What's Floating Around Cloud 9? 1 May 2017

Welcome to another week and it's another short week, with the May Day Bank Holiday. Being so close to Easter it appears that most weeks are short weeks at present and yet the August Bank Holiday seems a long way off.

When you are under pressure to deliver Events, shorter working weeks are a bit of a mixed bag in that you have less time to get everything done when people are around to communicate with, and yet long weekends provide the ideal time to catch up on paperwork and other tasks that require some peace and quiet. However, its hard to be productive when you friends or family are enjoying some nice weather or a BBQ and you are stuck in an office playing catch up! 

Apparently a third of workers say their boss thinks that the ideal employee should be available 24 hours a day, according to a recent poll run by Relate, and that work should come before home life. Over a quarter work longer hours than they would choose to and as we know in the Events Industry, sometimes the pressure to be on site or available for clients is unrealistic, yet we still work silly hours to accommodate them.

Overworking is very bad for our health and wellbeing. The Mental Health Foundation says that “the pressure of an increasingly demanding work culture in the UK is perhaps the biggest and most pressing challenge to the mental health of the general population”.

More flexible working and shorter hours would be better for employers as well as for employees. As the Timewise Foundation says, employers attract extra candidates and a more diverse pool if they hire flexibly, because many talented workers cannot consider a full-time role.

Also, both efficient work and the best ideas come from workers with energy – whoever did their best work when they were exhausted?
There are a few companies starting to adopt a policy of a shorter working week with Californian Ad Agency Steelhouse implementing a policy of a long weekend every month for staff, and Japanese clothing company Uniqlo offering all employees the option of four longer working days and then longer weekends.

South Korea made employees an offer back in 2004 by enacting a national policy that reduced the work week by 10% (from 44 to 40 hours) and made Saturday an official off-day. But the plan may not have led to the quality-of-life improvements that policy leaders expected. On the contrary, labour scholar Robert Rudolf of Korea University reports in the Journal of Happiness Studies that the policy had no effect at all on job or life well-being.

So just what is the best policy we wonder? Well here at Cloud 9 Towers we all share the idea that if you enjoy what you do, it doesn't feel like work anyway, and that's a mantra we are sticking by!

Have a great (short) week!