About time: Women pushed companies to change standard hours
The 9-to-5 workday has inspired songs, movies and a whole lot of angst. “I used to sit in traffic every morning and just stare at the clock on my dashboard,” says Vivian Bell, a 41-year-old account coordinator who commuted from Schaumburg to Elgin each day. “It made my stomach hurt.”
Bell says COVID-19 changed all that. “It’s a terrible virus and I wish I was still commuting, given what caused me to work from home, but I’d be dishonest if I said I didn’t love it,” she says. “It’s been a lifechanging factor for me.”
It’s not just the commute. Bell says she now begins work at 11 a.m. and ends at 7 p.m., which allows her to take care of her mother. “We have a nurse come over around noon so now I can get her up, have breakfast with her and not stress about missing something at work,” Bell says.
Riley Thome, a workplace consultant in New York, says the concept of ‘work hours’ in a white-collar office is antiquated. “Companies may offer 9-to-5 as a guideline for hours but most companies realize that their employees are working earlier, later or both,” Thome says.
Women and children first
Although he often hears millennials get credit for flexible schedules, Thome maintains that the trend was born out of an older generation — people now in their 40s and 50s who realized they couldn’t be two places at once. “Dropping children off at school when two parents are working means that either mom or dad isn’t going to be at the office at 8:30 in the morning,” says Thome.
“Pamela Robins, a career coach in Chicago, backs Thome’s claim, extending it a step further. “If you want to give credit where credit’s due, look to the mothers who became managers,” says Robins. “Nothing against fathers but men were in leadership positions for years and they didn’t do much to promote family-friendly policies.
Once women began working as managers and executives, they created policies that helped ease some of the stresses they felt as parents.”
New rules
The change in traditional work hours can’t be attributed only to employees with children, says Peter O’Malley, a former analyst with the U.S. Department of Labor. Part of it, he says, is employers responding to the wants and needs of the current workforce. “Companies are putting up fewer roadblocks for their employees. A change in hours reflects an increased number of employees working from home or in satellite offices around the country,” O’Malley says. “It’s hard to have a set start time when you have people working on the same projects in different time zones and different locations.”
O’Malley says an increase in independent contractors has also changed the rules. “A lot of freelancers will tell you they don’t even begin working until noon or later, either due to other commitments or to their own personal choices,” O’Malley says.
That’s Natalie Quinn’s story, at least for now. “I gave birth to twins last October and I have a sitter come in at noon so I can work,” says the 27-year-old insurance agent, who works a 1-to-9 shift from her home in St. Paul, Minnesota. “I tried to keep my regular hours after my babies were born, but the house was like a crime scene in the mornings. Even with help, it was just constant crying and screaming. I told my boss that afternoons were much calmer, and he agreed to let me change my hours.”
Since then, Quinn says she’s been more productive than ever. “I spend a lot of time on the phone and I’m fully engaged,” she says. “In the past, I’d be losing focus or trying to coddle a crying baby. Now when I work, I work.”