Throw out the contracted hours model, ring in the contracted value model.

Unless I’ve been out enjoying myself with a bottle or four of beer the night before, as soon as my eyes are open in the morning, I’m awake, ready to face the day, and absolutely cannot lie in bed (the weekends are sometimes different though).

I feel able to do some of my best work between the hours of 5am and midday. There are exceptions though, sometimes I’ll be working on some code in the evening, get in the zone and forget to go to bed until 2 or 3am.

The point, though, is that my body and mind don’t work well with the normal 9-5 working hours. Yet, most businesses _still_ insist on keeping these office hours. It’s in my contract, 9am – 6pm. But my body doesn’t care about my contract, it does what it pleases because that’s the way bodies work. Yours will do a similar thing. Think about when you’re most productive, is it during 9-5, or some other time?

My peers all function better at different times too. Some of my team get in at 10am, some get in at 8am, this is fine, they work to their pattern, the problem still remains though that they are obliged to do the correct number of hours per week. It’s in their contract afterall that they have to do 40 hours during the five business days of the week.

I think this is dumb.

If my best hours are 5am to midday, the company only gets three of those hours as I have to be in work at 9am. Three productive hours a day for five days is only 15 hours. So, 25 of the hours that the company has me for are not as productive as they could be and this is because I have a contract.

Let’s say though, thay my company says I can start at 5am and leave at midday (if we forget the obstacle of actually getting to the office, in London, for 5am). That’s still only 35 hours. What about the other five hours I owe the company? Where can they fit in? There are two answers to this.

The first is that I do those missing hours sometime over the weekend. If I can fit in five hours of productive work on Saturday and Sunday then the company and I are square. I am doing all the hours that they are paying me to do. Fairs fair.

The other answer is that I don’t do them. Yes, I just don’t do the hours. You see, my job is about generating value for the business. I do it by coaching, writing code and “managing” a team, not by being at some place for 40 hours a week. “But Mike, that’s what your company is paying you for!” cry one or two of my peers. Yes, that is what they’re paying me for, but they shouldn’t be. I’m not a security guard, or a working on a checkout (two jobs where you do have to be someplace for some period of time), I’m a (shudder) “knowledge worker” and my goals and objectives aren’t the same as yours, the security guards or the checkout person.

The company *should* be paying me to generate value. They should be setting down guidelines on what that value is and how much of it I should generate (I’m simplyfing massively here as objective setting as HARD) and then paying me to deliver it. How I deliver that value and how long it takes me should be entirely up to me. The trouble is, companies, as a rule, don’t do this. We’re tied to the old model of a contracted number of hours and, until we break this, we’ll never get the best out of our employees.

So, throw away the old model of contracted hours and ring in the new model of contracted value. Tell me what results you want me to achieve and when you want me to achieve them by, then let me be free to do this. If I can deliver those results in half the time, then next time, make my goals and objectives harder. I guarantee that, with the freedom and trust that this model will evoke in me, you’ll get the best out of me. I’ll be happy, you’ll be happy and our company will prosper.


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