Why do you care how many hours I work?
In my early 20’s I was working in the Marketing department for a large Insurance company, building all their websites and intranet systems. I was regularly ‘late’ into the office because, if I’m honest, I’m just not an early riser. I was a hard worker, I was passionate about what I did and I genuinely enjoyed my job… at first. In the beginning I obviously wasn’t late because I was new and eager to impress, but naturally as you settle in more you start to get more comfortable and the need to impress begins to dissipate.
As I got more comfortable my natural state of not being able to get up in the mornings started to kick in, but this didn’t affect how much I got done. I might of been 5 or 10 minutes late in the morning but I still made sure that I got everything I needed to get done, done. But not long after this started happening, I started to get ‘quiet words’ from my manager, asking me to make sure I’m there at 9am. That in itself you might think is fairly reasonable, but I quickly noticed that on a day where I was in the flow and getting on with things and it got to 5:30pm, quitting time, there was no ‘quiet word’ to make sure I went home.
It became apparent that the company was completely against the idea of me being 5–10 minutes late, but absolutely fine with my staying 20 minutes late, and this didn’t sit well with me. My stand point was if you’re so adamant I’m here at my contracted start time then you should surely be just as concerned that I’m not here past my contracted end time. So I began to run a little experiment. I made sure I would be in the office at 9am sharp, and leave at 5:30pm sharp.
As expected, no more ‘quiet words’ about my time keeping. But simultaneously I began to adjust my pace of work. While fulfilling my obligatory hours, I started getting half as much done and taking twice as long to deliver systems and websites and what was eye-opening is after 6 months of this, nobody called me up on it. There was no ‘quiet word’ about my productivity. There was no ‘quiet word’ for why what used to take me a few weeks to build a system was now taking a few months. I put it down partly to the ignorance of my managers of what I did, and them undoubtedly just assuming that this particular piece of work was more complex, but the biggest revelation was that the single biggest metric they were focusing on was whether or not I was on time in the mornings and did my full 37.5 hours a week.
The irony was I would have achieved two or even three times as much if they simply left me to my own schedule.
A few years later I ended up working at a software house building a SAAS product, where the leadership was very different and absolutely focused on output and performance, yet they still had it in the contract that I will work 37.5 hours a week and would get uncomfortable, admittedly less so, when I was late or left early.
This got me thinking. Why do we have ‘number of working hours a week’ in contracts for people working in an environment that builds something?
In a job that requires a presence for so many hours a day (shop assistant) I get it, you need that person present to serve the customers. But in an environment where we are measured by the output of what we develop, not the input of how many hours a day we’re in the office, why does it matter? In fact I’d go as far to say that it’s detrimental to what you’re trying to succeed in doing. If you are focused more on the bums on seats between the hours of 9 and 5 then those are the behaviours you’ll drive your team’s to develop. Making sure they appear to be busy because ultimately that’s what matters. They won’t be inclined to go any faster because why would they?
But if you focus on the output, the quality of the product being built and the speed and efficiency with which they’re building it, then those are the behaviours the team will be inclined to work on. I couldn’t care whether my team work 1 hour a day or 10 (as long as they’re happy doing so). I care whether we achieve the goals that we as a team set out to do.
You will always get more out of a team that wants to perform than you will from a team that has to. Focus on the output and not the input. Set the goals and the vision and give the team the flexibility to perform above and beyond.
That, at least, is my thoughts on the matter, but what are yours?
