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What Is Non-Linear Working (And How Might It Affect Your Business)?

3 min read
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What does your typical workday look like? Chances are that it involves turning up at the office around 9am, working solidly until about 12pm, having a lunch break at that point, and then leaving the office at 5pm or thereabouts before returning home.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic has loosened the rigidity with which people do their day-to-day work. You might have started working remotely, whether in whole or in part, during the COVID crisis and not relinquished this particular work routine since.

You could therefore see sense in turning to non-linear working. This would involve you working asynchronously — that is, working different hours to your co-workers — and potentially in short, focused bursts.

 

Why non-linear working is a throwback rather than an all-new concept

In pre-industrial times, humans traditionally worked in what we would now call a non-linear fashion: from dawn until dusk but not in solid chunks lasting hours at a time.

However, as society industrialised, the now-familiar five-day, 40-hour schedule was introduced for factory workers. This pattern of an eight-hour workday was also enacted in the office and has largely remained in place there since, despite technological advances.

 

How can non-linear working be practically applied? 

“Asynchronous work allows people to save commuting time, get admin tasks done during low productivity hours, fit in more exercise and save money having home-cooked meals,” Laura Giurge, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has told the BBC.

For example, an employee who lives in an apartment with flatmates could choose to do some home-based working from 6am to 8am, before those flatmates wake up. Meanwhile, a parent could temporarily stop working during the afternoon to free up time to spend with their child.

“A core benefit of non-linear workdays is having control over how to spend your time,” Giurge — an assistant professor of behavioural science — explains, “and getting work done when you’re most productive.”

 

Steps you can take to facilitate a non-linear working model  

If you run a business and are seriously considering allowing employees there to go down the non-linear route with their work, it would be wise for you to still impose some kind of framework that would prevent your employees from becoming too lax in their working habits.

You could take inspiration from the cloud storage company Dropbox, which has introduced ‘Core Collaboration Hours’ for all its employees across the world.

Dropbox director Andy Wilson explains in an article for HRZone: “These are four-hour windows reserved for live meetings, aligned to the time zones that teams most overlap with.”

He elaborates that “a typical day for a European employee could look like taking meetings between 10am and 12pm, and then again between 4pm and 6pm, to allow for cross-time zone collaboration.”

One obstacle to implementing a non-linear working model is the potential complexity of doing so. You might want to relocate your business to one of the serviced offices in Soho if your company’s current office is based in a rather less accessible area than this.

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