The Future of Time

How ‘re-working’ time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing

Helen Beedham

• Publisher: Practical Inspiration Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781788602624
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

**Business Book Awards 2023: People, Culture & Management Book of the Year**

The way we value and manage time at work is broken.

Businesses are squandering time when making decisions, delivering work and managing people. Employees are rewarded for 24/7 availability, speed of response and hours worked.

The results are clear: low productivity; high stress and burnout; falling retention; and stalling diversity.

The Future of Time reveals how 're-working' time – transforming organizations by adopting positive time practices – can help you build a more diverse, engaged and productive workforce.

• Diagnostics to quickly assess the 'time defects' damaging your business
• Compelling evidence, case studies and strategies to 're-work' time successfully
• Timelines and tools to bring about fast, effective change.

Helen Beedham, MA Cantab, speaks, consults and leads research on how to create more inclusive, productive workplaces where everyone can flourish. For the past 25 years, as management consultant then chair of a City-wide professional network, she has led change programmes for FTSE 100 businesses and regularly brought together Heads of HR, Diversity, Inclusion and Wellbeing to exchange market-leading practices.

Part 1

The ticking time bomb

How we’re failing to value and manage time at work

Chapter 1

Time today

How we value and treat time in business today

This chapter explores:

• what businesses value today

• how businesses value time

• how we typically think about time at work

• what collective time management is

• the neuroscience of time

• the main characteristics of working time today.

What businesses value today

BEFORE WE TAKE a look at how businesses think about time, let’s look at the bigger picture of what they value. What drives most businesses? Or, to put it differently, what defines success for them?

The first answer is obvious: it’s money – in the form of revenue generation, profitability and net returns to the business owners, who are typically the shareholders or partners. This focus on financial measures and gains overrides all other aspirations. Obviously, businesses have a responsibility to secure financial stability along with sufficient reserves to draw on during leaner times. Beyond that, the primary aspiration of any business is to safeguard and ideally grow its financial performance year on year, depending on whether the business is in a burgeoning, mature or declining market. Culturally, the pursuit of revenue and profit maximization trumps everything else in our Western capitalist society.

What else? Clients. In order to achieve their financial goals, businesses need to win and retain clients. Offering and delivering innovative products and services is critical for knowledge-based organizations, as is the ability to respond quickly to client demands and to constantly adapt their services to meet clients’ changing needs. Developing long-term, profitable relationships with clients is, in general, far more attractive financially to businesses, compared with the much greater cost and risk involved in securing a high proportion of new clients each year.

Third on the ‘valued’ list is talent. Businesses need employees with the right skills, motivation and commitment to develop those products and services, win clients and build successful relationships with them over time. This means people who can bring creativity and innovative thinking into the business, who have the critical technical and commercial skills required to deliver complex projects and transactions and who – particularly at the senior levels – can bring new clients with them. Today, businesses increasingly value diversity of talent, influenced by a now indisputable body of research showing that those organizations with diverse workforces and leadership teams outperform less diverse organizations on pretty much all major business metrics (revenue growth, profitability, stock market valuations and more).¹

It’s not just creativity, technical expertise and relevant experience that businesses are seeking, though. In recent years, employers have increasingly placed much greater value on ‘soft’ skills such as interpersonal communication, collaboration, problem-solving, curiosity and adaptability. Proving you can not only deliver in your role, but also understand the bigger picture, contribute to cross-business initiatives and embrace change makes you a far more attractive proposition to employers today.

Why? Because, to conclude our list, businesses value resilience and agility. In a global environment characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) businesses need employees who are open to change and willing to adapt their thinking, knowledge and behaviours. This enables the business to respond quickly to unexpected situations and changing priorities.

How businesses value time

If we want to find a better way to collectively manage our time at work, we need to understand how and why time is important or valuable to us. We can’t change something to which we’re not paying attention, so the first step is to look more closely at what time means to us at work.

Time is money

It’s a well-known saying – but what do we really mean here? Let’s unpack this. When we say ‘time is money’, we mean that time represents a cost to the business. For example, the cost of sale: how much it will cost us to pursue a project opportunity or to close a deal? Or the opportunity cost: what potential future gain may be lost as a result of a decision we’ve made? Time is also a cost in terms of resources (aka employees). What is the total resourcing cost required to deliver client work, and how can this cost stay below the price we’re charging to the client so we can generate a profit?

