By Gonnie Tutelaers
The 9-to-5 mentality is still very much in the work DNA of us Calvinistic Dutch. We believe in putting our money where our mouth is and are focused on making hours, productivity and tangible results from our work. This attitude is also firmly rooted in my own upbringing: from the age of fourteen, I worked in my free hours -illegally because I was actually still too young- in the dishwashers of a popular eatery and earned my pocket money with all kinds of side jobs. Eight hours a day of buffering was perfectly doable when my work was limited to washing up, frying chips (as a Brabant native, I won't argue with that ;)), preparing plates, tapping beers and serving dishes.
What a way to make a living
But when I was introduced to the phenomenon of an ‘office job’ after studying literature, I discovered something disturbing: after 3pm, hardly anything came out of my hands. ‘You're lazy and unmotivated!“, screamed the little voice in my head. I shouldn't whine, I thought. This was apparently how it went in the grown-up world. So I poured down locks of coffee, took a few deep breaths and tapped on. But no matter how hard I tried to stay sharp, the quality of my work invariably took a nosedive towards the end of the afternoon.
Barely gettin’ by, it's all taking and no giving
Moreover, in the years that followed, I discovered that not all the work I was supposed to do lent itself to a busy office environment. If I needed to do research, write a project plan or edit texts, I needed peace and quiet, something that was routinely lacking in the office. And working from home? Not done. Because then how could my manager check that I was really putting in my hours? Add to that the bulk of information I had to process every day in systems that were more often against me than cooperative, and soon mails, documents, questions and requests were piling up, and every day I was mostly busy creating order out of chaos. The Microsoft Office environment I was supposed to work with, however, in no way felt appropriate for all that information violence. I used evenings and weekends to quiet my now chronically overstimulated brain. “This is not healthy,” whispered the little voice.
They just use your mind, and they never give you credit
The penny dropped when Martijn Aslander, founder of Digital Fitness, told me about the birthplace of the eight-hour working day: the factory. Henry Ford figured out in 1914 -following Robert Owen- that this was exactly how he could keep three shifts working day and night in his factory. The eight-hour working day is thus based on working with your hands. However, working with your head is a totally different sport, mental excellence. Peter Drucker introduced the term ‘knowledge work‘ for it in the 1960s. This term summarises all kinds of professions that are different from the classic manufacturing professions. In these new types of work, dealing with information and knowledge is central. The point is: everyone handles knowledge and information differently. This cannot be managed with fixed instructions for everyone, such as 9-to-5 at the office with mandatory use of the Microsoft Office package. So decades ago, Drucker was already convinced that for good results and healthy employees, managers should interfere as little as possible in the way knowledge workers do their work. Yet over the past 60 years, we have seen exactly the opposite happen.
It's enough to drive you, crazy if you let it
As a result, many knowledge workers stand in mile-long traffic jams every morning to get to the office on time, losing precious hours in the day when they are actually sharpest. The result? Frustration, insecurity, embarrassment and masses of burnout among all those hard-working office workers. Not least because the far-reaching digitalisation of our society means that more and more information is fired at us through endless different channels and devices. How do you deal with this? The document-oriented tools we are mostly expected to use in our work (think .doc and .excel) are no longer adequate in any way.
Rescuers in distress: tools and task autonomy
Fortunately, there are also knowledge workers who get up at 8 a.m., start their working day in a local coffee shop and close their laptops guilt-free as soon as they lose focus. Who work and communicate in a concentrated and stress-free manner while using modern tools that fit their unique way of working and thinking. Who are they? Mostly independent entrepreneurs who can decide for themselves how, when and with what tools they work on what. I was one of them for much of my working life. Now, I am not necessarily advocating a working population made up of only self-employed people (not as long as the protection of the so-called modern workers The fact is, while there is still a lot to be done, we do want a working environment that gives employees the freedom to take control of their own work in all areas. Because when you become aware of the preconditions needed to do your job optimally and then get the freedom from your employer to organise your work accordingly, a lot of great things happen. Everyone wins, right?
Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living. Dolly Parton had it down pat in 1980. Isn't it about time we started taking this piece of social criticism seriously?
