Managers have learned not to schedule meetings from 4 to 6 PM and all day Fridays. Few show up.
Productivity Dead Zone
Many managers hate hybrid work because colleagues vanish late afternoon. The Wall Street Journal labels it the New Workday Dead Zone When Nothing Gets Done.
The 4 p.m. meeting is canceled because half the team can’t make it. You send an email with what would have been the main discussion points, and the replies roll in through the evening and into the next morning. A consensus that could have been reached before dinner now forms the following day.
The hours that bookend the traditional close of business have become a dead zone at many companies, but employees aren’t just blowing off work to relax for the rest of the day. Workers say the 4-6 p.m. flex time they use to take a turn in the kids’ carpool, hit the gym or beat traffic often requires a third shift at night to finish the day’s tasks.
Microsoft researchers have documented what they call a “triple peak” phenomenon in which workers’ keyboard activity spikes in the morning and afternoon, then a third time around 10 p.m. The tech giant predicts this pattern is here to stay.
Bosses can drag employees back to their desks, but good luck keeping them there until the end of a 9-to-5 workday or beyond. Accommodating employees’ personal appointments—happy-hour yoga, a teen’s tuba lesson—can be necessary to recruit and retain top talent, several business leaders tell me. They add it sure makes getting a quorum at meetings tough, though. Others, especially child-free workers, complain that their workdays have become longer and less predictable since it became widely acceptable to take breaks during normal business hours.
Stephan, a father of five, holds himself to a hard stop at 5 p.m. He initially worried that others would keep hustling after he called it a day, but he now realizes others are winding down early or right on time.
This behavior was literally unheard of in the 25 year period I was in corporate America, mostly at Harris Bank.
You stayed until the task was done no matter what. Technology releases were scheduled on weekends to allow rollbacks if anything went wrong. That meant weekend work on new releases.
I have been talking a lot about productivity lately, and this is another piece of the puzzle. People may put in the same number of hours, although I doubt that. But even if so, a task or decision that takes more than one person can be problematic.
Labor Productivity vs Costs Long Term
Production and nonsupervisory wages started accelerating pre-pandemic, unit labor costs rose sharply after the recession.
On July 14, I asked and answered the question Do Rising Wages Tend to Increase Inflation?
The Fed may be making progress on inflation, but that progress is unlikely to stick if costs keep rising more than productivity.
A huge wave of boomers retirements is in progress. Skilled boomers are now replaced with unskilled Zoomers (generation Z), who do not seem to have the same work ethic.
So, it’s no wonder productivity is in the gutter.
Mish, I worked in IT, so I had the same experiences you had, including working one Christmas Eve to fix a production problem! Now I wonder if it was worth it, or what we accomplished with all that work. I say hurray to employees getting a little more balance in their lives.
The problem with hybrid work, however, is that it breaks down the boundaries between work life and family life, as the productivity spurt at 10:00PM shows. You never really get a chance to decompress. You get some idea in the middle of the night, and you just have to get up and work on it.
Living to work is over. Just do the minimum. It doesn’t pan out much for employee much anymore. Even in tech the days of making a bundle on stock options is over. The VCs have learned how to screw you over.
When I first started in an office we had plenty of long lunches and folk out for ciggie breaks and plenty of time spent socializing. And stacks of paper shuffling. Can’t say I remember any great boomer work ethic doing routine and boring work.
When I moved over to IT, sure, very different. The work was interesting, we achieved things, we all worked excess hours. But most of those people were from the same group that did not a lot as paper shufflers.
Nowadays most folk in big IT will not get the opportunity to make significant change, so for the masses it not much different to paper shuffling. So it’s hard to get build enthusiasm in folk of any age group.
Personally my group was moved to a location a long commute from my house. That was the end of my interest in contributing any effort. Now I work from home 3 days, they would let me do 4, but I am managing a team so I an happy with 3.
Of course on the days I am in the office I just end up in meetings and talking to bosses and team members.
