Thoughts on flexible hours

Originally published February 2019 on Medium

Empty desks at 9am

From day one of hiring contractors and staff at Paper Giant, we created a flexible working hours policy. Now it’s two years on I wanted to reflect on the policy.

Some background

Paper Giant is a design consultancy. We’re a team of 15 consultants and support staff, and most of our work is defined projects for clients. We do ‘billable’ work to outcomes, not hours, and have a lot of internal projects where people manage their own time.

Why create a flexible hours policy?

The nature of our work — being present is not always required to get work done. Some of our work does need to happen in physical, collaborative environments, especially when it comes to certain kinds of qualitative research, synthesis, creative work or client and stakeholder engagement. Other work needs quiet, private concentration. We all oscillate between group work and solo work over the course of the day.
General human variation — people are different. Some people just aren’t morning people. Some people like to work late, or work late at night. If we can allow for this variability, why shouldn’t we?
Kids — School and childcare pick-ups and drop-offs are hard to manage in a 9–5 work day (Australian schools finish the day at 3 or 3.30). The fact that this remains a problem in our modern economy is crazy. School holidays and breaks are also problematic. Sick children make things even more complicated for parents. Flexibility around work hours can take a lot of pressure off.
Appointments — the dentist, the doctor, the post office, etc. These businesses are open during ‘business hours’, which just happens to be exactly the same time that other professionals are usually expected to be working. The policy gives people leeway to take the time to attend appointments without having to take leave, or feel demeaned by having to ask permission.
Autonomy and freedom — giving people control over their hours means more freedom and autonomy. The point is that we don’t care about the hours, we care about the outcomes. Our staff are experienced professionals who can manage their own time, and our culture needs to reflect this and enable it.

The core of our flexible hours policy is as follows:

Official office hours (we call them ‘team hours’) are from 10am to 3pm. If you are in Melbourne, you should try to be in the office and available for collaborative work.
Outside of team hours, you can work wherever — and importantly whenever — you like.
As much as feasible, we try not to schedule meetings outside of the 10am–3pm slot. If you must have a meeting outside of those times, negotiate with your invitees or project team.
As a staff member, you are expected to do, on average, 7 hours work a day, plus an hour break for lunch.
If you are working on-site at a client’s premises, you keep to their hours, not Paper Giant’s (i.e if a client wants to meet at 9am you should still meet at 9am).

The policy has continued largely unchanged in this form for two years now.

2 years later

At Paper Giant, people tend arrive in the office anywhere between 8.30 and 10, and leave anywhere between 3 and 7pm depending on the day. When there is a lot of work to do together — if say, a project team has a deadline coming up — teams often to switch to more ‘regular’ 9–5 days for a period before returning to more flexible hours.

A flow-on effect of this policy has been that people feel very comfortable taking short breaks when they need to, going for a walk, not working through lunch. As far as I’m concerned, this is great. As ‘knowledge workers’, keeping a balance and not feeling pressure to be ‘on’ all the time is important for both physical and mental health.

About 6 months in, we added a requirement to check-in on Slack to let the team know when you would be in the office, or when you were online if you were offsite. This was so people could know when it was ok to contact each other. We started use a dedicated channel #whereabouts for this, which quickly became a general ambient ‘where people are and what they are up to’ channel. More recently, we’ve also started a #standup channel where people post their big tasks for the day for a bit more visibility on activity outside the office.

We haven’t had any serious problems with people exploiting or pushing the limits of our flexibility — if this ever happens it’s obvious because the project work suffers and we can address it. Nearly all of our work happens in small teams, and our teams are pretty self-regulating when it comes to equal effort and performance.

Another effect that has become part of the culture: an open door policy for children. Staff regularly have bring kids into the office during school holidays, or after school. People don’t ask, they just bring their kids in, everyone is fine with it, so more people feel comfortable bringing in their kids.

I asked the staff what they thought

3 months ago I ran an anonymous survey about the policy, and the results reflected my feeling that it was working pretty well.

