PRODUCTIVITY
Say hello to the triple peak day
A new “three peak” working day is on the rise. But is this more efficient or more likely to burn you out?
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YOU CAN UNDERSTAND a lot about the fine-grained ways work is changing if you’re a data scientist at Microsoft; they’ve gleaned a ton of insights over the past couple years by combing through Microsoft Teams data to see what they find.
One of their findings is the “triple peak day.”
“Traditionally, knowledge workers had two productivity peaks in their workday: before lunch and after lunch,” they write. “But when the pandemic sent so many people into work-from-home mode, a third peak emerged for some in the hours before bedtime.”
They reasoned that parents were shifting some of the things they might do between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. to the hours of 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., when the kids were down for the night, while others might just prefer to knock tasks out without the usual work-day distractions.
But with every peak comes a trough, and that trough now happens at around 4 p.m.
“The hours that bookend the traditional close of business have become a dead zone at many companies,” reads a recent Wall Street Journal report on the phenomenon. “Workers say the 4 to 6 p.m. flex time they use to take a turn in the kids’ carpool, hit the gym or beat traffic often requires a third shift at night to finish the day’s tasks.” Others are using it for a bit of needed balance – hitting the golf course (or the bar) at 4 p.m., and picking up the slack later on.
We’ve written before about the rising trend of asynchronous work and flexible schedules, and like those, the triple peak day is neither good nor bad on its own ― rather, it’s a reality of how work is completed that can be resisted or embraced. There are advantages, like workers getting work done when they are less distracted, and disadvantages, like scheduling all-hands meetings and expecting after-hours work.
“The third peak should be an available option for people who need it, but the challenge moving forward is, ‘How can we make sure people are not working 24/7?’” Microsoft’s Shamsi Iqbal said. “If people are working all three peaks, that’s a recipe for early burnout.” Kieran Delamont
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REMOTE WORK
The brave new world of super-commuters
With more companies embracing hybrid work, what it takes to live and work in separate places is changing
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WHEN VIA RAIL and various officials were in town earlier this month to announce a slate of renovations planned for the London train station, it was instead the announcement of the planned return of early morning London-to-Toronto commuter run (which gets you into Toronto before 9 a.m. and home to London by 7 p.m.) that stole the show ― enough to elicit “hooting and cheering” from the assembled audience that interrupted the rest of the announcement.
While the return of the route is popular for a bunch of reasons, one segment of the population is particularly pleased ― the hybrid workers needing to make an appearance in a GTA office a couple times a week.
These folks are part of a growing contingent of “super-commuters,” defined as those with a commute longer than 90 minutes. And lately, they’ve who been more openly embracing their long commutes and sharing them on TikTok. Hybrid work schedules opened the possibility for some workers to move further afield, live somewhere lower-cost while keeping their big-city job (and salary), with the main trade-off being a long ― but not always unpleasant ― commute.
“Personally I love it,” one Philadelphia-to-New-York-City super-commuter told WorkLife. “I love seeing my coworkers, talking to them, just having human interaction. And I find myself being really productive and it’s a fun environment to be in.” (In the U.S., where cheaper flight options are more available, some are even flying multiple states over to make it to work.)
And interestingly, as Ontario looks ahead to staffing some of the marquee electric vehicle plants, some believe that embracing super-commutes could be a key component. “Canada has a lot of the skilled workers trained up and ready to meet the demand, they just aren’t in the right places,” said the head of the staffing agency Blue Branch, Todd Clyde. “Blue Branch has found that super-commuting can help address the labour shortage. As many as 32 per cent of unemployed Canadians are willing to super commute or move to another province for work. They just need help overcoming the hurdles, including housing and transportation, to get there.”