The days at home are when stuff gets done
In return for that flexibility employees are going back to work at 10pm. Good luck getting them to do that at “in office only” workplaces.
“Microsoft researchers have documented what they call a “triple peak” phenomenon in which workers’ keyboard activity spikes in the morning and afternoon, then a third time around 10 p.m”
That 3rd peak at 10 PM is when they are surfing porn or on tinder (or other hookup sites) using a VPN.
Nope. Kids are Fed and in Bed.
Nobody is making them attend a worthless “in person” meeting or Zoom.
They can get an hour or two’s worth of REAL work done without interruptions.
The answers, project, spreadsheet, info, whatever are in the inboxes of everyone else they work with when they walk in the door or check their emails in the morning.
I always used to say (pre-covid) that everybody should be forced to work all day Thursdays, to accommodate meetings. All these people with different work times, days they don’t work, are a pain. Any project team is hampered by there never being a time slot that everybody is there.
But there’s another side to this … new style management often does not reward (tangibly or otherwise) the people carrying the load; it literally does not pay to take responsibility for results … that’s the two-year manager stint’s circus. Zoomers & Millennials have been formed by more than abstractions like work ethic; a lot of other vectors at work here.
Well the people who show up for meetings on Friday and go the extra mile are those who end up being promoted. You can accept it or not but your personal preferences make no difference to top management. What they want is someone who is always available to take car of problems when the crop up and if you are there you will get the promotion. There are some exceptions for truly exceptional people but frankly how many are in that category? Very, very few people are.
For those who resist going back to the office then you can expect that those who do will get promotions and not you so you will have to be content with staying in the middle somewhere. Your worst enemy is complacency.
One smart lady who goes kayaking on Friday afternoon is worth 3 nose to the grindstone suck ups, sorry.
You wish it were true but it isn’t. “Something came up that we have to do now. Where is Miss X? Oh she is off kayaking. OK, is Y available? Yes she is so she can do it.” Next week X comes back and finds Y getting to head the new project that X had her eye on.
Seen it happen so many times. Being smart is good but if you aren’t there to take advantage of it then it isn’t very useful. Miss X probably thought she was unreplaceable because she is very smart but a lot of people are smart. Other qualities are equally important.
Maybe if you’re in an industry that employs average people I guess. I’m long retired but office drones were always pretty useless vs even a half engaged PhD. YMMV I suppose.
Haha. My industry is one that uses lots of brains.
Absent brains are no brains at all.
Nonsense. Effective Managers want RESULTS. They don’t care WHERE you are on Friday afternoon. Incompetent Managers want to have a bunch of meetings to pretend they have value to the company, instead of delegating authority and responsibility.
Nobody who is effective in executive leadership cares how early you get in on a Monday…what time you leave on a Wednesday Evening or how many days your work from home. As long as your team is productive…you will get promoted or raises or responsibilities that lead to those things.
Old School “counting hours in the office” is why Old School Companies are being disrupted every year.
Maybe it’s not productivity that’s decreasing, but that work/life balance is returning back to normal?! Why slave away for 60hr weeks, to not be able to enjoy thebl fruits of your labour (through taxation, inflation or untimely death?)
Better to have more modest goals and enjoy life. By many accounts, Americans are very unhappy people, so this bizarre over the top work ethic hasn’t done much good
Americans had a bit of work ethic.
The Japanese, now there was a work ethic.
Which is why the entire Japanese Population is crashing, too many old people, not enough couples and babies to sustain the country and they have Debt at more than 200% of their GDP. Sounds like a great plan…NOT.
This is news to…nobody who has ever worked a 9-5 job.
Seriously, anyone who claims we all worked harder back in the day is full of it. I was just as unmotivated on fridays when I was 20 as I am 30 years later.
