“Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.” – Albert Camus
We can divide work into the following three definitions:
- Employment that provides sustenance that is often vital and sufficient to live life
- A place of work
Employment that demands an effort How does the definition of a workplace look? According to Wikipedia: A physical place where someone works. So then, work in the sense of a job we do during the course of a day (or night) is a relatively straightforward concept. We go to a physical place of work and perform our labour to earn economic compensation and achieve goals that we or others have set.
Worktime
Once upon a time, we were paid for the number of hours we spent at, let’s say, a machine in a factory. If we spent 8 hours at work, we were paid for 8 hours of work. The same went for sitting at a typewriter, serving customers at a store or diagnosing patients. The value of products and services was determined by supply and demand, but its price was based on production cost—in other words, the cost of raw material plus labour. In many ways, this practice remains. But as new products and services are created and adjacent professions and tools come to be, this equation becomes increasingly arbitrary. The profit on hours worked or the refinement of raw material does not necessarily add up the same way anymore.
“I don't like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself not for others what no other man can ever know.” – Joseph Conrad
If you require fewer hours to achieve the same goals, you can raise the expected profit or redistribute the surplus to new investments. What happens if we invest this increased effectiveness in developing new skills, health and flexibility for the employees, our greatest asset? Would it not give rise to increased productivity and steadier output in both the long and short term? Could this eventually proffer new products, novel and unexpected modes of work and, by extension, perhaps the innovation we need to build a more sustainable society? We need to seek alternative ways of working, living and being to see the world in a new light.
It is high time to reconsider the punching clock and factory whistle—the compensation for hours worked. That work is measured by the hours you spend doing your work or at your workplace. Which hours of the day are considered work and which are not? How do we measure this? What if we focus on what we accomplish instead of how many hours it takes us? What would life look like then? What role do work hours and the workplace play when physical meetings between our employees and collaborators happen? How should these meetings look? What are we doing there? How often are we present? And last but not least: why? What is a workplace even?
The 8-hour workday and 5-day work week have a long history originating from the heydays of industrialism towards the mid 19th century when the basic assumption was that the ideal workday consisted of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure and 8 hours of sleep. This evolution did not happen in the same way or at the same time everywhere.
In Sweden, the parliament adopted an 8-hour workday in 1919, reducing the workweek from 6 to 5 days in 1971. Much happened to productivity and growth between 1918 and 1971, which continued to increase from 1971 until today. Our working conditions have undergone major transformations and new professions with different prerequisites have been born along the way. Life conditions during this period were altered at a breakneck pace, with the life expectancy in Sweden today being ten years higher than in 1971. Why then have we not seen changes to our working hours since 1971, given that proproductivity and growth have increased at an astonishing rate ever since? There are many explanations for this, but the likely reason is that the expectation of further growth simply has not enabled it. As a consequence, no one saw any point in restructuring our time. Now that we see clear incentives to increase wellbeing, development of new skills, measures of innovation—should we not consider fewer or shorter work days or at least an overhaul of what we do in the course of our workday?
Workspace
The factory whistle made it clear when the workday commenced and concluded. A shopkeeper cannot help but serve customers when the doors open and people flock through them. When a doctor starts her or his day, there is little time to do anything aside from treating patients. But this is not the case for all professions, even for the above. Today, digital tools allow us to perform many tasks outside our normal working hours and physical workplace. Parts of factory work are now fully automated and are performed outside the factory floor. The shopkeeper can now serve the customers via a webshop and rather than working from a health centre or hospital, doctors can now meet patients online. This evolution has been going on for a while and has meant different leaps for different industries, sometimes shaking them to their very core. Nonetheless, it has done little to change our overall view on when, how and where we work.
Taking this reasoning one step further: The workplace is where we perform our work, where we create products and services for sale. Once upon a time, people usually worked in a specifically equipped place; a factory, farm, store, hospital or office. For some time, the production of products and services has been increasingly less bound to physical locations. Hence, it does not rely on the worker’s presence when the factory whistle rings or the store opens its doors for the day. Neither do we need a place to gather like we once did, as communication can happen digitally and physically. This isn’t news to anyone.
What is new is that we operate outside the workplace to a much larger extent than before. More and more people perform their work outside of the office, store or hospital, in totally novel lines of business and on a scale that often renders our workplaces devoid of people. We work less alongside other people at a shared physical location, presumably because we do not need to in the same way as before and because the digital way of working is becoming more cost and time-efficient.
However, anyone who has worked alongside other people can testify to the irreplaceability of physical meetings in an increasingly digital world. Certain facets, qualities and tools are impossible to fully replace. Among the many valuable aspects is the unpredictability that occurs when people meet physically, especially when it’s unplanned or unexpected. These types of encounters are irreplaceable.
Worklife
We work, therefore we are part of society. There’s a sense that we are of use. Many can probably recognise that work not only preoccupies our thoughts and physical presence at the intervals of the factory whistle. We also bring it home and plan, find solutions, discuss issues with family and friends or vent about the day’s events at the dinner table. We also spend a considerable amount of time in cars, buses or trains commuting to and from work. Is this not part of our work? Counting time that an employee works on the go is a mindset many workplaces have already adopted. Working from home in the evening or weekend to compensate for leaving early now and then is a relatively normalised practice. For those who are able to and belong to business cultures that accept and allow it.
Why is leaving the office or closing the laptop when you have achieved your goals for the day less accepted? Trying to be as effective as you can to have time for contemplation, personal improvement, physical exercise or a little more time with your family, is not as approved of. Why is this so? We know that given time to pursue these activities, employees thrive and perform better in their jobs, short term and long term. We also know that society as a whole fares well when people are happy and healthy, costing us less and contributing to a more sustainable whole. Why have we not succeeded to focus more on this—helping people with the workplace as a starting point by putting together a functional life puzzle, feeling good physically and mentally, having the opportunity to develop in their work, etc.—is quite hard to fathom. Having the opportunity to do a load of laundry between digital meetings surely leads to less stress, making the puzzle a little more straightforward.
What if we introduce weekly contemplation, sharing of knowledge or physical activity to the workplace? Take collective and individual inspiration trips, participate in conferences, meet colleagues and peers within the same line of business, perform benchmarking locally and remotely, or take up education in the workplace? The list of possibilities can be made long, but the truth is that these life-enhancing activities are rarely prioritised in business. But what if we put them at the top of our agenda, prioritising them above all else to help people perform better in the short and long term? Why not dedicate a day each week to this—a take on the 4-day work week, complemented by a day of contemplation, physical activity, inspiration or development of a new skill?
Life and work
We believe that life and work—the individual and the professional identity, the workplace and the colleagues, the digital office and the physical meeting place—is a whole package that should be reimagined from the ground up. We need to reconsider the definitions and decide on a new order of priorities to adequately address contemporary and future needs and opportunities: the office, working hours, the definition of work itself and what goals the organisation sets. We should make room for varying cadence and a broad range of requirements in a diverse group of individuals and personalities.