Businesses also assign a financial value to time, typically in a hierarchy of value rather than a fixed or universal value. Two classic examples are reward packages and fee rates. Reward packages assign a value to time by ‘buying’ a specified number of working hours from an individual over a specified period of time – simply put, your working hours in return for your salary. This concept of time loses meaning in organizations or industries where employees’ actual hours worked vastly exceed their contracted hours – a common occurrence in many large, professional firms. With fee rates, an employee’s time is charged to the client at a stated price per hour. An hour of a senior employee with more years of career experience and/or more qualifications under their belt is assigned a greater value than an hour of a junior employee, which is where the hierarchy comes in. The commercial practice of ‘leverage’ involves finding the ideal combination of people’s time that will generate the most profits to the firm.

Time is a proxy for ‘human capital’

Related to, but not the same as, the concept of ‘time is money’ in terms of human resources, human capital is a concept coined by eighteenth-century Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith to encompass not just the economic value of the work that employees do but also their investments in expanding their knowledge and skills that enable the organization to succeed.

The simplest way for businesses to define their human capital is as the number of employees with different skills and knowledge working full time or part time for their business. They also view human capital in terms of length of service – ideally not too short (expensive to the employer) or too long (stagnation of talent and diversity), but somewhere in between.

Time is presence

For decades, time at work has been associated with being physically present in the office. Working time has been highly synchronous: people show up at roughly the same time to do their work and leave at ‘the end of the day’. The gradual rise of ‘working from home’ over the last decade or two hardly dented this way of valuing time, until the COVID-19 pandemic triggered mass remote working on a scale never anticipated. At the time of writing, it is too soon to tell what the long-term impacts of this will be on Western business time culture – although we will be considering it more throughout the book.

Time is sooner rather than later

In industries that produce tangible products and often require major capital investments, such as manufacturing, pharmaceuticals or oil and gas, 5–10, 10–20 or even 25+ year time horizons are common. In contrast, knowledge-based businesses tend to focus on the nearer term rather than the longer term. They think of time in terms of the working day, week, month, quarter or year. Their business volumes and activity levels are driven by operational cycles, such as results reporting, planning and budgeting processes, and pay and performance reviews. In this culture, the emphasis is much more on the ‘here and now’; only senior management and strategy functions are likely to be more focused on the longer-term horizons.

Time is what we measure

‘What gets measured, gets managed,’ stated Peter Drucker.² What we measure, incentivize and reward drives how much time we invest in sales calls, project discussions, client meetings, personal development, compliance activities and so on. If our annual bonus is determined by whether we have met, exceeded or missed our sales target, we will inevitably focus on chasing down sales above everything else. Businesses that recognize this tend to adopt more holistic measurement frameworks to help them evaluate a range of performance outcomes rather than just financial ones. One such example is the balanced scorecard, a tool widely used by senior managers to review progress towards strategic or operational objectives from four different perspectives: financial; customer; internal business processes; and learning and growth.

How we typically think about time at work

Given that businesses are made up of people, how do we think about time at work? For all our creativity and inventiveness, we tend to think about time in a surprisingly limited, unchanging way.

First, we think about the number of hours we typically allocate to work in a given day or week. These are shaped by shared ‘temporal boundaries’: beginnings and ends, and breaks in between. Traditionally, working hours are specified in employment contracts, the classic example being a 40-hour week worked 9.00 am to 5.00 pm each day with working time outside of those boundaries considered overtime. Yet today it is far more common for work hours to be defined as ‘to meet the needs of the business’, and overtime typically to be unpaid in professional roles.³ We also think about days off and points in the year where we might take one or two weeks’ annual leave at a stretch.

Second, we tend to focus on filling our time with activity. Our work culture is task focused, meaning we prioritize ‘getting stuff done’, ticking items off our ‘to do’ lists and meeting deadlines. This culture of busyness is an overwhelming characteristic of modern working life, with the urgent usually taking priority over the important. We’ll look a little later at how and why we find meaning in busyness – for now, it suffices to recognize that this social culture exists.

Third, we tend to think about time in relation to individuals and not in terms of a collective group. We put significant effort into ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: The ticking time bomb: How we’re failing to value and manage time at work
• Part 2: Time re-worked: Better ways of valuing and managing time
• Part 3: Time to act: How to re-work time in your organization
• Appendices
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index