WORK IN
PROGRESS
The quest to free employees from
distraction By Alana Semuels
Tamara Hlava in
the Column Five
office on Jan. 23;
even before the
pandemic, the
company had made
changes aimed at
helping workers
stay focused
and employees were generating the
most creative work they’d done in a
long time. A shorter workweek was
something TGW’s leaders had been
dreaming about for a year, but they
worried how clients would react, says
Kribs, 37. “And then COVID happens
and we’re like, You know what, let’s
do this,” she says. “It was almost this
like ‘F it’ kind of a thing.”
Office wOrk was brOken long
before the pandemic. Technology
has seamlessly connected workers
to one another, but it’s brought with
it an endless stream of distractions.
The average knowledge worker—
essentially someone who performs
cerebral tasks for their job—checks
email every six minutes and spends
more and more time in meetings.
Since productivity in office work is
more difficult to monitor than manual
work—it’s easy to see if a hotel room
has been cleaned, for instance—many
knowledge workers feel wedded to
their desks, since the time they spend
at their computers has become a
proxy for how hard they are working.
The pandemic is forcing compa-
nies to rethink how they structure
work, and some are trying ambitious
changes to try to fix what is broken.
They’re shortening the workweek,
doing away with meetings and re-
thinking the butts-in-seats mental-
ity. They’re adjusting workdays to
suit the needs of employees scattered
across time zones and faced with
childcare responsibilities. Some are
even reimagining offices as nonwork
retreats for employees who need a
break from home.
It’s not just small companies like
TGW that are switching how they
structure work. Morrison’s, a U.K.
supermarket chain, said in July its
1,500 corporate employees would re-
ceive the same pay to work a four-day
week. Slack, the messaging-software
company, started a company holi-
day one Friday a month for its staff
to rest and recharge. JPMorgan said
in August that its employees would
permanently cycle between remote
work and the office.
Companies like TGW say they
In AprIl, As offIce workers Across the world
stared down months of being stuck at home while juggling
childcare, their jobs and general anxiety about a global
pandemic, Lisa Kribs and Gavin Thomas, the co-founders
of a marketing firm in Rochester, N.Y., decided to try an experiment
to make life more pleasant for their stressed-out employees.
They implemented a four-day workweek at their eight-person
company, TGW Studio, and cut the number of meetings by about
50%. By paying everyone their same salaries while expecting them
to work less, they hoped employees would be more productive dur-
ing the hours they were actually on duty.
They were right. Two months later, productivity had increased,
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN GUIDO FOR TIME 83
