Rethinking the 9-to-5 Work Week
Who’s still working 9 to 5?
Is that even possible any more with business spanning all 24 time zones and some people having to work multiple jobs? Salesforce, the world’s #1 customer relationship management (CRM) platform, is breaking the mold and going in a different direction. But first, some background.
The U.S. government first began tracking working hours in 1890. Full-time manufacturing employees back then labored on average 100 hours each week. Workers were right to grumble about all the takin’ and no givin’. That is, until 1926, when Henry Ford decreed a five-day, 40-hour workweek in his factories. But it wasn’t until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 officially limited the workweek to 44 hours (and in 1940 to 40 hours).
Now, though, with manufacturing no longer employing so large a percentage of our citizens, things have changed. More than one third of the American labor force are Millennials, and studies show that their concerns are different from past generations. They want flexibility, autonomy, and fulfillment. Those are things the 9-to-5 workday has a hard time delivering. Studies also have shown that only one third of employees are engaged at work, but that improves dramatically when those same employees spend 60-80 percent of their working time (maybe three or four days) working offsite. Why? The most common answers were too much micromanaging, too many meetings, and too many distractions in the at-work environment.
As for Millennials, when their work isn’t tied to business hours and they have the freedom to choose their schedule or work on flex time, employers have found it creates greater job satisfaction and higher performance while lessening turnover.
There are a number of alternatives to the 9-to-5 workday. One New Zealand firm tried an experiment that paid off well. It was to institute a 32-hour, four-day workweek, but still paying its employees for five days. The results? Employees experienced a 24 percent improvement in work-life balance while supervisors reported that “staff were more creative and generally had better attendance.” One reason it was so successful is that it forces employees to be more productive; they have to get the same amount of work done in less time. In order to get that work done on time, they either shortened or eliminated meetings, one of the workplace’s big timewasters.
The Salesforce Experiment
This CRM company just announced that going forward it will allow employees three work options.
• The Flex Option – This allows employees to come into the office up to three days per week.
• The Fully Remote Option – Their choice is to work full time, but remotely.
• The Office Based Option – A small subset of workers will come into the office to work every day.
Employees on the flex option need to be in the office for tasks such as team collaboration, customer meetings, or in-person presentation. These are things that are either difficult or can’t be done through video calls.
Fully Remote employees can take this option is they don’t live near one of Salesforce’s offices or have roles that don’t require being in a physical office.
As for the Office Based option, only a small portion of its 49,000 employees will be in the office all or most of a full week.
The decision to make these changes was based on company “employee wellness surveys” that were undertaken at the beginning of the pandemic. Says Brent Hyder, President and Chief People Officer at Salesforce, "An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead; and the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks."
Workforce changes mean physical office changes.
Salesforce has 19 offices in North America alone, including the recently completed Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, a 1,070-foot-high skyscraper that cost $1.1 billion to build. But from now on, the offices will be redesigned as "community hubs" with collaboration and breakout spaces instead of rows of desks. And there’s the positive affect the new options will have on diversity. If a worker isn’t required to be in an office in one of the cities where Salesforce has a presence, they can broaden recruitment to different locations.
Studies have shown that schedule flexibility is just good economics. What happens if many of your employees only need to work 30 hours per week to finish their tasks? You’re paying them for an extra 10 hours, and they’re unproductive for that same amount of time. Or if you demand that they be there on the 9 to 5 schedule, but some of them do their best work beginning at 7:00 a.m., or don’t really get moving until 10:00 a.m.? By giving them flexibility, productivity rises, you only pay for the hours that they work, and profits should go up.
Productivity and job satisfaction in the dual-income, flexible schedule family.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that more than 60% of families now are dual-income households. These households must rely on expensive childcare if both of the incomes come from 9-to-5 jobs. But with flexible schedules, these same dual-income families can stagger their work hours. That means they can plan for fewer hours that outside childcare is needed, and so they will save money. And with today’s childcare costs, those savings are as good or even better than a bump in salary.
Conclusion
I’m not saying that within the year no one will be working 9 to 5. In fact, I’m sure that 9 to 5 will be with us for quite a while, but it won’t be as prevalent. In fact, it may no longer be the norm. As employers were forced to rethink their workplaces because of the pandemic, they soon found that the new normal may be better than the old. What they might never have considered doing pre-pandemic pushed them to innovate, and innovation is often the path to a stronger bottom line. It’s too bad it took a pandemic to give most employers the incentive to ask if what worked is really the best way.