Though I never fell into the “I love my company” culture, I don’t remember anyone ever volunteering to work extra hours on a Friday. Very few would come in on the weekends even though that was overtime. Yes, much of the work was much harder back then; but we weren’t any happier doing it. Basically, if you were that enamored of your job, it usually meant you had nothing better to look forward to at quitting time. I always did. And the reason why the new generation doesn’t have the same work ethic, is because they see how little good it did for the previous generation. Not to mention their parents never made them work. I don’t know why people whine about the new generation anyway. They’re the product of their raising.
‘Church Time’ nonsense.
WFH usually skip on Fri. During the week, starting at 3AM, mgt might be on conference calls. Conference call replaced flying and cut cost. Front line Mid mgt are important to CEOs. They have the pulse, they are in trenches. They might refuse to take on a risky project that will end their career. If a ceo will not lead Mid mgt will chick out.
After tsunami #1 and #2 buybacks, bonuses and options became more important than transforming the co for the next five years. Top mgt cares about short term results, not the future.
Labor productivity index minus hourly earnings shows it (Juy 14)
I well remember my dad telling me the mantra that you never wanted to buy a car made on a Monday morning or Friday afternoon. This in the days when cars were still 90% made by men on the assembly line and not by robots.
Clearly productivity hasn’t changed in the ensuing decades.
I was watching an episode of Cagney & Lacey where the entire dept had to work all weekend to get the paper files cleaned up and organized for the boss. The episode digs into what they would have been doing instead of working like shopping for furniture, going on a date etc…
Today they would be looking for furniture deals at work on a Friday most of the day, looking at dating apps most of the week and ignoring a lot of the crime in the city altogether. Lacey would not be using her Saturday night to dig into her law books to pursue a file she found where the statute of limitations was expiring in 24hrs that’s for damn sure.
Part of this is poor wage growth and lack of dedication of both employer and employee to long term. Workers do not have pensions, or sometimes pensions are raided. 401k is basically self-managed like your own portfolio and matching is a joke at most places. So WHY, if you can get away with it, do you want to work for the benefit of some board and richer upper management???
This is not just employee issue but work in US in general.
Because they make payroll during slow times.
FYI – I was self-employed most of my life.
IT workers still have to get everything working promptly and do deployments over weekends. The IT department is typically the most important department at most companies. If computers aren’t working, nothing is working.
The biggest change is working from home. There’s rarely a need for an IT person to come into the office. Exceptions for those who have to physically fix hardware. Maybe those with bad broadband connections have to come in.
The thing that I hate is when program managers call meetings to discuss some issue they don’t understand. I frequently get invited because a subordinate is the programmer. The meeting starts, the PMs take turns giving speeches. In the mean time, I email the developer asking what the issue is. We figure out the solution in a minute and then we disconnect from the meeting letting them know we’ll handle it.
We don’t deploy anymore on the weekends. Unless it goes out Thursday it will have to wait until Monday. The reason; a lot of good developers quit.
When we changed to the no weekend deployment rule we started keeping good developers around. Work hard play hard basically. We usually start off Monday with discussing something fun some team members did over the weekend then slam right back in grinding on the job site so to speak. It’s absolutely the way to go for us.
Doing it from home makes it more bearable. If everything was checked properly before the deployment, it typically only takes an hour or so. Most of the time is spent taking down servers and then bringing them back up. Gives me an excuse to take a half day during the week. I just say that I did a deployment on Friday, so I’m leaving early. No one questions it.
I was in IT and in general agree.
But I always felt the most important departments were accounts receivable (my paycheck) followed by sales (my future paycheck).
You know what is important Lisa.
That’s every day … I start at 7 and am done at 3
I used to do that and then the owner complained that he couldn’t reach people, so now I have to work at least 8-4. I told him and he said the message wasn’t meant for me and I could keep 7-3, but I’ve kept 8-4.
Official work hours at the last job were 7:30 to 4.
Job before that was 8 to 5, the one before that was 7 to 3:30.
Is there such a thing as a 9 to 5 job?
