I hate presenteeism, let me get that out of the way first… I hate the person who is first in and last out and their smugness. It drives me insane. Flex sheets, holiday balances, minimum hours, etc, etc… who cares? I don’t. What I want from my staff is the job to be done, sometimes this will take 2 hours in a day, sometimes 12… Do they have to do those hours in the office? Hell no. Costa, McDonald’s, home all suitable work locations. Working at 2 in the morning or 11 at night, I don’t care as long as the job is done (and you are working when you want too). Why do I feel like this? Mainly because we have unnecessarily shackled ourselves to Victorian values, I accept you have to be in a factory when it’s opening and making widgets, but for any modern office based team there is no need. The tools at our disposal now make it possible to work from anywhere at any time. My preferred way of looking at this is we have reconfigured our day. The slides below is how Microsoft describe how we used to spend our time and how we do now. My day is certainly made up of “moments” now, I go into the office to socialise with the team and to have meetings that are best face to face. I work from home one day a week, this gives me the freedom to see Alice off to school and be there when she gets home. My work pattern on my work from home days goes something like this get up, go for a run, grab coffee, work from 6-7, see Alice to school, work 7.30 – 11, have a break do bits and pieces, work 13-15, see Alice home from school and eat, work 20-22.30… As you can see my day is about the same length as if I go in, but… I get more done as I don’t have to focus on anything else. I also don’t spend 4 hours of the day commuting. Soooo what do I need to give the team the ability to this? It’s simple… The right tools. Personally I have settled on Office 365, but Google’s G-Suite or Amazon WorkXXX or ZoHo will all give you the ability to enable the workforce to do this.