In 2023, employers are finding themselves a bit challenged when it comes to best structuring their companies to meet employee lifestyle needs.
Face it. Your employees have a lot of cards stacked in their favor at the moment. In 2022, we saw trends like quiet quitting and job hopping sweep across the labor market worldwide.
Now, nonlinear is starting to become a go-to working style.
Read on for a breakdown of how a nonlinear structure can work for your company and why it may even make your workers happier.
What is a Nonlinear Workday?
A nonlinear workday expands the concept of asynchronous (not real-time dependent) work.
With a nonlinear structure, your team can break their time into blocks of work that are most convenient for their schedules.
Let’s say Employee A is a single mother with young children that need to be picked up from school around 3 p.m.
A traditional 9 to 5 would have her work eight hours straight with a short break for lunch.
If you give Employee A the option to work nonlinear, she might work from 8 a.m. to noon, take a lunch break, do some chores in between, and pick her child up from school at 3 p.m.
After that, she could start again from 5-9 p.m. That way, Employee A gets all her daily chores done, can care for her child, and take a short break before her evening work. She’ll probably feel more recharged and productive than if she had pushed through eight straight hours without a significant break.
Nonlinear Workday Benefits
By allowing your employees to work nonlinear, you’ll likely see some benefits that will increase commitment to your workforce.
A nonlinear working style can improve:
- Health. Employees stuck at their desks all day don’t get to enjoy the health benefits of daytime sunlight and fresh air. Furthermore, say an employee could only book a doctor’s appointment during mid-day. This offers them the opportunity to attend these appointments through a nonlinear structure that allows your employees to be proactive about their health. By letting your employees break up their days, you may see a teamwide energy boost and increased happiness levels.
- Productivity. Most of us aren’t at our best when we’re struggling to concentrate. In his famous book “Deep Work,” author and computer science professor Cal Newport suggests that most people have difficulty performing more than four hours of deep work (distraction-free and fully focused output) per day. By encouraging focused work rather than for a predetermined time, you may be encouraging your employees to put more care into how they work and real productivity.
- Energy. Nonlinear work functions with an employee’s natural energy levels rather than against them. All of us are not created equally. We have different times of best focus that help us get our work done (e.g., early birds vs. night owls). A worker who knows they’re most focused in the morning might want to wake up with the sun and pump out a longer block of work to maximize their hours of highest productivity, instead of putting in lackluster effort over eight hours.
With the 9 to 5 increasingly falling out of style, setting yourself up as an innovator with a nonlinear working structure could help you recruit and retain workers that are seeking more flexibility.
Alternative labor structures can and do work. In the UK, the Autonomy think tank with researchers from Cambridge, Oxford, and Boston College recently performed one of the largest scale 6-month trials of a 4-day work week to date. The results? Revenue jumped up during the trial period and employees were far less likely to leave the participating companies.
Unusual working structures are reaping rewards for those employers bold enough to try. By giving your employees a trial run at a nonlinear system, you help position yourself as an adaptable employer demonstrating excellent workplace cultural leadership.
Risks and Considerations
With a nonlinear workforce, creating a culture of connectedness is paramount to keeping your workers happy.
Offering flexible office time to help employees network and conducting team-building exercises are good ways to avoid the feelings of isolation that can come with working nonlinear hours.
And watch out for time zone mismatches when factoring in the hours that your team chooses to work.
Work Nonlinear Across Borders
At Borderless, we’re focused on helping you expand your team worldwide.
With workers in time-zone-independent locations and emerging global markets, working asynchronously with a focus on nonlinear timelines can help your workers feel a sense of freedom and pride in what they do.
Let us help develop your global team, no matter which hours they choose to work.
Book a demo with Borderless to see how we can get you set up for success quickly and easily.
Disclaimer
Borderless does not provide legal services or legal advice to anyone. This includes customers, contractors, employees, partners, and the general public. We are not lawyers or paralegals. Please read our full disclaimer here.
