing that comes to mind. You are focusing on outcomes, not outputs. So if we put that all together, doesn’t it mean, in theory, that a reduced work week makes sense; or at least could be within reach?

What might make even more sense is flexi-work. The idea is that people work where, when, and how they want; in order to be the most productive member of a team. With this, however, there has to be a deliberate and intentional plan to foster collaboration. If everyone is working random hours, for example, or you have people who say things like “Well you said I could choose how I work and I choose not to use chat or email” then there will be a degradation of productivity. 

However, if the team determines what collaboration and communication looks like to them, and is intentional with how they do this through work agreements; then flexi-work not only can be, but rather should be a real concept that every company should consider putting in place. Of course, there also needs to be a continuous feedback loop for the team to understand whether things are working, and a plan to fix things when they crumble.

EMPOWER YOUR TEAM

Teams need to be empowered to determine their work culture, just like they should be to plan the work product. Once the customer or product owner prioritises what they want/need, it is then up to the team to get the product across the finish line. Often, a customer has a delivery date in mind, and what can realistically be delivered has to be negotiated based on complexity. 

The team has to engineer the solution and determine the time it will take to get the desired outcomes. So why can’t they also engineer how they want to work? Punching a time clock may be required for hourly jobs, but when a team is creating a product, it is somewhat nonsensical to maintain a time clock mentality.

If I, as a product team member, am having a really great day of productivity and want to work 10 hours, then I should. If on the other hand, nothing is going right the next day , then I should walk away and reset so that I can be supportive to the team. This may mean stepping away for a few hours, or it may be stepping into a different role that would allow me to clear my mind of the block that the current work has created.

As a result, how many hours a team works, or where they work, becomes truly irrelevant. With realistic product goals come productive teams that have safe spaces to work as they need. 

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About the Author:

INDRA A. BOOKS

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