Broadly speaking, there are three things that take away our freedom at work: meetings, managers and mails. A lot of us try to fill in the ten-or twenty-minute holes between meetings with work that requires concentration and long uninterrupted periods of time to be done properly. According to Jason Fried, serial entrepreneur and author of Remote: Office Not Required, meetings and managers undermine our productivity. In short, meetings are employees talking about work that they have done or work that they are going to do, and managers are people whose job it is to interrupt people. Both are killing our productivity.
As a solution, Fried suggests that, instead of casual Fridays, ‘no-talk Thursdays’ should be introduced. Pick a Thursday – say, the first or last of every month – and make it the rule that nobody in the office can talk to each other that day. No interruptions. No phone calls. No meetings. Just silence. Now work on whatever you need to work on.
We tried it at the Happiness Research Institute. For us, it didn’t work to have a full day, or even an afternoon, when we couldn’t talk to each other, so we modified it and introduced daily ‘creative zones’. Two hours of uninterrupted time to get stuff that needed full concentration done.
Later, I discovered that Intel had experimented with a similar ‘do-not-disturb sign on the door’ model: Tuesday-morning quiet time. On two US sites, three hundred engineers and managers agreed to minimize interruptions on Tuesday mornings. No meetings were scheduled, phone calls went to voicemail, emails and IM were shut down. The aim was to ensure four hours of ‘thinking time’ – and to measure the effect this had. The pilot lasted seven months, 71 per cent of the participants recommended extending it to other departments and Intel found that the trial had been ‘successful in improving employee effectiveness, efficiency and quality of life for numerous employees in diverse job roles’. Like Intel, I found having uninterrupted time useful and productive but, like the Happiness Research Institute, your workplace might need a different modification again.
For some people, no-talk Thursdays or quiet Tuesday mornings are similar in concept to working from home. No meetings, no interruptions. In Denmark, there is a high level of autonomy and flexibility in the workplace and people are often allowed to carry out a proportion of their work at home. This is part of the reason why 94 per cent of Danes say they are happy with their working conditions, at least according to the Eurobarometer, which has been measuring public opinion on behalf of the European Commission since 1973.
However, I think a bigger reason for this happiness is that 58 per cent of Danes (according to YouGov) say they would continue to work even if they no longer had to for financial reasons – say, if they won 10 million kroner in the lottery. Work can – and should – be a source of happiness; and the proper design and functioning of the workplace can push more of us closer to this. And one part of this proper design is to provide people with an element of freedom: free time without interruptions. This may also entail not showing up at the office.
HAPPINESS TIP:
DO-NOT-DISTURB INITIATIVES
Try out initiatives like Tuesday-morning quiet time which may improve your sense of freedom at work.
Start a conversation at work about the ways in which flexibility and autonomy might improve employee satisfaction and productivity. Could you or your boss introduce concepts like quiet Tuesday mornings – carve out two or three hours every Tuesday morning in which no meetings are scheduled, no phone calls made or emails sent? Convince them to have a trial period of a month or two, and then evaluate it in terms of employee satisfaction and productivity. Or you could suggest work-from-home Wednesdays. If an employee saves two hours driving to work, they might even put in an extra hour for the company – and still gain an hour of free time.
MIND THE GAP
I propose a new mandatory course for all university students. Every student in the class is squeezed into the smallest wardrobe possible and they have to stand there for forty-five minutes without making eye contact with anyone.
If you make eye contact, you fail. Then they are asked to move into an even smaller wardrobe – in which they won’t all fit. If you don’t make it into the second wardrobe, you fail the course. I call it ‘Commuting 101’.
I’m not sure how long Jean-Paul Sartre’s commute was, but it might have been where he first came up with the phrase ‘Hell is other people.’ Granted, some commuters do get some pleasure and value out of their commute: they read, listen to music or simply digest the day. However, for many, the daily commute is a drag, and we find it frustrating because it makes us feel like we don’t have any control. You are trapped on the bus, or in the train, or in the car.
The idea that the car is the ultimate symbol of freedom is quintessentially American, but car advertisements the world over promise that you will be driving on meandering roads by the coast, surrounded by nature, with no other car in sight. In reality, we are more likely to be surrounded by traffic congestion and inching our way through rush hour while horns play a symphony of anger and frustration. That feels a long way from freedom. The car has become a ball and chain – it seems only to take us further away from happiness.
To make matters worse, for many, commuting to work is the worst part of the day. At least, that is what is suggested by some studies, in which people have been asked to rate different activities. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, conducted a study using the Daily Report Method, whereby respondents detail everything they did the day before – what they did and at what time, who they were with, and how they felt during each activity. In it, 909 American women rated their morning commute as the worst time of the day. Then came work – and then came the commute home.
Unfortunately, we spend a substantial part of our lives commuting. There is a lot of variation, obviously. According to a study by the OECD, people in South Africa and South Korea spend roughly twice as much time commuting per day as people in Ireland and Denmark. However, the longest commute is said to be in Bangkok, where people spend an average of two hours each day on their way to and from work.
There is also a lot of variation within countries. In the UK, people working in London endure the longest average commute (seventy-four minutes), and it has also been reported that almost 2 million Britons are travelling three hours or more for work daily.
Commuting Time
Source: OECD, ‘How’s Life? Measuring Well-being: Commuting Time’, 2011
In a time when more and more of us are finding it difficult to juggle work and life and fit it all into the twenty-four hours of a day, it may not come as a surprise that, according to the Office of National Statistics, happiness seems to decrease with every mile a commuter travels.
Using people who travel between one and fifteen minutes to get to work as the benchmark or reference group, it becomes clear that everyone else – those who need longer than that to get to work – feels less happy, while people who work from home (or live very close to their workplace) are happier.
We see the same pattern if we examine the question of anxiety. People working from home are less anxious than others. However, it is interesting to notice that people travelling more than three hours for work are no more anxious than people who have a one-to fifteen-minute commute. We do not fully understand why the negative effects of the commute seem to vanish once you hit three hours. Perhaps this group can make better use of their commute by reading or working – and perhaps they have made a conscious choice to work in London but live in the countryside and the benefits of their living environment counteract the negative effect of the commute.
Looking across several indicators of well-being, the worst effects of commuting are associated with journeys lasting between an hour and an hour and a half.
Jessica had one of those commutes. After getting a job in advertising in San Francisco, she found herself driving 90 kilometres each way. If she hit rush hour, the commute could eat up to four hours each day. But the money was good and the extra cash could help fund expensive fertility treatments.
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