By Melvin Day, Managing Director
Like a scene from any Lowry painting, in times gone by marketing professionals across the world trooped through the doors of their technology employer en masse and on time – at 9am every Monday.
This procession was then reversed exactly eight hours later at 5pm, repeated five days a week and 52 weeks a year – barring 23 days of annual leave. And you did this for approximately 45 years. And if you were lucky you didn’t die for 10 years after you stopped!
With dispersed teams and flexible working, there has been an undoubted blurring of traditional working practices regarding location and communication. So thanks to remote working and the legal right to work at least one day from home, we now might not need to go to the mill, and not necessarily at nine either.
But one thing that has remained constant is the largely unbroken chunk of eight hours from morning until late afternoon where we are paid to get the job done. Increasingly at Marketing Moves, we’re finding that this working hours aspect of the week is also being blurred by clients and candidates with whom we work.
For example, a parent might do 7 or 8 hours work through the day in say four blocks of 2 hours, in order to fit around the various aspects of parenting – such as getting children ready, feeding, the school run, pre-school activities throughout the day and so on. Whilst the first block starts at 6am, it might be that the last block does not finish until 10pm.
And if very early morning and late night work is increasingly happening to make up for less time during the day, are companies accepting of it?
It does seem that companies are coming round to the employees’ way of thinking, notably the recent rise in 3 -12 month unpaid sabbaticals to let people recharge their batteries, as well as numerous examples of fully paid four day weeks (dropping either Wednesday or Friday) which appear to show an increase in productivity.
With this in mind, should companies look at how flexible they are on daily working hours when employing new staff in order to ensure they’re offering as many options as possible to attract and retain the best employees?
Please do let me known your thoughts below or direct and I shall reply individually to every comment.
Contact
To discuss in confidence how Melvin and Marketing Moves can support your organisation’s growth, please contact Melvin by any of the means below.
+44 (0) 20 3911 6757
+44 (0) 7967 678 002
mday@marketingmoves.com
linkedin.com/melvinday
