I am starting to meet the odd person in New Zealand who works part of the week for one organisation and for a different organisation the rest of the week. This is commonplace across the globe but is still somewhat of an emerging trend in NZ.
Both as employers and employees we are extremely focused on the 9 to 5 workday, Monday to Friday, for the one organisation. From an employer perspective this can limit productivity. I remember reading an article once where the employee had a ‘conundrum’ (not the right word)... where they had taken on a role to work from home where they had to do a large amount of data cleansing and manipulation. It was a 40 hour a week role.
Within a few weeks this employee had created a programme that meant the role could be completed in 5 hours. Now the conundrum for the employee was that if they tell their boss they had potential done themselves out of 35 hours of work!
Why are we so obsessed about the 40 hour week? Surely it would be more fulfilling gaining and spreading your skills and experience across different organisations.
As I learn more and more about successful scale up organisations that reach a critical mass and mature as a business, is that there is somewhat limited talent in New Zealand to always help organisations get there.
Instead of working for one organisation, wouldn’t it be great if we could see more and more people work for a large corporate in the morning, a growing SME in the afternoon and spend Friday’s working in a not-for- profit.
To get here I personally believe employers need to play a big part. Rewarding those, for instance our employee above who reduced his role from 40 hours to 5 hours a week on outcomes, rather than rewarding on hours worked.
Imagine what this would do for work-life balance!
Anyway, I have to go, I am working as hard as I can to get this blog done, so I can make sure I can go for a surf tomorrow morning.
