By Mary Cloake, Workforce Skills Adviser, Buckinghamshire Business First

Before March 2020, a full-time job generally meant 37-40 hours a week based in an office, possibly near an employees’ home, although more likely involving a commute by car or train, or both. It seemed to be the exception rather than the rule to be able to work from home or work flexible hours.

The purpose of this article is not to debate the pros and cons of office versus homeworking, or how hybrid working has evolved, but to suggest that if your business is struggling with recruitment, have a look at how you are advertising a position, including the working hours stated, as a way of exploring solutions.

Are historical practices now outdated?

Are employers aware of how much they are influenced by historical and potentially outdated practices?

It was the Industrial Revolution that played a key part in bringing in the eight-hour work day; it had previously been unregulated with workers often having to work 18 hours a day, six days a week to earn enough money to support their families.

The traditional rural pattern of working from sunrise to sunset led to strikes, protests, campaigning and lobbying that paved the way to improvement. The great car magnate, Henry Ford’s decision to pay his workers more, shorten their working day and still increase productivity was a big influencing factor.

By the early 1920s, an eight-hour day had more or less become the accepted working day across many sectors. It has been culturally engrained into us that we should be working for eight hours a day, five days a week.

The 21st century challenge

The conditions that existed in the 18th and 19th centuries are no longer the norm. The phenomenal rise in the use of technology has meant that many manufacturing and industrial jobs, whose workers needed protecting from long hours, just don’t exist in the 21st century.

Many employees today sit at desks, the kitchen table or even on the end of the bed, tapping away at laptops, writing, coding, designing.

Jobs are not the same. Skills are not the same. If two people are given the same assignment, one person might finish it in one hour, the other might take four hours and do a worse job! It is all but impossible to actually work for eight hours a day in the jobs so many of us now have.

So, it seems illogical to use an out-of-date law defining an eight-hour working day or a forty-hour working week to recruit workers/employees in a market where a) the latter are increasingly clear that they do not want to work full-time or work as their predecessors were forced to, and b) there are more vacancies needing to be filled than there are employees to take up positions.

Eight hours as a limit, not a target

For anyone who has been on a speeding course, the overriding message is that just because the speed limit is 30mph, it does not mean that cars must travel at 30mph. It is a limit, not a target.

So, if an eight-hour day is regarded in the same way, it is a limit on the number of hours spent working, not a target. Productivity can be just as high, if not higher, if the employee doesn’t have to be seen to be sitting at a desk, potentially not being fully productive. It is also quite likely that there will be occasions when someone works far more than their 40 hours a week.

The point is that for every job advertised, especially in the current market, there will be a number of people who will look at a job description saying ’37-40 hours a week, 2 days in the office/3 days at home’ (or similar), and decide against applying.

Productivity does not only come in eight-hour blocks

If the work gets done, and an employer wants the best productivity and engagement from an employee, why not have a rethink about the contract you offer someone?

Look at what someone is really offering your organisation. See who has the skills that you need to help your business grow and work out an employment contract that meets the needs of the employer and brings out the best in the employee.

Dig deep into the eight-hour day norm and ask whether you need to promote this in recruitment adverts. Recruiting as you always have done may not serve your business into the future.

Remember: whatever approach employers take, they must ensure they stay within UK employment laws.

Some ideas for employers to embrace:

1. Be open to the idea that your business can adopt different working practices
2. Explore using a time/productivity app such as ‘Rescue Time’ to see where you and your staff are spending most of your time, and how usefully. It may sound intrusive to start with, but over time, it should give the employer a much clearer picture of productivity, which in turn can massively contribute to the work-life balance of all employees.
3. Embrace flexible working. Agree with an employee when they will start work. Allow for a longer day, say ten hours - though as an exception and not the norm!
4. If a project is going well, stand the employee down at 1pm on a Friday.
5. Try not to schedule meetings at the end of the day.
6. Slow down the frenetic pace of ‘doing’ business. 
7. Summer hours – in July and August, adopt a summer hours policy and close the office early.
8. Team-building days – research has shown that employees who are close are more productive. The whole sum of the job does not have to focus just on deliverables and business development. Factor in a team-building day, if not once a month, then once a quarter. If you regard it as a positive way of breaking the eight-hour day, it will benefit your business.
9. The more freedom an employer gives their employees over work scheduling, the more likely they will achieve that work-life balance and be more engaged and more productive. They don’t need to be sitting across the desk from the boss eight hours a day in order to achieve their best. Change the suspicious mindset that says, ‘if the employee isn’t sitting at the desk, they aren’t working’. Trust yourself and trust your employees.
10. Make things as good as they can be for your employees, and you could be surprised at the results. Just because you as an employer have been on the treadmill of an eight-hour-plus day for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, take up the challenge and break the cycle. 

It is ironic that Victorian culture was concerned for the moral lives and education of workers. There was much campaigning to allow ample leisure time for workers to morally educate themselves and to act in their free time as upstanding citizens.

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