To end the blight of presenteeism, employers must start trusting workers with their time

Tanya Sweeney

'Research is starting to claim that a less exhausted — and by extension, a happier workforce — is a more productive one'

July 29 2022 06:00 AM

A few years ago, I found myself working as a caretaker editor on a monthly magazine, while the editor proper went on sabbatical. It was one of the first times I’d ever really been The Gaffer. Before he departed, the editor warned me about the week in which the magazine went to press. “Don’t be surprised if you’re here until 11pm on that week,” he said. “It can get a bit hairy for a couple of days each month.”

In the first month, I noticed that one member of staff had a particularly creative flair. Not just in editorial: rather, she was a borderline genius at coming up with excuses for lateness. Her partner had locked her inside the apartment. She’d fallen off her bike. The Virgin Media guy didn’t come yesterday, so she had to sit in and wait for him to come from 8am-8pm. There’s a funeral to attend. The excuses got more and more creative, short of ‘my helicopter coming in from Inchicore can’t find a place to land’. It became the office running joke.

As a caretaker editor, I didn’t have much interest in upkeeping the status quo. Besides, it wasn’t my job to put manners on grown adults and encourage them to be a desk at 9am sharp. I took the staffer in question aside. “I genuinely don’t care if you’re in this office for three minutes a week, as long as you hit your performance goals each month,” I told her. Something shifted in the office that day. Everyone was being trusted to get on with the work, in whatever way they wanted to execute it. We were now a team, as opposed to a bunch of people headed by someone tapping their watch, matron-styley. The daft excuses dried up and the team came and went as they pleased. On press week, we sent the issue off to bed a whole two days early, giving us enough time to grab a celebratory bottle of Prosecco and while away the afternoon of press day playing ‘snog, marry, avoid’ instead.

This unorthodox approach — work as much or as little as you need to — can sound a bit like the woo-woo approach favoured at progressive tech firms, but the alternative is a far worse prospect. I’ve sat in air-conditioned offices under strip lighting, gawping at a clock, willing it to move to 6pm. I’ve felt my energy leech onto the keyboard, while I’m trapped listening to the blatherings of the office creep. My mind, and my productivity, starts to atrophy after 5pm. I’m as useful to an employer for that last hour of the day as a handbrake on a canoe. And yet there I sat, waiting for release. I felt like a pre-schooler who wasn’t trusted with my workload. The insistence that we are at our desks on the stroke of 10am, until the Angelus bells tolled, all felt faintly condescending, and paternalistic.

I realise that spending an afternoon heartily going at ‘snog, marry, avoid’ doesn’t exactly make me anyone’s idea of an exemplary manager, but it did make me think about the dreaded blight of professional presenteeism. Someone described it to me recently as ‘coat on the back of the chair’ syndrome. We’ve all known someone who stays in an office a good few hours after everyone else, thereby making the people who leave on time seem like absolute part-timers (said late-stayer, meanwhile, doesn’t necessarily work out as more productive as anyone else). The problem is that work culture valorises them.

The concept of presenteeism has been on ice for the last two years (although ‘digital presenteeism’, or answering calls and emails well into the night, is another story) but is re-emerging as employees seek to establish their post-pandemic set-ups. But why should we bin a situation where employees were trusted to get their work done, whether they sat down at 9am or midday?

Research is starting to claim that a less exhausted — and by extension, a happier workforce — is a more productive one. In one management software group, Kronos, the chief executive offered his employees an open number of holidays. The result was that his employees took off an average 2.6 more days last year than the year before. Voluntary turnover dropped, and people reported being happier at work. The company enjoyed its best financial year ever.

In February, 3,000 workers at 70 Irish companies began a four-day work week with no loss of pay as part of a worldwide initiative. The results of this new arrangement have yet to be revealed. In Brighton, the recruitment firm MRL Consulting Group implemented a four-day working week in 2019, and 87pc of the workforce reported their mental health and wellbeing had improved over the first six months. Productivity also increased by 25pc over the same period.

There’s an awful lot to be said for treating employees with respect, and offering them an element of agency over their working lives. I think back to the moment, working on that magazine, when it stopped being ‘Me’ and ‘Them’. We were all in it together, which is the best place for a professional team to be, three hours a week or not.