One Today Is Worth Two Tomorrows

Trial new ways of bringing colleagues back from extended leave, slowly ramping up working time in the office and/or remotely. Invite returners to describe their experiences and the benefits at employee network events, in blogs and interviews and in wellbeing programmes. Test new business ideas on school leavers and undergraduates as part of your early career outreach. Form a regular feature or prize, and highlight successful responses in early careers materials and corporate literature. By developing greater adaptability, wellbeing and resilience in your workforce, your business can respond more easily and effectively to changing circumstances. It’s daunting if you’re swimming against the tide or sticking your head above the parapet. The answer is to band together – focus on what’s in your team’s sphere of control, trial some changes and ask for forgiveness later when you’re hopefully trumpeting your successes. Keeping a collectively open mind means regularly looking at your organizational and business data and asking, ‘What are we not paying attention to? Where are our blind spots? What different perspectives can we bring in?’ Likewise, as individuals and as teams, we can reflect frequently on our time habits and identify where these are no longer fit for purpose. Encouraging resourcefulness focuses on leaders’ and managers’ roles as coaches. They can invite others to be curious and creative about work habits and outcomes – successful or otherwise – by asking questions like, ‘What are we finding difficult here? Who or what can we lean on for help? What can we draw from these setbacks? This has the potential to become an organizational strength and an enviable source of competitive advantage. Developing a growth mindset in time management needn’t mean adding to our workload. Instead, it’s about recognizing when our existing mental models and work habits need updating because they no longer serve our goals.

Dirty Little Secrets

And it’s about believing we have the potential to find or create better ways of working together, instead of thinking we already have all the answers or that our organizations always have to operate the way they do today. Now let’s widen our perspective once again to look beyond your organization’s boundaries at the bigger picture. How do we move beyond changing organizations one at a time to achieve a transformative shift in society that will benefit future generations? How do we change public policies and politics to help create a healthier, more productive work culture, nation by nation, that generates real value for businesses as well as for individuals? There are broader efforts underway with these aspirations in their sights. This invites organizations in the United Kingdom to gain accreditation for responsible business practices, including fairer hours and contracts, employee wellbeing, employee representation, and diversity and inclusion. There are regional efforts as well – for example, in London the Good Work Standard launched by the Mayor of London sets out a benchmark for ‘best employment practices’ above legal requirements and bestows two levels of certification. Then there are the international campaigns. One international cohort of politicians, social leaders and business experts is calling on governments to shorten the working week without reducing pay,5 whilst the burgeoning B Corps movement6 is a global community of leaders promoting ‘a new kind of business that balances purpose and profit’. Businesses that have gained B Corp accreditation have committed to higher levels of transparency and legal accountability for their social and environmental performance. Over 74 countries and 150 industries are involved to date and in the United Kingdom there are currently 430 B Corps with a combined revenue in excess of £4.3 billion and over 22,000 employees. A global movement can achieve impressive results, but often legislation needs updating to better reflect the realities of modern working lives and to adjust the imbalance of power between employer and employee. With greater job protection and security, for example, employees may feel less compelled to work all hours in competitive professions simply to hold onto a job that pays the bills.

Slight Discrepancies

It would switch off the default position of ‘shareholder primacy’ for all companies and empower business leaders and owners to operate in a way that benefits employees, society and the natural environment. By updating legislative and regulatory frameworks and offering positive policy incentives, governments can make our nations attractive places for businesses to locate to or expand in. By investing in their businesses there, companies can signal loudly and clearly that they care about job sustainability, environmental sustainability and healthy work lives that encourage individuals and families to flourish. New Zealand and Scotland are advocating likewise. It may be a case of the public sector leading the way, with the private sector jumping on the bandwagon when the benefits are clearly demonstrated. While these campaigns and pieces of legislation are admirable in their intent, there is scant evidence that they have had any impact on our time culture so far. Perplexingly, organizations can be signed up to many benchmarks and awarded the highest levels of accreditation, yet still operate with complete time blindness. The actual experiences of employees aren’t materially changing in any significant way because our time culture is so relentlessly ignored. We simply can’t afford to sit back and wait for the next charter or new legislation – we’ve got to shift the needle now. There’s one last question for you and your business to consider, which we explore in the Conclusion. You’re not solving time for time’s sake. Everyone has their part to play in adopting your new approach to managing time, but their roles will vary.

Coming Up

Lost time is never found again. Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff that life is made of. You may delay, but time will not. Will you still feel that way at the end of your career when you look back and ponder on what might have been? If you accept that our current attitude to time at work is unhealthy, unproductive and unfair for many, but you’re thinking, ‘We’ll never really crack this. It’s too hard, too complex, too ambitious’, then I urge you to think again.