If there is one area in which thinking about the future of work meets more societal considerations, it is that of working time.
If it seems to be a given that the 9 to 6 workday in the office will be less and less the norm, there is not yet an alternative model that seems to impose itself in an obvious way. And, for that matter, should there be one?
A topic we will observe, as usual, in terms of the forces shaping the future of work in 2022.
The pandemic
For many, the pandemic has meant forced remote work on a large scale. And when you explore new ways of working in this way, you end up discovering the finer points and better exploiting their specificities.
Some people discovered that remote work could mean asynchronous work: since we are no longer in the same place as others, we are less bound by office hours, we might as well work at the pace that suits us best.
Some people started their day earlier to slow down in the afternoon, while others preferred to work longer hours in the evening but had some free time in the morning. As long as the work was done and you could be reached, you might as well take control of your own organization.
That’s for the organization of the day. But why not go further?
While not everyone embraced large-scale, imposed remote work in the same way, some appreciated the flexibility it provided and figured there would be no going back to normal for them. And that as long as they could choose their place and hours of work, why not go one step further and also choose their days? Why not fit 5 days of work into 4 and buy themselves some free time?
A dream? Well, no, insofar as this desire collided with other thoughts and aspirations and could well lead to something.
Consumerization
Without much impact here except to consider that the employee who considers himself more and more as a customer of his business intends to take over the organization of his work, of his life, and to decide the place that work will take in it.
And that’s not so wrong.
Technology
It is the basis of everything, because it makes remote work possible in the first place and opens the door to new forms of flexibility.
If it makes a lot of new things possible, it can also constitute, depending on the way it is used, a guardrail or even a brake on these new flexibilities. During the pandemic, we saw an explosion in the demand for solutions aimed at monitoring employees remotely: when you have a problem of trust, you always think you can solve it with control.
We have also seen that there is a fine line between using technology to understand how people work and improve things, and using it to establish productivity indicators that are more than questionable.
Technology allows us to explore new forms of work organization insofar as it allows distance and suggests asynchronicity. The way in which it is used will then depend on whether we go further in the flexibility and autonomy of the employee by putting the necessary safeguards in place or, on the contrary, whether we fall into a system of hypersurveillance that will be used to protect past models.
The evolution of society and economy
The reduction of working hours is a subject as old as the world of work itself, for several reasons.
First of all, the technological evolutions that allow us to do more in less time.
Secondly, there is a deep-rooted societal tendency for the time saved to be used for leisure. In fact, it is by increasing vacations and reducing the working week that the whole service and leisure economy has developed, which weighs so heavily today. This is also part of the broader context of work-life balance, which is a strong demand.
Finally, the reduction of working time has often been seen as a way of sharing work in order to reduce unemployment. This is less true in an economy of almost full employment as we know it today, but we do not know what tomorrow will bring.
Nevertheless, a real reflection on the four-day week exists in many businesses because it corresponds in part to an aspiration of employees who want more time for themselves and to an employer brand strategy in a context of great resignation and reversal of the balance of power between businesses and employees.
However, there is a novelty in this reflection: in most cases it is not a question of reducing the weekly working time but of organizing it differently. Working a little more each day to have an extra day off during the week.
Can we expect this to become the norm? The subject is far too vast and complex to have a definite opinion.
First of all, because it requires a real rethinking of the organization of work on a large scale. Will the business be closed one day a week? Will it be necessary to make sure that everyone does not take the same day in order to maintain operations?
Will this affect all professions or just those that are not in contact with the customer?
Is it sustainable? Working a little more each day to have an extra day of rest is obviously attractive. But we don’t have any hindsight on the long-term impact and we don’t know if after 6 months or a year with this system, employees won’t want to smooth out their workload a little more, considering that finally doing the work of 5 days in 4 is exhausting in the long run.
The transformation of service activities and knowledge work
Strictly speaking, we are not talking about the transformation of activities but rather of the context in which they are carried out.
The very nature of this type of activity makes them extremely well suited to a more flexible approach to work organization, and they are the first to request it.
But isn’t the issue, if such a change is to happen, that it is for everyone?
Bottom line
The reflection on the future of work will not be without a reflection on working time. But to think that we are heading towards a sustainable reduction in working hours is a step I will not take, if only because at some point the question of the difficulty of maintaining income will arise.
On the other hand, we are moving towards greater flexibility: the idea is not to work less, but to work differently in order to combine salary maintenance with a better work-life balance.
Such systems are very easy to set up on an ad hoc basis for certain people, but generalizing them will raise profound questions of work organization for which there does not seem to be a clear and definitive answer today.
And nothing says that there are any. It will certainly have to be seen on a case by case basis, for each business, for each profession.
En attendant si futur du travail signifie davantage de temps libre, cela ne voudra certainement pas dire travailler moins. On est davantage dans une logique de flexibilité que de réduction du temps de travail.
In the meantime, if the future of work means more free time, it will certainly not mean working less. We are more in a logic of flexibility than of reduction of working time.
