The covid crisis, has turned upside down our 9 to 5 organization and introduce much more flexibility. Today, many companies want to return to the traditional model. But the relevance of this choice is not clear, specially if we consider our internal body clock.
Improve people willingness to work for a company
According to a survey published in the New York Times in 2021, more than 30% of workers worldwide reported they would quid their current job if their employer took away the work flexibility gained during Covid. The health crisis has allowed many employees to work at a pace that suits their needs. As a result, it created many new ways of working and employees appreciate that.
Flexible working is not only a solution that helped companies survive the health crisis. It has also become a strategic advantage in attracting and retaining talent. Many companies or institutions such as PepsiCo, Meta, General Motors or the Irish government have decided to make these changes a permanent part of their corporate culture.
Flexible work hasn’t impacted productivity, on the contrary it has been linked to an increased in work quality.
Chronotype: a key aspect of productivity
Our body is governed by an internal clock that controls many physiological processes. This is called circadian rhythms. From one person to another, these cycles can shift in timing. It is possible to define groups of people who share approximately the same circadian rhythm’s timing. These categories are called “chronotypes”.
There are 7 different Chronotypes whose distribution in the population depends of many parameters. These parameters are for example age, gender, job or geographical location. To learn more about it, you can read our previous article on the distribution of Chronotype in the population depending on the age and the gender.
Among the parameters controlled by our circadian rhythms are our optimal waking and sleeping times and the times of day when we are most productive. Therefore, each Chronotype has its own specific timing for producing their most cognitively intense and demanding tasks. This explains why flexible working conditions do not decrease productivity: people can now work at the time that best suits their internal body clock.
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