Margaret Heffernan makes a great point in her post about WFH and why focusing on arguments about the number of work days that should be based in the office or at home is really the wrong debate to have. The issue, says Margaret, is not about the number of days in the office, it’s about productivity.
She references a study conducted by Leslie Perlow (PDF), who studied a software engineering division that had never shipped a product on time. Perlow got the engineers to log their working days in detail to see how they actually spent their time. The study found that from the moment that the engineers came in to the office they were subject to continuous interruptions – requests from managers for inputs or quick fixes, casual conversations, status updates, questions from colleagues, phone calls. In a familiar story they found that as a result they were not able to progress with any productive work until near the end of the normal working day which often then resulted in them staying late or becoming disenchanted.
Perlow defined two different types of work: the kind that demanded real concentration such as compiling reports or presentations, writing or debugging code (or what everyone called ‘real work’), and the kind that was about helping colleagues, speaking to stakeholders or team members, casual conversations (‘everything else’). The former was important because this was where they could make real progress towards achieving important, meaningful goals, like shipping a product. But the latter was also relevant – the engineers reported that 96% of this type of work was helpful. The trouble was however, that this ‘everything else’ type of work was completely dominating the working day and the engineers were not getting more than 20 minutes of focused time before being interrupted. As Margaret says: ‘It wasn’t urgent but it was wildly disruptive’.
In response to the study, Perlow recommended scheduling the two types of work differently and proposed that three days a week none of the engineers could be interrupted before noon. This allowed the engineers to have focused blocks of time and concentration but also enough space for ‘everything else’. Implementing her recommendations resulted in a productivity gain of 65% and the team shipped a product on time for the first time.
Margaret goes on to emphasise how disastrous multitasking can be to work that requires real focus, but also that BOTH types of work are important. Knowing that their quiet time was protected, the engineers became more helpful in solving problems and answering queries in the ‘everything else’ periods, meaning that the value of both types of work time increased.
The key to having a productive debate about WFH, she says, is in understanding that distinguishing between these two kinds of work is essential to productivity. The ‘real work’ should be done wherever the individual can best defend their concentration, in the office or at home – and we should trust staff to make the right choices about this. Equally, the ‘everything else’ type of work characterised by casual conversations, high collaboration and being helpful is best done in the environment where other people are around – the office.
This ‘Bimodal’ approach to work feels like a nuance that has long been lost in the whole WFH debate. But it also feels like something that is essential to appreciate and plan for not just for productivity, but also for wellbeing, staff engagement and mental health. It reminded me of Paul Graham’s concept of the ‘makers schedule’ and the ‘managers schedule’. Creative individuals, such as writers, programmers, and other makers, he says, find that blocks of at least half a day are necessary for productive work. This is because making progress on complex projects, writing, or programming effectively requires blocks of focused time without interruption. It’s what Cal Newport called ‘Deep Work’, something that I would argue is essential not just for creative individuals, but every knowledge worker tasked with complex work.
Managers, on the other hand, tend to divide their time into one-hour increments. For those on a manager’s schedule, a meeting is simply a matter of finding an open slot and booking it in. But when you’re operating on the maker’s schedule meetings or calls or interruptions can be a disaster, since one meeting or call dropped into the middle of an afternoon can blow the whole afternoon.
Paul Graham notes that problems arise when these two types of work meet. I’d add to this that a failure to separate these two kinds of work leads to the under-recognised blight of modern leadership and knowledge work – constant context switching.
So, here’s to a wider recognition of the importance of bimodal working.
I write a weekly Substack on the latest in AI, digital strategy and trends, transformation insights and the best links on the internet. To join our community of over 10,000 subscribers you can sign up to that here.
To get posts like this delivered straight to your inbox, drop your email into the box below
Leave a Reply