No study suggests that working in an office eight hours a day, five days a week maximizes employee productivity, satisfaction, or performance. In fact, all of the data that exists on working life in an office reveals that most employees are unengaged, spend a lot of time in the office without working, and underperformance is a persistent problem.
The The most powerful lesson companies can learn from the Gig Economy is to judge workers by their work – their results and output – not when and where they do that work.
The Gig Economy is transforming our way of working by disconnecting work from an office. The Gig Economy has been called many things, including the YouEconomy introduced by I/O Media in 2017 – an umbrella over a handful of moves; parts of it, along with other moves toward economic freedom and flexibility, have been called the sharing economy, gig economy, and independent economy. The new economy encompasses the ever-changing labor landscape and the rise of the freelancer.
Related: YouEconomy:the power is yours
Independent consultants, contractors and freelancers are judged by their results and output, no matter how, where and when they are produced – not by time they spend in their office chair, or if they work from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. everyday. Study after study after study of remote workers have consistently shown that they are happier and more productive than their office colleagues. Recent surveys of 8,000 workers by McKinsey's Global Institute and nearly 900 self-employed workers by Future Workplace and Field Nation reveal that these workers, freed from the constraints of office life, are happier and more productive. Yet somehow, despite compelling empirical evidence to the contrary, our approach to working in the office, being five days a week and lasting in the cube, persists.
Tracking employee time and location made sense when many jobs depended on time and location. Factory workers, laborers, or workers in retail stores, restaurants, or hospitals need to be at their workplaces at specific times to be productive. If your job is to be a salesperson in a retail store, you need to be there to sell to customers when the store is open.
There are still jobs in our economy that require a specific time and place, but few of them are corporate jobs. Despite this, most companies misallocate their resources to track and manage employee time and location without measuring what really matters. Ideas and results are the real value workers bring to their employers, not time and attendance.
When asked, senior managers and HR professionals champion the need for a office-based culture building on stories about teamwork, culture, and collaboration. But their arguments are anecdotal and lack data, even from their own company. The evidence that does exist suggests that trust and effective teams are built primarily through interpersonal behavior and communication, not constant proximity in the same office space.
Related: 7 ways to create a sense of family in the office
Corporate culture is the main obstacle to managing by production, results and the value delivered. Most managers enjoy working in a company where employees are managed by time and place. After all, it's pretty easy to see who's at their desk every day. It is much more difficult to develop, measure and follow, for each employee, the specific value, the deliverables and the results that they must produce. Managers will have to work much harder in a system that focuses on tracking results and deliverables.
The rewards are great for companies that can overcome corporate resistance to remote working:more productive workers, efficient and satisfied, better management, a healthier corporate culture based more explicitly on merit, access to a much wider geographic pool of talent, and lower real estate and facility costs as workers s away from an office schedule.
Businesses can start reaping these rewards by taking three immediate steps:
Encourage remote working
Manage and evaluate employees by the results they deliver
Offer co-working spaces instead of dedicated offices for employees who prefer the social structure of a working environment office, or who lack the quiet environment and space for a dedicated home office
For employees, remote work eliminates wasted time commuting, face time pressure, the stress of constant exposure to office politics, and the shredding of the workday by the hundreds of paper clippings from interruptions and meetings.
Labour is the most expensive and valuable resource for most businesses. Managing this resource by time and place is an unproven, inefficient and expensive approach that fails to measure what really matters:results. The biggest lesson companies can learn from the Gig economy is to manage and measure employees by what they produce, deliver, and solve, not the hours they spend in the office.
Related: 18 scientific reasons why the working week should be shorter
