The forty-hour workweek was a blessing to factory workers in the early 1800s.  At the dawn of the industrial revolution, most workers were commanded to work 16+ hours per day, six days a week.  Restricting the workday to 8 hours was necessary to protect folks from near slave labor.

  Eight hours of work, eight hours of recreation, and eight hours of sleep, was the slogan when this movement began.  It has hung on for close to two centuries though it had already outlived its usefulness.

I was never a believer in heavy oversight or restrictive work hours.  When I hired new salespeople, I used to explain my laissez-faire management style like this:

 “If I call you one summer morning and hear the surf crashing behind you, I will have one of two responses.  If you’re over 100% of quota I’ll say don’t forget to reapply sunscreen.  If you’re under 100%, I’ll say, you’re fired.”

The point was that I wanted my reps to feel free to produce on their terms.  It was my opinion that if I had to lock someone down for eight hours a day and monitor their phone calls, they weren’t going to make it in sales.  I offered them the freedom to run their plans, and those teams crushed it for us for over two decades.

Great business athletes train, sprint and rest.

Then they reassess so that they can sprint even harder, and rest again.

In my interactions with clients these days, it seems as though they have been forced to view their knowledge workers the way I always viewed my sales teams.  With folks working from home, they can’t easily monitor the time put in, so they need to create innovative ways to measure effectiveness.

Many leaders are struggling with this.  It may be that they haven’t got the metrics they need to evaluate performance.  It may be that they have a leadership style that only works at arm’s length. Or it may be that they are functioning as a factory in 1855, not understanding how much the world has changed.  The forty-hour workweek is a relic of a bygone age.  The pandemic has forced folks to look at work in a whole new way.

Personally, I like it.  It plays into my hand.  For some, it might be hard to get used to.  They may struggle to create the systems needed to be successful while unmonitored and untethered to the cubicle.

If you’re a business athlete and have trouble getting in condition to sprint hard and then take a well-deserved rest, click here and schedule a free fifteen with me.  I want to help.

Own your sales gene…