Remote Control: Moving Your Office Out of the Office

Anyone in marketing has experienced it, the 2:00 pm creative push to brainstorm ideas for the next step in a campaign, the next big breakthrough. With coffee in hand, you stagger into an office only to sit there, staring at your colleagues staring back at you. Inevitably, the day might have beaten you, productivity has halted. Sometimes this creative and cognitive slump can be overcome with aid of caffeinated beverages, quick jaunt out of the office, etc. However, this reoccurring event has professionals asking the question, is the 8 hour day, Monday through Friday, in the office the best use of our time and what alternatives are available? First, a quick history lesson...for those of you who curse the 8 hour office day and the 40 hour work week, there is only one person to blame, and he might have been responsible for getting you to work today. Henry Ford instilled the 40 hour work week in May 1926 for all factory workers for Ford Motor Company. Being impressed with the productivity, this schedule was applied to the office staff 3 months later. This was certainly a breakthrough for industrial efficiency, but how well does this schedule work for the modern professional. Factory work, albeit a necessary portion of a company, economy, etc an be considered repetitive, sometimes mind-numbing labor requiring little to no thought. I speak from experience; printing sports jerseys for a summer in college, I never had more time in my life than during that job to contemplate the poetic qualities of Point Break or question the fleeting nature of the McRib. As John Wesley wrote, A continuous 8 hour work day is a relic of the past. It makes sense for physical labor and manufacturing work, but with information workers it doesn't account for the mental energy cycle. The ability of a factory worker to think analytically is irrelevant, he's either cranking widgets or he isn't. Professional, creative work, on the other hand, involves cognitive intense processes that do not stamp a time clock. The modern information worker is dependent upon creative and strategic thinking to be fully productive in their job efforts, which has a tendency to peak in the morning, and dive throughout the day. In this model of deteriorating workplace efficiency, it is rumored that only 3 4 hours of actual work is accomplished. So, if not the 8 hour day, then what? What is an acceptable alternative workday model for the creative, design, and/or marketing professional? The overwhelming trend is the remote office, working from outside the confines of an office setting. Time that is productive can be logged while time spent regaining composure, whatever activity other than work that it might be, can be kept off the clock. The remote office has been gaining popularity parallel to innovations in telecommunications and the Internet due to the ability to communicate via cell, IM, email, teleconferencing and other means which can allow face-to-face interaction, through a screen. This technology also permits supervision of employees, in stringent situations, and network file sharing enables free flow of data throughout a mobile office space. While this sounds preferable to many people in our industry, this manner of officing staff seems to still have a long way to go before becoming the norm that some predict it will be in the near future. So in the meantime, get the Grande, sit back, and try not to stare.