Maximizing Productive Time

As companies take a stance to be more flexible with work hours and work locations, more and more are establishing core hours to guide the required times employees are to be present. However, how are those core hours decided? Are they based on customer interaction times? Established norms of a standard work day? Or the convenience of leadership?

How many organizations have taken the approach that it is up to the teams and the people with whom they interact to organize themselves in the best way possible? We all have said things like “oh I am a morning person” or the complete opposite “I can’t get moving in the mornings.” So what would happen if we knew that about everyone on the team. And once we knew it, we made decisions about what times of day the team would be at its collective best.

Here is one approach that I have used with teams. The range of hours were put into a grid with everyone’s names down the side. Each person then color coded the day based on when they were most productive.

Green = This is my best time. Bring on the challenges.

Yellow = I will hold my own but may not be most innovative

Red = This is not a good time for me at all

And then once everyone has entered their information, you can begin analysis. The goal is to find four hours in a row where the majority of the team is feeling productive. This is very unlikely to be all members in the green but it should be majority green with a bit of yellow. This is also a useful analysis if people span time zones.

Analyze when team members are most productive

So for this particular team, they all felt productive between 09:00 and 13:00 every day and if they needed back up time to collaborate then 15:00-17:00 was available. With this team, the stakeholder was heavily involved with the product team and was taken into consideration and put their own hours in as well.

People were encouraged to apply any necessary filters to their decision making. Some of those filters were:

• Home or personal schedule and commitments

• Sleep hours

• Break time needs or lunch needs

• Best focus time or alert time

• Exercise routines

• Product values and goals

• Customer schedules and needs

And they agreed that if there was not a clear demonstration of four consecutive hours to collaborate during which everyone could commit to being accessible then they would have a conversation together to work out the bugs.

Alter work agreement and communications plan based on outcomes

Once the core hours for the team were determined, then the team updated their work agreements and communication plans and the manager made sure that leadership was aware of this arrangement as well.

In addition, since the team was 100% distributed, it was essential that their communication plan included what to do if they were not able to be available during those hours and how to communicate their availability for the rest of the day. They used techniques such as posted in the chat “stepping away for 15 min” if they were going offline and no reason or justification was required. They would also post “stepping out for lunch. Back in 30” and then when they returned, communicated this as well. None of this was done so that someone could check up on them but rather so that they could maximize their time working together where needed and not leave a teammate stranded with no assistance when needed.

increase productivity, foster innovation, and create value streams

The reason for doing this is to support the needs of the team, but to also increase productivity, foster innovation, and create value streams by utilizing everyone on the team when they feel their best. It also empowers the team to organize in a way that makes sense for them for the work that they are doing. Not all teams are created equally and not all tasks require that people work either hours together at the same time. This is a construct that goes back to punch clock days. And who knows, maybe this will also show us that eight hours doesn’t have to be the norm and that the real focus is reaching the goals established by the organization not how many hours each person logs.

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