Can you think of anything nicer than knocking off work early on a summer Friday afternoon?
We can't either.
Autum may be approaching fast but
for next year it's worth remembering that some company's do actually have a policy throughout the summer months allowing their employees to make up the time flexibly but enabling them to enjoy a shorter week at the time when they prob most appreciate it.
But imagine if this could happen all throughout the year?
Researchers who study workplace productivity and employee well-being agree this should be the case, because giving workers more freedom to decide when and how they work may ultimately result in them getting more done.
While occupational researchers have never specifically studied the effects of Summer Fridays, they do know quite a lot about the impact of both shorter workweeks and flexi-time—that is, allowing workers to define their own hours.
Workplace productivity doesn’t increase with hours worked, the research concluded. Workers in Greece clock 2,034 hours a year versus 1,397 in Germany, for example, but the latter’s productivity is 70% higher.
Also, the larger social toll of an overworked population are clear. A 2004 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control linked overtime to poorer overall health, and other research has suggested that working long hours can lead to depression.
There's no reason to think that a strictly scheduled 40-hour (or 50-hour, or 60-hour ... ) workweek is the best system either for the economy. What we think of as standard today is just a historical holdover that’s very much showing its age, said Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Family and Work Institute. “In the industrial era, we had a notion that, because productivity was essentially on an assembly line, presence equals productivity. If you’re manufacturing things, you have to be present in order to do that,” she said. “And that image of productivity has been very hard to change, even though work isn’t like that anymore.”
Many organisational psychologists study productivity by examining employee “engagement”—a catch-all for happiness, interest, and the like—because these things tend to correlate with how much work an individual gets done. “There’s lots of research out there showing that giving employees a choice of when and how they work ultimately boosts engagement,” said Lisa Horn, co-director of the Workplace Flexibility Initiative at the Society for Human Resource Management. “And when you see higher levels of engagement, you see higher levels of productivity.”
Stretching the spirit of a flexi summer through all four seasons isn’t such an outlandish idea; it’s already slowly starting to happen. In America, according to the most recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an estimated 30 percent of Americans already have some form of flex-time available to them.
Long live Summer Fridays we say!
