Are 9 to 5 jobs over?

A lot has been talked about how productivity in the workplace doesn’t depend on having a scheduled job or on the number of hours put into working. We already know that for an employee to be efficient in their job, it isn’t required to spend more time but more focus. So why are we still expecting workers to fulfill 7 or 8 hours strictly?

Since the pandemic and remote work, we realized that some traditional office laws are just obsolete in our new ways of working and lifestyles in general. Right now, we’re prioritizing flexibility without compromising the quality of the work or how much work is done. This also implies modifying different work dynamics that respond to how we were taught work should be.

But it’s been really hard to change that mentality, even if most of us know that rationally it makes sense. It happened to me when Axiacore switched from working on a fixed schedule, I was so used to being required to work strictly from monday to friday from 8am to 6pm that when we changed methodologies and I knew that I could take, say, the morning to run errands, I still felt bad that I wasn’t working when I thought I was supposed to. Eventually, I realized that running errands wasn’t gonna affect my results.

So even if collectively we do think 9 to 5 jobs are over, unconsciously we believe our productivity and work results depend on having a fixed schedule. Even if it’s scientifically proven that those two factors aren’t tied to one another.

But this is not an encouragement to keep those schedules, on the contrary, it’s to allow your employees the possibility to explore which ways of work are best for them. If you give them the flexibility they will find a way to improve their time management and at the end deliver better results.