About 30% of our staff regularly come to work after 9am, and about 30% regularly leave work before 5pm.
Everyone surveyed said they liked the policy. Flexibility, autonomy and the ability to get to appointments were the key reasons people like the policy.
Two staff members said they couldn’t work here without the policy.
In actual practice, the policy is 10–4, not 10–3. We might adjust it to reflect this by making the 10–3 meeting rules more explicit.
Staff who regularly leave before 5pm lamented that some team activities (e.g, after work drinks on a Friday) are scheduled at a time that they can’t attend, and this is something we need to address in the future.

A few more things to worth reflecting on

What’s with the 7 hours? At first glance, the ‘do 7 hours per day’ and ‘we care about outcomes not hours’ is contradictory. There is some complexity around this, due to the nature of work scheduling: if someone has free time because project work doesn’t fill the day, there are lots of other things that person could be doing for Paper Giant, all of which are explicitly part of people’s roles: business development, marketing, internal capability projects, public talks and events, mentoring. Having some expectation around hours means makes it possible to schedule accurately, and more importantly, we can track when people are booked over capacity or are working unpaid overtime. Also people know when they have capacity to do stuff other than ‘projects’.

That 10–3 thing. There is something materially different about doing design work in the same space as a collaborator, and unfortunately, this something is lost when working remotely. We do a lot of project cross-sharing, presentations, invite guests to present, and have clients working on-site with us. As such, the 10–3 block has been set up as a time where it’s ‘safe’ for anyone to book meetings or events, and you can reasonably expect people to show up (or reasonably expect a reason for declining). This 10–3 block is also when you should be able to call someone over, have a chat, have a coffee, get some face to face time with another team member or director.

That said, culturally, project teams do make their own arrangements and are free to make hours that suit the team, including lots of working from home or offsite. Project teams negotiate amongst themselves around this, including working as a team from people’s houses on occasion.

Multiple staff at Paper Giant work regular short days, 9 day fortnights, or 4 day weeks, some of those days from home. This is not in the written policy, but it is negotiated on an individual basis. There is a critical mass effect that is already happening — the more people that do this, the more comfortable people are in asking for it.

About overtime. Our preference is to catch any ‘upcoming overtime’ before it happens through regular checks on work patterns and project scope, resetting expectations (with either clients or staff) or even de-scoping projects where we can — we want to avoid overtime as much as possible. My mantra is ‘overtime is a problem, not a solution to a problem’.

Time in lieu up to a few hours (due to, say, a late night or two) is usually just taken by staff with little more than a slack message, and no approval process. Sometimes people balance overtime with longer lunch breaks, appointments or errands instead. This is tacitly accepted by everyone and is just part of the culture now.

Regarding ‘autonomy’: There is a trade-off in running a business between autonomy, predictability, access and planning. We try not to schedule people to do stuff without checking with them first, but we do need to schedule activity, sometimes at specific times. The culture enabled by this policy means staff are very comfortable culturally speaking up if they think they are over-allocated. We also spend a lot of time during project scheduling meetings to watch for over-allocation.

Flexible hours as a ‘care structure’

One of the challenges as we continue to design Paper Giant as a functioning agency is the how we operate in a fast-paced, high pressure, highly competitive, and sometimes exploitative industry while still providing a healthy working environment and culture.

We see this policy, along with others (for example, we have a practice of having a dedicated ‘carer’ assigned to projects), as structures we put in place to care for our staff.

And we do care. Most people who work in strategic or service design (in my experience) do so because they care about other people. Despite this, burnout from overwork is rife in our industry. Our work can take a toll: we have difficult conversations, we learn about complicated and traumatic things, we context-switch all the time, we travel a lot, we make high-stress decisions that have impacts on many people.

The message that a policy sends matters as much as the rules it establishes. This policy says “we trust you, we aren’t counting hours, we don’t need to see you working as proof that you are working, you don’t have to come in before the boss and leave after they do”. It says “this work is hard, but it shouldn’t be so hard as to make your life difficult or put your health at risk.”

Allowing flexible working has been very positive, and rarely disruptive. I can see no reason why it shouldn’t continue, and no reason why other orgs with similar modes of work shouldn’t make it possible.

Thanks Ryley Lawson and Mike Palmyre for their feedback on this article