So, when the early morning train returns, don’t be surprised if there are plenty of white-collar workers filling out the seats, noted local MP Peter Fragiskatos. “(Microsoft) Teams and Zoom, as helpful as they are, are no substitute for one-on-one, in-person interaction, particularly for those in the business community who have to have those relationships.” Kieran Delamont
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Terry Talks: Why the new productivity model is no longer about watching the clock
| Many companies are still counting hours spent working — traditionally enforced through timesheets and standard office hours. But the habit of constantly monitoring work hours is feeling more and more out of place amid a changing work environment, and organizations around the world are adopting different models that advocate measuring value over hours clocked. | | | |
ENVIRONMENT
Feeling the heat
As record heat descends around the world, changing weather stands to shake up work as we know it
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IT’S SHAPING UP to be a hot week in the Forest City, and likewise, much of the world has been suffering under intense, El Niño-inflected heatwaves this summer. And you probably don’t have to look far to see how it’s impacting business, with tired, sweaty and overheated employees, an office that feels sweltering and uncomfortable ― and, increasingly, an impacted bottom line, too.
Last year, the Atlantic Council released research that attempted to shed some light on lost productivity as a result of extreme heat, and came to somewhat startling findings. Looking at 12 cities across the world, they found that “in an average year, these losses total USD $44 billion across the twelve cities in 2020, and the amount will rise to USD 84 billion by 2050 without action to reduce emissions.” Another study estimated that economic losses since 1992 due to heat was between $5 trillion and $29.3 trillion, globally.
There are the dramatic effects, like the crop failures we’ve seen in Western Canada, but also the less obvious cumulative effects of having every worker feeling just a little bit off step as a result of the heat. “What’s really kind of wild about the heat waves we’re in the midst of right now,” said climate scientist Justin Mankin, in an interview with The New York Times, “is not just their magnitude, but the number of people they’re affecting simultaneously.”
An individual business has no control over the heat, obviously, but experts do think that office design and construction choices can be helpful at mitigating the impact of extreme heat moving forward. Engineers have recently created, for instance, a type of white paint that they say can reduce the inside temperature by as much as 1.7 degrees by reflecting sunlight. There are also new forms of concrete that are both environmentally friendly to produce, as well as more thermally efficient than wood and metal.
“But before we get too enthusiastic about all these new technologies, let’s go back to basics,” writes British environmental design lecturer Aurore Julien. Open windows, good airflow, access to cold water ― all easy, cost-effective ways of making the heat bearable. “Lighting, computers, dishwashers and televisions all use electricity, and inevitably produce some heat ― these should be switched off when not in use. That way, we can all keep as cool as possible, all summer long.” Kieran Delamont
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TECHNOLOGY
Has AI lost its lustre?
After months of dizzying growth, traffic volume on platforms like ChatGPT is falling. What’s next for the AI revolution?
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FOR THE BETTER part of a year now, the spectre of AI has been haunting many of the conversations around the modern white-collar workplace. What will AI be capable of? How many office jobs will it kill, if any? And how much do companies stand to gain ― or lose ― by chasing the AI trend?
The pendulum has swung in the other direction a little bit lately, with more questions being asked around the future of AI technology. For one thing, it’s driving less of the job market than it was last year. “The job market for AI specialists is coming back down to earth,” writes Bloomberg, who cited research from Revelio Labs that showed “job postings for AI-related technology jobs ― like machine-learning engineers or senior data scientists ― have become more scarce in recent months,” now at around 50 per cent of last summer’s peak.
“There might be something to the hype around AI starting to fade out,” Revelio economist Loujaina Abdelwahed told Bloomberg.
Users are dropping off, too. For the first time since it launched (and subsequently became the most trafficked site on the internet, for a period) ChatGPT’s monthly usage figures are dropping by nearly 10 per cent ― though some of that is likely explained by users switching to other, similar platforms, like Google’s Bard.
In an article titled The AI Hype Cycle is Distracting Companies, Eric Seigel writes in the Harvard Business Review that “AI suffers from an unrelenting, incurable case of vagueness ― it is a catch-all term of art that does not consistently refer to any particular method or value proposition,” and that these projects “often lack a keen focus on their value ― exactly how [AI] will render business processes more effective.”
Still, don’t count AI out, say business leaders ― it’s more likely the case that the underlying tech is still in its infancy. “It reflects some growing pains as companies struggle to move beyond the hype and incorporate AI into their business operations,” noted Bloomberg’s Matthew Boyle. “The decelerating demand adds to a growing sense among businesses that AI needs to get past the gee-whiz, anything’s-possible phase.” Kieran Delamont
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