The ? Hour Work Week

Lately a popular topic for books and articles has been how few hours anyone can work and still be successful. Books have been written about the four hour work week. Articles have been written about the new “results-only work environment” or ROWE. And there have been a number of other variations on these themes. Four hours? Maybe zero hours? Why not. What’s the real answer? Well it depends if your are working for yourself, if you are working for someone else or someone is working for you. Let’s look at each.

Working For Yourself

If you are one of the increasing number of people who no longer work for someone else and work for yourself, congratulations. You are an entrepreneur. Most people who work for themselves have no steady paycheck (unless they are retired and that is NOT the subject of this article), no benefits and few if any employees.

If you are working for yourself, especially in the first several years of establishing and building your business, do not plan on four hour work weeks. You are responsible for planning, IT, marketing, sales, billing, customer service and more. As a result, you will probably be working at least twelve hours per day. You may be fortunate enough to work five days a week. In most cases, you will be putting in these hours six or even seven days per week for the first couple of years. The person you see in the mirror each morning is going to be the one who does all of the above functions and is responsible for translating goods or services into revenue - i.e. your paycheck.

Working for Someone Else

People hire you for your brains, your creativity, your ability to learn and to translate all of that into sales and revenue for them at the lowest possible expense. If you work for someone else, they are looking for the maximum work from you (based on your job function and related responsibilities and performance objectives) without a lot of additional expense. Strangely, most bosses at any level of management expect you to demonstrate your worth in terms of what your can do to make the business successful and in the process make them successful also. If you can do this by putting in four hours per week or even less than forty hours per week, you are an exceptionally gifted person. Or perhaps you are lucky. Or maybe your job is just too easy and you need additional responsibilities.

Rather than testing the waters with your boss by putting in fewer hours than your peers, I recommend that anyone who wants to be successful, work hard to meet and exceed all of their performance objectives, take on special projects and also take advantage of all the educational options available related to the job. Plus you need to network professionally both inside and outside of your company. Often this translates into being in the office (or at your computer at home) before your boss and working long after your peers have gone home (or signed off their computers). To be in the top 10%, get the bonus, get the raise, and get the promotion you must do more. That is difficult, if not impossible, to do by putting in the fewest working hours possible.

Others Working for You

Maybe you have the luxury of hiring everyone who works for you. If you are in that position, you can hire the best and the brightest that your budget can afford and train them to operate the way you see most effective. In all likelihood though, you have inherited some if not most of your employees from previous bosses. As such, some will be top performers, some will be average performers and others will be – well – slugs. Any one of these employees may walk into your office at any time and tell you that they only need to work a couple of hours per week to not only meet – but also to exceed – their performance objectives. What are you going to do?

- Tell them “Great job. Enjoy your time off”.

- Review their job description and objectives and beef up both of them.

- Fire or transfer them to someone else and hire then the best and the brightest that your budget can afford.

Most bosses that I know would take the second option – although their gut instinct may be to take the third one.

As an executive, middle level manger or supervisor, part of your job is to achieve your portion of the business’s goals through others. If the people reporting to you are only operating at 10% of capacity (or more or less) and you are paying them a full salary (let’s assume that they are salaried knowledge workers) then you are guilty of under utilizing the resources that the business has entrusted to you. This is the case whether the individuals in your team are achieving their results or not. If they can operate at approximately 10% of capacity and meet their performance objectives then, as stated previously, either the objectives are too low, they are lucky or their job function is incorrectly aligned with the performance objectives (as in someone else is really generating the performance results through their efforts).

While working less and achieving the same or better results is a dream much touted over the years by business philosophers and now gaining interest again, it is a model that is untenable for the self-employed, small businesses such as start-ups and even in the largest business organizations. Those who tout working less and getting the same or better results are only fooling those who read and buy into their naïve and misguided theories.