You know, for a lot of the white collar workforce now spending at least some time (or all the time) at home, a lot of us arent really needed 24/7 unless the computer starts acting up or a customer has a meltdown. Could the computers literally be taking on more and more of the work successfully? They still cant get no-driver cars and trucks to work, but a lot of the manual work that Mish may remember from the 1970s and 1980s is now successfully computerized. How many meetings really NEED to be attended, or is it just a way of proving supervisory worth? What we have now could be the model for universal basic income to work … tax the computers (somehow) and rebate the money to all Americans. Dont mess with a good thing ….
“This behavior was literally unheard of in the 25 year period I was in corporate America, mostly at Harris Bank. “
Agree wholeheartedly and this just goes to show everyone how the labor dynamic changes with who has the power. Right now and moving forward, employees are going to have the power. They can jump ship today and have a new job next week and if they don’t like the conditions there, they can hop again and again.
Employers will be happy to have a warm body doing something, anything for them.
The days of employers “firing” people and having someone ready to take their place are gone for at least the next one or two decades. Don’t take my word for it, take data driven analysis and have a look at the labor participation rate.
link to fred.stlouisfed.org
it’s no wonder United Airlines gave their pilots a 40% wage hike recently, they can just easily walk over to American, Delta, etc. Next up, huge raises for nurses, doctors, UPS workers (teamsters), Hollywood, and so much more. It’s going to be a game of strike roulette and everyone’s betting on green and winning.
Prudent investors will be positioning for huge profits from this new reality.
I wouldnt give up too quick on the rich and their MBAs keeping what they feel is their right. “Manna for the proles?” The unwashed wouldnt know what to do with the money. You can always find low wage people somewhere …
About a decade+ ago (2009?), I was tasked with heading over to India and setup a support center for the business. I flew to Mumbai thinking it would be super easy to just interview and hire a bunch of people, setup the office, spend a few days training and voila – cheap new support center up and running.
I was a naive kid. All the things above were actually quite simple and easy to do but the bureaucratic nightmare of actually employing people, having the right economic zone, in the right area and the right mechanisms (legal entity, policies and protocols) to support the staff was impossible. We ended up abandoning the idea because after analyzing all the costs, even though the employees would be cheaper, would not really save much money. Throw in the time zone difference and it was the final nail in the coffin.
It’s possible for large corporations like Microsoft or Google to setup in India or other places around the world but it’s an entirely different thing for smaller to mid size enterprises. If you’re not a Fortune 500 company that can offshore then your business will be in a world of hurt over the next decade.
Hyderabad wasn’t any easier.
A bit hotter, and way, way less humid.
But you can’t get them to produce…that’s the problem.
…But they’re so agreeable about not doing what you want them to.
re: “You stayed until the task was done no matter what.”
Exactly. And I came in on the weekends.
”
e: “You stayed until the task was done no matter what.”
Exactly. And I came in on the weekends.
”
And now that all money is being made off one’s “home”, one stays at home on the weekends. Nothing really changed.
Stuki, I always enjoy your comments. So on the anniversary of your 500th reference to wall fungus, can you please humor me and enlighten us all as to the details of this fantastic wall fungus trauma you clearly experienced so many years ago? The world wants to know!
Friday afternoons have been a dead zone for as long as I can remember, and I can remember a long time. As long as 20 years ago Friday afternoon meetings were viewed as nothing more than a loyalty test. Or something to tell your wife while you were actually at the bar.
LOL. Totally. This is not new. When I was working (which began in 1978) if I hadn’t left the office by noon on Friday something had gone totally wrong.
I gave my new managers three pieces of advice. Own your mistakes. Don’t try to do my job. Don’t schedule meetings on Friday afternoon.
Obviously did not work for my company. May have been true in ’78 but the 90’s – a definite no. We were totally into how many hours could everyone put in at the office. Not to say all hours were productive, but we were there.
That’s what it turned into. People were there long hours, but often not working, just to put on a show.
“People were there long hours, but often not working, just to put on a show.”
By the 90s, it mostly was nothing but a show.
People were “making money off their home” by then. Whatever work was too complicated for Wall Fungi and Roaches, was mostly already done in Asia.